Smoke and mirrors
Mike Sabin's column keeps telling us how Northland is surging ahead, and seems to be an on-going story in his past few columns. I am sure that we will be having street parties soon to celebrate the new prosperous Northland.
His boss John has just written to me to tell me how well-off my wife and I are compared with 2008. In 2008 we used to shop at Pak'nSave and our fortnightly shopping included meat and six bottles of wine (we used to drink in those days), and the bill was never higher than $180.
Now we do our fortnightly shop and the bill is generally about $220 (no meat, no wine). So the fact that our pension has increased since 2008 does not alter the fact that our dollar buys less.
I suppose the government works on the theory that if you repeat a story often enough it will eventually become true.
