For Goodness Sakes, Some People You Just Can't Help

For an entire week, this Blog has been focused on one issue - the false claim made by the PM that NZ's GDP growth rate is better "than every country, other than Japan" which he made to Hosking on Newstalk ZB. I saw it as crucial to the election campaign, which centers on economic credibility and in particular cost-of-living issues. The latest IMF figures, released two days ago, put NZ close to bottom on GDP growth - we're on track to be 180th out of 189 countries next year (and way down this year as well). I've checked the OECD Quarterly Growth Figures - since the PM inferred at one stage it maybe these numbers he's talking about - and NZ is certainly not 2nd after Japan there either.

So my point is that I've tried like a dog to put the truth out there - and I know many MPs receive this Blog - and thousands of folks have been reading it the past week and re-posting. But then in the Leaders Debate last night, the PM repeated his claim that NZ is beating every country other than Japan on the GDP numbers... and Luxon let it go.

How could he? His opponent was stating that Labour is a superior economic manager to National based on our GDP performance and it is not true. How on earth could Luxon not challenge him on the most crucial issue of economic competence? Luxon could've won the debate hands-down and the election in that one moment - by showing off a command of economic matters, like the OECD & IMF numbers, and calling Hipkins' out as deceptive. Once the PM knew he could get away with that, he knew could get away with anything.

My political analyst friends in the US say folks expected John Kerry to lose the Presidential Election in 2004 when he got labelled a coward by George Bush & the Republican Party for not helping his fellow soldiers more in Vietnam when they came under enemy attack, even though Kerry had received three Purple Heart military medals when George Bush had been serving in the National Guard in Texas and dodging the draft. They said that for Bush to win the debate & label Kerry a coward when Bush had not served proved Kerry could not win a debate even when he held all the cards.

It seems to me that National has held all the cards on the economy and should have easily won these debates on the GDP growth numbers & cost-of-living since they're so clearly in tatters. To not win easily winnable debates with all the numbers on your side, and when Bloggers like me have handed them the evidence on a plate, beggars belief.

Sources:

https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryName=350

NZ Media spins the IMF GDP figures in Labour's favor and grossly misleads Kiwis a day before voting

Probably because some reporters receive this Blog, Newshub today picked up on the IMF 's latest GDP growth figures. This is how they report it:

NZ's economy is at 1.1 percent annual GDP growth, which the IMF predicts will drop marginally to 1 percent next year. To see how Aotearoa ranks against other countries for economic growth in 2024, Newshub analyzed GDP growth percentages across 25 different economies & compared them to 2023's figures (with the change in brackets). Macao came out on top with a whopping 27.2 percent GDP growth prediction for 2024, while Equatorial Guinea was at the bottom of the list, estimated to shrink by 5.5 percent. Aotearoa is near the bottom of the annual GDP growth list. However, so are many advanced economies NZ compares itself to including Germany, Japan, Finland and Australia".

What a disgraceful biased piece of junk reporting. First, Australia beats us easily on GDP growth in 2023-24. Second, who "compares" NZ to Germany? Was NZ dependent on Russian gas to run our industrial base, like Germany was, and which Putin turned off, handing them an extraordinary economic shock? Third, the IMF ranked NZ as 180th out of 189 nations, an appalling ranking. There are only 9 nations in the world worse than NZ. There's no reason to justify how Newshub chose their 25 "different economies". On their weird arbitrary list NZ ranks 19th out of 25. Not amazing but not too bad, voters must think. Here's Newshub's bizarrely selected GDP growth table from top to bottom:

Macao; Libya; India; Kenya; Samoa; Ukraine; Nigeria; West Bank-Gaza; South Korea; Switzerland; Chile; Canada; Brazil; US; France; Australia; Japan; Finland; New Zealand; Belgium; Germany; Austria; Italy; UK; Guinea.

Newshub took a tiny subset of 25 countries (representing only 13% of the 189 countries the IMF collected data on) but included on that list nearly all the countries that did worse than NZ (6 out of 9) and yet threw out nearly all the countries placed ahead of us (keeping just 18 out of the 180). Yes, Newshub's list includes most nations worse than us, yet just 10% of the better performing ones. Why not simply report our global ranking of 180th out of 189?

The IMF ranking is proof of how the PM & Finance Minister screwed up, squandering Kiwis' amazing sacrifices & victory over the virus during the 2020-21 Covid lockdowns, to snatch an unnecessary economic defeat for the people. Hipkins wrecked our economy by paying billions to big business (Fletchers grabbed $70 million), by making it illegal for anyone to sell food other than the supermarket duopoly during those times, by throwing cash at the big banks through schemes like funding-for-lending, printing money, worsening inequality, entrenching monopoly powers & creating the cost-of-living crisis. The IMF's economic figures provide the evidence but NZ Big Media won't report it.

Does our Media Establishment have a political agenda? Is it trying to swing the election by not reporting facts? Is our media beholden to politicians & business in ways we don't know? Why doesn't Newshub write a headline that when the PM told Mike Hosking two days ago that NZ was growing faster that "every country other than Japan" he misled us.

Sources:

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/money/2023/10/how-new-zealand-s-economic-growth-predictions-compare-to-rest-of-world-according-to-imf.html

https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/10/10/resilient-global-economy-still-limping-along-with-growing-divergences#:~:text=According%20to%20our%20latest%20projections,well%20below%20the%20historical%20average.