The hoon around the week to July 17

Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The Kākā

TLDR: This week, demands to loosen restrictions on bringing in migrant workers grew to a crescendo amid widespread delays, cancellations and employer concerns about wage inflation. In Thursday’s Chorus, I looked at whether a loosening is a good idea on its own, and what a bipartisan deal on migration along with infrastructure spending should look like.

Also, the Reserve Bank hiked its official interest rate as expected and house prices kept falling, but I took a closer look in Wednesday’s Chorus at the central bank’s $12.7b worth of cheap loans for banks, which are diluting the effects of its tightening and giving already-very-profitable banks a taxpayer subsidy.

I also challenged the assumptions about our ‘squeezed middle’ in Friday’s Chorus and detailed in Tuesday’s Chorus how our bi-partisan 30/30 mantra on public debt and the size of Government is sucking our future dry. In Monday’s Chorus, I looked at how a pathway to citizenship for New Zealanders living in Australia would expose employers here to much more ‘brain drain’ pressure.

In Friday evening’s live hoon webinar for paid subscribers, which is in recorded form above for all subscribers, I took a lap around these issues and more in geopolitics and the global economy with co-host Peter Bale and special guest Professor Robert Patman from the University of Otago.

We talked about:

• Sri Lanka’s political and economic implosion;

• what Boris Johnson’s departure might mean for Aotearoa-NZ; and,

• How the Pacific Islands Forum went and why China may have over-played its hand in the Pacific.

Here’s Peter’s Weekly World Bulletin email newsletter for more background.

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