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In privately owned bank debt money supply systems, such as ours, Interest Rate Inflation Targetting has become nothing but a rort.

Never a win win for the people, but always a win win for the senior elements of banking who can't resist abusing the extraordinary privileges that have been gifted to them.

Relief from debt that is illegally odious and some kind of Sovereign Money System, is the only things that can break the walking dead debt zombie state we as a nation are in.

The senior elements of privately owned banks need to be held to account for what they have done at great cost to society, first by their excess computer entry credit writing, then their whispering interest rate hikes.

Imho of course.

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Darn auto correct, that was meant to be whipsawing interest rate hikes.

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70 percent rise in public transport fares, while Wellington public servants are being forced into the office? Not going to be a lot of money left to prop up the local economy with scones and flat whites...

Small correction too Bernard - it is Whanganui council cutting roles, not Whangarei. 😊

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My mistake. I will correct.

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The reduced investments in health IT directly affects patient care. My daughter broken her wrist snowboarding in July. Treated well at hospital A&E. She told doctor she was returning to Wellington for university. He explained that the Otago IT does not directly communicate with the Wellington IT but there is a work around!!

Daughter back in Wellington tries to get progress review in fracture clinic at Wellington A&E. They had no records of her - until a few days later they checked their work around bin. Then she saw a physio after coming out of cast. Then onto a hand therapy specialist. Next is a nerve specialist and after that an orthopedic surgeon as she has continued pain. All these wonderful people need to communicate with each other around the care needed by patients/clients/customers (😆, as if they have a choice). That communication most often happens through a fully functional IT system. ACC is in there too because it was an accident.

So shortsighted to not be investing in a system that streamlines patient information and it's transfer.

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Wow, aside from that IT comms workaround, this sounds like excellent care!

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Yes and the merger and efforts over the coming years were planned to eliminate this farsical situation. We are a country of 5 million people. All that had now been cut.

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Yes they also run rosters across multiple spreadsheets that don’t talk to each other, so there is no way of knowing further up the line how many shifts are illegally short staffed… might be part of the plan. I see nurses are now going to be striking in the run up to the year end, they have been offered something like 1% and government wants to roll back work done on safe staffing numbers (only reason nurses settled their last collective agreement with labour government) Going to get a bit messy in health as senior doctors are up next, similar 1% increase which is going down like a cup of cold sick.

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CCDM, Care Capacity Demand Management which is a structured system to match safe staffing levels with Patient acuity. I.e. sick Patients require additional staffing.

HNZ are now saying they can't afford it so will walk away and leave their staff in risky situations.

But apparently lots of money if you want to buy a second or third house.

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Couldn’t agree more Mark!!

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Queue the "greedy landlord" comments. I was thinking about the people I know who own 2nd rental properties, the vast majority, perhaps because I am of a certain age, own them outright with no mortgage whatsoever. An OCR cut does absolutely nothing, no handout, no transfer of wealth, etc. Sure fhbs and rhbs (recent home buyers) will welcome this news, but to anyone with savings in the bank, not so much.

I was also reflecting on this group of people who chose to put their extra money, usually over decades, into a rental property as opposed to, say, the stock market. I wonder if that's not because having lived through 3 crashes, the stock market is seen as more of a lotto ticket than a safe place to invest.

Though the truth is, if you're a millenial buying RKLB on sharesies, you've done a lot better that way than you ever would have done buying real estate.

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It doesn't even do anything for people with mortgages as it takes a long time to take effect. Also it only benefits people with mortgages and punishes savers. A rate cut changes nothing for renters and let's landlords keep just that little bit extra. There is a propensity among the wealthy to save any extras anyway because their net spending doesn't change much. If you are already wealthy a saving on your mortgages doesn't make you go out and spending it, because they probably already were spending.

The lies being told are monumental.

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The cabinet paper Treasury prepared to remove interest deductibility had some really interesting stats. In 2019, half of all lending to mortgaged investors was interest only. Investors were much more highly leveraged than owned occupiers. Their borrowing habits (in particular being excessively over leveraged) is creating financial risk for our whole system. In that year, they also claimed $3.5 billion dollars in interest deductions. This was when 1 year rates were between 3.5 and 3.8 per cent. Given how high interest rates are now I’d suspect that figure to be quite a bit higher. I really would like to see how much money the government receives in tax from rental income. The people I know who own rentals, had bragged in the past about never paying tax. Looks like you’re about to make a profit well time to take on more debt and reduce your tax bill to zero. At the very least we should ban interest only mortgages.

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Great Dawn Chorus this morning Bernard. Excellent summation. My question: what do you think New Zealand will look like in 10 years and why? Background to my question for context.I’ve been here (from Western Australia) since 2008. Married to a Kiwi and we’ve bucked the more popular trend of kiwis moving to Australia. Now in droves. Over that time things have progressively (systemically) worsened. I’ve heard politicians (John Key) promise to ‘close-the-gap’, talk about climate change being nuclear moments and still others emphasising the criticality of productivity,diversifying the economy, and growing high-value exports. And yet, nothing much yet. Luxon and his coalition government (by far the most inept government I’ve personally experienced here to date) are accelerating a barely believable attack on their own economy. So, back to my question. What do you think? Is NZ going to get better by 2035? Or, is it going to become a South Pacific Argentina? Cheers. https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/argentina-stuck-periphery-globalized-world

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A side note to myself: If your name is Christopher Luxon or Nicola Willis or you’re a wealthy funder or lobbyist or just a ‘wealthy and sorted’, why would you want to shit in your own backyard? Something else is going on here, I just can’t work it out. Why would Luxon and Co. deliberately wreck the country they lead? Jenna Price, visiting fellow at Australian National University suggested, “I’ve been complaining about politicians for a long time. Poor preselection processes. Little training. And no idea. No other workplace would put up with this shit.” One of the replies, “You’re right. In workplaces people are interviewed to see if they're suitable for the role. They're given training where needed. They have their performance reviewed at least yearly and if they engage in misconduct they're performance managed which could mean termination. But politicians? None of the above!” And in my view, here lies the core problem. Add in a uniformed, disengaged, electorate, where over 800,000 + people couldn’t be bothered to vote in 2023, and a real challenge emerges. Essentially, you now have the blind leading the blind. And I think this is pivotal to the lack of NZ success. The expertise and knowledge to trim NZ’s sails exists (in spades), but sadly, it never gets to helm the boat. Result: we end up with politicians who demonstrate to us daily that they are not up to the task of leading, managing, and operating New Zealand Inc.

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When I first scanned your comment I read 'funder' as something else!

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Luxon / Willis are just front-of-house agents for think-tanks. The think-tanks are funded by ultra-wealthy ideologue zealots, not by 'ordinary' business people. Think tanks in the modern age don't just influence policy- they write entire parliamentary bills and write ministerial briefings. In effect they are a shadow civil-service, the private sector mirror of the mythical 'deep-state' of the bureaucracy.

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great reporting Bernard on so many issues

Wondering what it would take for the the person interviewing the PM- well actually just letting him waffle and obfuscate on Morning Report or Breakfast to read it, ask some real questions, listen to Luxon’s answers and then burst into a chorus from Lennon’s ‘Gimme some truth now’

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I have stopped listening to Morning report ..

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You're right - it's all downhill after the Bird call and Breakfast is bird poop.

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I haven’t listened to the full interview. However, in the context of what is happening in our heath system at the moment, these comments by Dr Blakely in the article regarding the Royal Commission of Enquiry into Covid19 stood out:

On whether we are better prepared for another pandemic now than before Covid-19:

“We would do better because we've learned a lot,” he says. “That better preparation is about investing in your health workforce, your infrastructure, your IT systems and it's not just spending all your money on pandemic preparedness.

“The most obvious no-brainer is your public health workforce. Those people are going to stand up and do the contact tracing work with the labs to do all the testing, go and visit people and make sure they've got food.

“You need to have sufficient size of that workforce and the ability to scale it to surge it. You need a rump, you need a base.”

Has that “base” or “rump” gotten bigger or smaller since the pandemic?

“I'll leave you to look that up,” he says. “Every country is struggling with providing the health services that their citizens need or want. And it's hardly surprising because of aging populations - I'm talking across the board before we even get to a pandemic - and because we've got more medical treatments and we've got more things we can do,” says Dr Blakely.

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Re SolarZero and Whangarei council the staffers aren't being sacked - that's a term for being dismissed for misconduct.

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Whanganui commenter Rory says

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Recommending ‘Unsheltered’, by Barbara Kingsolver, an insightful novel about how life can deteriorate when the world changes around you, even when you do everything right.

I feel many people in Aotearoa today are experiencing this with the erosion of security and services by this coalition government.

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The Reserve Bank running monetary policy at cross-purposes to the government's running of fiscal policy is another reason why the 'independent' Reserve Bank ideology should be abandoned and full responsibility for monetary policy, along with fiscal and industrial policy it already has. Independence of reserve banks comes from anti-democratic neoliberal economic ideology.

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Now a days I take consumer confidence surveys with a grain of salt. The fact that there is a gap between increase in consumer confidence & actual spending indicates to me a bias. The pervasive belief that the National party are better economic managers I think is seeping into these survey results irrelevant of reality, IMHO.

But we all know what PM Luxon will say... "we inherited it".

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Central Govt handing off cost, debt and risk to local Govt's, this reminds me of somewhere else...

New Zealand with Chinese characteristics?

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