68 Comments
Jul 13, 2022Liked by Bernard Hickey

Thanks Bernard. This is an important debate for New Zealand to have. I'd support opening it up.

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Jul 13, 2022Liked by Bernard Hickey

Thanks Bernard! I wish the Government would listen to this and come out transparent with their plans not as they pretend to be but in a real way.

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Interesting ‘The Kaka’ this morning Bernard. I can’t see any bi-partisan deals being agreed atm though ahead of next years election and a change of government. I’d like to see you make comment on increasing housing affordability, poverty reduction and the role of government bureaucracy inhibiting desired change.

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Jul 13, 2022Liked by Bernard Hickey

For what it’s worth my answer to the question should this be opened up to non-subscribers will always be yes😁

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There’s a lot think about in this. But I’d comment that light rail down dominion road would be much cheaper than the tunnel all the way route. The big plus is that light rail eliminates a LOT of busses from the centre city. But it can and should be done much cheaper than the gold-plated option currently on the table.

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I said it yesterday. We import low wage workers which lowers the cost to employers. NZers are not willing to accept those low wages so they bugger off overseas. Because NZ now doesn't have enough of that occupation group, we import more low wage workers. Rinse and repeat.

A recommendation: - set the base wage for police, ambulance, fire, nursing and teaching at the same amount. Which stops the undervaluing of nursing and teaching because they are predominantly female roles. And stops a sector from underpaying their staff to meet a budget, rather than getting the budget they should be receiving to do their job.

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'Pressure is building to breaking point, powered by signs everywhere of usually reliable essential services breaking down (suspended elective surgeries, school holiday flight cancellations, shortened shop and cafe hours, construction delays and building materials shortages, an age care sector near collapse), and growing fears of a wage-price spiral that worsens the inflationary cost-of-living crisis.'

Maybe I'm stupid, but there seems something terribly flawed in a society, or economic structure, that cannot function effectively without endless immigration. Okay, bring in another 500,000 people to do the work that cannot now be done. Then what have we? A larger population, so more services underprovided, with the need for yet another 500,000 people. We've been doing this for decades; we're up to 5,000,000 inhabitants. Where do we stop? 10 million? 20 million? 100 million?

Can we not design a self-sufficient steady state that needs only to replace the people who emigrate?

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Great to hear your take on modeshift and how a potential deal could be struck. It is the most cost effective/speedy solution by far and great to hear your voice join the chorus here (excuse the pun) after a few others have weighed in (great series of articles in the Dom Post/Stuff on this recently).

I sure hope some kind of deal could be struck here but agree I am an eternal pessimist and doubt it. National would need to give up a pretty powerful attacking point of theirs going into the election so they'd need some big carrots from Labour/Greens I'd think. But here's to hoping and you laid out the case well (let's hope Luxon and Ardern are Kaka subscribers).

P.S. - Not sure I agree with your comment on "un-electable". Maybe you'd have more votes that you'd think if you or someone willing to call out Aotearoa's real critical issues and offer serious solutions rather than tired talking points threw your hat in the political arena. I get the (albeit un-substantiated) feeling there are more people out there sick of politicians who only listen to focus groups and want real leadership than the pollsters might think. At least enough for a new minor party, one would hope.

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Surprised you haven’t included any mention of the REINZ HPI figures for June. It showed that prices are rapidly retreating and are now down around 9.5% from the peak in just 7 months.

To put it into context this is the NZ HPI plotted against some recent housing corrections. All of them aligned by first month prices went negative.

https://imgur.io/Ln6xCot

It does really make the “soft landing” narrative, and predictions of total falls topping out around 15%~ look increasingly dubious

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I'm glad to see you on this Bernard. If you could, I'd love to see you put the acid on Immigration about their shameful statistical shambles. When I wanted data on immigration to make a submission to the Productivity Commission, I got fixed spreadsheets, nothing interactive that's actually useful (they have a few and they are trivial). One way to get rational discussion about immigration is to have the numbers. They should be on the Immigration website in some detail, updated at least monthly. We could see approvals by category, the long lag to arrivals and various useful sub-category calculations ('student work visas', the cafe working/fruit picking lot as under 30 or whatever, etc). This is not competitive stuff, it should be out there. We pay millions for them to assemble a database and they are too miserable and perhaps incompetent to display it in ways that the public could use.

We currently have a natural births minus deaths growth of about 25k a year. If we had a net growth in immigration (ie, work visa requiring arrivals minus departing NZers) of the same, that would be 50k, or about 1%pa. It would require a rolling estimate total for departing NZers, as that can be very volatile and large at times, but it is definitely do-able over a five year average, which is all one can do for labour market 'planning' anyway. So we might be getting 50k visa-requiring immigration over time as we bled 25k NZers a year, almost all to Australia.

The diaspora NZ has showing alongside Ireland in your graph is 80% in Australia, whereas Ireland's is no longer mostly in Britain. The rest of ours is dominated by the UK (maybe 40%) but spread around a lot - over 20k in the US. But this is absolutely normal and not a function of failure here. We have, ex-Australia, a diaspora of no more than 3%. Australia's is about 2% according to one of their Govt websites. Ours is understandable in that context.

We should be talking about net migration (departing NZers included) whenever we discuss this and using the best possible estiimates/real data to guide the discussion.

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Jul 14, 2022Liked by Bernard Hickey

We are forever in this perpetual race to the bottom. There is so little between Red and Blue that it really doesn’t matter who you vote for the outcome will be the same! There is no courage among any of the main parties just a hole lot of bluff and blunder!! Sad, we have such a great country!!

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Unemployable and unelectable you may be, if you say so. But these ideas, so excellently expressed this morning, need to be available to the electorate as a whole. Without wishing any threat to your independence and assuming there will be no bipartisan acceptance of these ideas before the election I would love it if you could drive more political coverage of these ideas. In the meantime I am supporting TOP which if it attained a much improved election result could be some sort catalyst for change. Are you able to give comment on Raf Manji or the party policies generally.

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Jul 14, 2022Liked by Bernard Hickey

Crikey you are on a roll this week Bernard. Yet another very thought-provoking discussion. I think Labour have made noises about setting an NZ Inc immigration policy and you would have thought that with the majority they hold would have felt emboldened to roll something out. Unfortunately the polls say "don't you dare" and for that reason I am pessimistic like you of any long term planning or bi-partisan approach

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Jul 14, 2022Liked by Bernard Hickey

Why are our infrastructure costs always underestimated? I assume smart people who do these things all the time are well aware of probable inflation, changes of scope, unexpected problems, etc. but the estimate is always well under. It will cost $2 billion... ends up $3.5B. These aren’t small errors. Is it a political motivation? It doesn’t matter if we under estimate the cost cause we’ll pay no matter what and if we estimate the real cost it will get shot down and never happen?

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Jul 14, 2022·edited Jul 14, 2022Liked by Bernard Hickey

Hi Bernard the discussion needs to also consider whether this population driven growth is even economically viable - many of these "jobs" actually require substantial supplementary state support for health, education, policing and housing. The infrastructure costs per additional unit of population is about $200,000 if using the current estimates of underspend on infrastructure as a guide. Then there is the "housing effect" Population growth that has not been met with a concordant increase in housing supply has been the leading cause of increases in the cost of housing which has had a hugely detrimental effect on NZ society and the national economy. The depressant effect that low wage immigration has had on wages generally is a leading cause of societal distress and crime. Most of the jobs migrants are filling are not net contributors to national wealth and wellbeing. These hidden costs are actually nothing other than a direct subsidy to those employers who rely on cheap labour and at least when Muldoon applied subsidies they were transparent and they also were targeted at increasing exports where as the present subsidies on labour do nothing more than increase costs n society and increase consumption/demand for imports. NZ is one foot and mouth outbreak away from being the next Cuba - our collective wealth and well being is still completely dependent on what we export and how much we get for it - and that hasn't improved substantially in either nature or relative value in thirty years even though our population has doubled in that time.

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Jul 14, 2022Liked by Bernard Hickey

Interesting thing about that population chart - NZ net migration has never been higher than over the last 10 years. Pretty much since the GFC. To the extent people 'vote with their feet' NZ is doing something right! In spite of the ballooning real estate and other ills.

Love the snail.

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