Today it has been announced that GDP shrank in the last quarter, in spite of record immigration, which means that for Kiwi residents, we are suffering staggering drops in our per capita incomes. Our worst Finance Minister ever, the smug, grinning Cheshire Cat, Grant Robertson, and his negative, bitter colleague, Chris Hipkins, well and truly stuffed the NZ economy. Digging us out of this mess is going to be hard work for the new government, especially since Labour and the MainStreamMedia are trying to sabotage them from the start. Amazingly this week, Robertson, Hipkins & Newshub attacked the new government for not subjecting the legislation they wish to repeal to Regulatory Impact Statement scrutiny, arguing that Labour had always done so "except during Covid".
Well, Covid makes up most of the period during which Hipkins held power, as Covid Minister. During that time he ran NZ, together with his colleagues, like a totalitarian state, ignoring every form of proper scrutiny - particularly like cost-benefit analysis and regulatory impact statements. Folks like me ferociously and personally argued for those checks and balances to be done, and Hipkins, with the aid of his accomplices in the media, set the attack dogs onto us.
During Covid I argued on this blog and radio that the late order of the vaccine was because Hipkins never did cost-benefit analysis. Had he done so, his government would have worked out that since each vaccine dose cost only around $20, five million doses should have been ordered from Pfizer (as well as from each of the several other companies offering vaccines) instead of one million at the end of 2020. Furthermore, I argued on Newstalk ZB that the second lock-down in 2021 never added up on a cost-benefit / regulatory impact basis. That was not with the benefit of hindsight, it was when it was happening.
Yes, Hipkins and Robertson have damaged our lovely country in an unprecedented fashion, and now have the gall to argue that they managed the economy prudently by respecting the experts advice, in the form of cost-benefit analysis and regulatory impact statements, when the truth is they gave the likes of economic "experts" like me, who were arguing in favour of those disciplines, short shrift. Now we're all paying the price in terms of a shrinking economy, meaning less money to pay for health-care and more people dying as a result.
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