What's prejudice? It is an unreasonable opinion especially when formed without enough thought or knowledge. We're going to make the argument that the cause of the recession we're now suffering is our Prejudiced Big Media which suppressed alternative views in September 2021 about the economic consequences of Auckland's disastrous almost four month second lock-down. It was that lockdown & snails pace opening up which is the cause of our current malaise. That was when government debt skyrocketed, money was recklessly printed & Aucklanders became so fed up, many left the country and one's that didn't ejected Labour from power. Last year, the Australian Financial Review said, "The latest data from across the ditch suggests NZ is the first advanced economy to enter into a bona fide stagflationary recession. To my knowledge, no other nation is in a double-dip recession. While GDP stagnates, immigration sets all-time records (2-3% of the population) meaning GDP per capita is plummeting at Global Financial Crisis proportions. It may be the start of a long-term malaise as Kiwis lose faith and leave in an exodus to Australia and other countries.
Who or what's to blame? It is important to know since only then can one fix the source so it doesn't re-occur. The cause lies with our Prejudiced Big Media. In September 2021 a group of us tried in vain to rally opinion against Auckland's second lockdown to avoid the devastating economic costs we're now experiencing. This Blog argued on 15 September that Auckland's lockdown was not adding up. In desperation we wrote:
"Can Treasury please do the cost-benefit analysis which we've been pleading with them to do for months".
One of our country's top economists, John Gibson, published articles on the topic, warning of the dire destruction being wrought. On 12 September 2021, he wrote:
"The apparent kindness of locking down to limit Covid-19 deaths will, instead, be killing more people by making us poorer - lockdowns are one of our greatest peacetime policy failures .. safety at all costs - costs lives".
Meanwhile Dr Martin Lally at Capital Financial Consultants produced his own private cost-benefit analysis of lockdowns supporting such arguments. We were all shafted by Big Media. It colluded with Labour to avoid shining light on the truth that the cost of Auckland's September 2021 lockdown wildly exceeded its benefits. A Treasury cost-benefit would've brutally exposed it at the time but Labour's leaders refused to order one. They slammed that door shut. The truth got in the way of their agenda. Big Media refused to report our views. Had it done so and we gained traction, our current economic mess may have been avoided. In September 2021 Deputy PM Robertson repeated his mantra, "A strong public health response is still the best economic response". Big Media selected its own anointed experts who were put on its front pages to back him up, whilst de-platforming those of us with different views.
Were folks like Gibson & me shunned since we were nobodies? After all, I am a nobody like everybody. Many of this Blog's readers are, no doubt, fed up with folks calling themselves experts, but if an expert nerdy type is what you want, people like Gibson & me had academic backgrounds more than matching the Government-Media team of self-declared Covid know-it-alls. In the ranking of NZ economists, we comprise half of the country's top four (Peter Phillips, a Nobel Prize contender, is first). But none of our skills meant a thing to Big Media. The current calamitous state of the nation's finances vindicates our predictions. Money has now become so short that our health system has run down, education system is declining & impact on young lives will end up being far more devastating than the benefits stemming from that September 2021 lock-down. Were NZ now growing at 2% per annum, instead of stagnation, $8 billion would be added to the country's ability to save lives & livelihoods in this year alone. How many people will now die because they're on hospital waiting lists & can't get the drugs to save their lives? How many young Kiwis will grow up in despair because of the poor education they've received these past 5 years? How many will commit suicide?
Next time Big Media gangs up with politicians against the public, it should realize one day it will pay a price. That price is the disdain we now have for it, because it betrayed us. Big Media's betrayal resulted in the suffering of countless people due to our recession & cost-of-living crisis. Instead of apologizing, journos now run sad stories painting Luxon as a cheat by claiming a housing allowance & Seymour as racist. They call it upholding democracy. NZ's Big Media misled us. Not our politicians. They were just being politicians. Prejudiced Big Media lost its integrity.
Sources: