The usual lies

If you just want the facts, no matter what side of the political spectrum you may value, it probably annoys you listening to Christopher Luxon's rhetoric about the economy and what he has inherited.

The rhetoric contains the same few statistics on repeat and some propaganda terms and unfortunately journalists have abandoned challenging Luxon about these matters so he repeats them ad nauseam and they come across as "agreed and a point of indisputable fact".

Journalists often say "I get that but..."

That's kind of like surrendering to fake news on repeat, beaten down by a broken record cycling back over a bump and a scratch as the cat tries to escape the skunk.

The population is being programmed with fake news about the state of the economy by Luxon and Willis - when the facts say something quite different.

Let's briefly step through the main issues ...

Rent has gone up by $170 per week repeats Luxon - sounds a lot until you realise that this figure is calculated as a sum - over a six year period since 2017 which equates to an average of $28 per year.

In reality the average rent increases across New Zealand were low at around 5% per year in 2018, 2019, 2020 until 2021-2022 when they increased considerably with inflation to 6.8% before falling back down to the normal ( approximately ) 5% average per year range...but Luxon's single figure masks that detail.

By looking further back at rents you could pull Luxon's same trick and say rents rose by $121 under National.

Debt - as you know - Willis and Luxon - never uses percentages to tell their story - instead they use a number of $5 Billion in 2017 and a number of $100 Billion by 2023. They skip over Covid and they emphasise spending on anything non Covid. Willis also harks back to the old way of calculating debt as a percentage of GDP which was out of step with all other nations we compare ourselves with.

Willis wants to paint a terrible picture to excuse her cruel cuts to school lunches, beneficiaries, the disabled etc - in order to afford unaffordable tax cuts and the $5.6 Billion shortfall she faces - but she always leaves out where New Zealand's debt sits relative to other OECD nations.

No matter how you look at it - with the large OECD Nations median or the small OECD Nations median - New Zealand's net debt is below them - and so it's sad and ridiculous for us all to think that this is some "economic vandalism on a scale never seen before" at work here - as Luxon might tell the media over and over and over again.

When it comes to GDP - Luxon uses the term "three out of four of the last quarters had negative growth"...

What Luxon always neglects to point out is the world economic context where the world economy as a whole - is going through a weak growth period..for example in April 2023 the IMF wrote...

"The global economy is heading for its weakest medium-term growth in more than 30 years as the world grapples with geopolitical fragmentation, slower labour force growth and weaker prospects for previously fast-growing economies such as China, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warns in its latest World Economic Outlook.'

So in that context - blaming Labour for flat growth in New Zealand is "fake news" on repeat.

Luxon conveniently forgets we also had a major cyclone in 2023 on top of the impacts of inflation but I have not forgotten how when GDP growth was high under Labour a couple of years ago - Luxon dismissed it as just a few "marco indicators but look at how people are suffering in the squeezed middle" and then he would recite made up anecdotes about a man in a supermarket putting back the biscuits.

Mike Hosking wonders why Luxon is not connecting...like Dur.

On top of all of this we had all those credit agencies and the IMF singing the praises of our economy - real experts - as Luxon said he was good with numbers and they were rock solid and he will not be lectured - that would be too ironic.

When Jacinda was PM many got paid a cost of living allowance, there were discounts applied to the price of petrol, and in the end teachers got decent pay increases as did nurses - but today we don't see any such help - instead we see Seymour taking away free lunches, sneaky fuel taxes coming next term, the cost of running an EV go through the roof, massive rates increases on the horizon thanks to repealing Three Waters, the Nats taking off with the wheelchairs needed by the disabled, no plans to replace the Ferries, and negotiations with the Police stalled while Luxon doubled down about how he was entitled to that $52,000.

Tomorrow - Stats NZ will tell us what the GDP growth was like three months ago in between October and December 2023 - and I am betting you will hear Luxon and Willis make all sorts of "fake news" faces and recite misleading rhetoric again - as they increasingly use the uncertain language of "intentions" about tax cuts and blame Labour for everything they have inherited.

The Market ( Banks ) are making the following predictions about quarterly growth in that period three months ago :

ASB -0.2%, RBNZ 0%, Westpac 0%, KiwiBank 0%, ANZ 0.1%, BNZ 0.1%.

As you can see it's pretty safe to suggest it won't be far from zero ...and if it's negative there will be howls about a technical recession as Luxon blames Labour and pretends he is the solution and austerity for the poor is the only answer...along with cuts to funding and public services.

It's a familiar script now to most of us and yes my eyes roll back in their sockets at the way DumbTown swallows all this like it was gospel news when it's Trump Playbook manipulation.

I would like to see some more pushback from media and Labour and the Greens about these lies because there's a danger that allowing Luxon and Willis a free pass to repeat fake news ad nauseam will increasingly programme the deluded and lazy into thinking something horribly untrue.

Once the lies are swallowed its hard to unpick them with the rabbit down its rabbit hole as it seeks to confirm what it thinks is true.

We really need the press to step up and confront this now.

The usual lies

Morena

G