What Politicians Will Say in their Lust for Power: Labour's Hipkins & Otago VC Robertson Must be Held to Account

Before the election toward the end of 2023, in September of that year, when Hipkins was PM & Mr Grant Robertson (BA) - now Vice Chancellor of Otago University - were running the show, this is how they reported on the NZ economy. "The Pre-election Economic & Fiscal Update (PREFU) shows no recession, a growing economy, more jobs & wages ahead of inflation. The PREFU released today shows NZ’s economy is turning the corner .. Economy to grow 2.6 percent on average over forecast period .. Fiscal Rules met - return to surplus .. Our economic plan to support NZ'ers dealing with the cost of living while investing in building a stronger, more resilient & inclusive economy is working".

Just over six months later, NZ was experiencing a combination of its deepest & longest economic downturn and recessionary contraction for over 30 years, with less jobs, with none of its fiscal rules having been met and a worsening cost-of-living crisis. The old joke that economists have predicted 9 out of the last 6 recessions sure don't apply to the ones working at our Treasury. Together with Hipkins & Robertson, they predicted 9 out the past 0 booms. Given it takes over six months to a year for nearly every economic policy change to work its way into the numbers and outcomes, the vast majority of the slump this past year is directly attributable to those two men. How these blokes, in cahoots with Treasury, could have written such nonsense, made such outlandish claims, is beyond me. Robertson & Hipkins often reply with the line that the likes of this Blog say things with the benefit of hindsight. Really? In mid 2023 I did radio interviews, including with Kerre Woodham on Newstalk ZB, saying, "I don't know what planet Robertson is living on. Its an extraordinary thing to say & he knows its not true".

Sure, National have not met many of our expectations. But the idea Hipkins, along with his lobbyists - the Main Stream Media, unionists and many academics - think they can pull the wool over the eyes of voters and trick them into re-electing Labour in 2026 when everything Hipkins said about the economy just a short while ago has been proven to be so wrong, so off-the-mark, is beyond me. My reading of the situation is that what Labour's Hipkins did was so unforgiveable, the economic and social carnage he wrought so long-lasting, that he should not even be in contention, whatever National's faults.

The School Lunch Fiasco is not our Politicians' fault. It stems from the NZ Treasury's wrong economic advice.

To be fair to our politicians regards the controversies swirling over the quality and reliability of school lunches, the guilty party which started the fiasco was certainly not Labour, nor National, nor ACT. It was NZ Treasury false and misleading "advice". Midway through 2023, just before Labour lost office, Radio NZ headlines blared, "Treasury does not support free school lunches .. Finance Minister Robertson said evaluations showed the program had no effect on attendance & provided little benefit for Māori students .. Evaluations found no impact on attendance & ākonga Māori, who make up 48 percent of students receiving the program, have not benefited on most metrics, such as paying attention in class, health, and mental wellbeing (with mental wellbeing worse off for those in the program)."

Identifying the causal impact of quality school lunches on such outcomes is a very difficult econometric problem. It has been the subject of international studies & debates for nearly 100 years. School meal programs were introduced in America by President Truman in 1946. Working out their effect has been fraught since its usually poor, disadvantaged children who've been selected for the programs. Consequently should you correlate the likes of school attendance, grades, obesity and those kinds of outcomes on participation in lunch programs, it may even appear that such programs are associated with worse outcomes. The problem is so hard that modern attempts to work out whether meal programs are worthwhile have titles like, "The impact of the National School Lunch Program on Child Health: A nonparametric bounds analysis" which is in the highly regarded Journal of Econometrics. That article starts out by saying, "Children [partaking in] the National School Lunch Program tend to have worse health outcomes on average than children who do not participate .. Whether [this] reflects causal impacts of the program has become a matter of considerable debate among researchers and policymakers". Even that paper's findings are somewhat ambiguous.

My view is that it was a mistake for the NZ Treasury to pretend it had worked out the effect of quality school lunches on children's educational & health outcomes, when no-one else in the world has done so. It should've never stated that across a range of metrics, there are no effects. Just because Treasury, using a wonky statistical methodology, could not find them, does not mean they do not exist. Instead Treasury should've backed off making any assertions, and been modest. The Treasury threw NZ's debate on school lunches into chaos. All we know for certain is that healthy public school lunch programs are intensely political. Just last week US Republicans in Congress took aim at ending meal programs that provide funding for schools to buy healthy food from local farmers. Such programs had been championed by Michelle Obama, former President Obama's wife, when he was in office. Treasury should have had the honesty to say that it had no clue whether providing high quality lunches would turn out to be - over the next 50 years - a "social investment" that would improve the outcomes for children who ate them. The Treasury never had the data.