Bill Ralston: Top guns trying their best

I have become addicted to those dramatised documentaries on Sky TV called Air Crash Investigation where they reconstruct a crash or aerial mishap.

Usually it is a series of seemingly trivial past mistakes in construction or maintenance of the plane, some unforeseen failure in preparation or planning, or freak weather conditions that leads to the pilots frantically pushing buttons, heaving on levers and adjusting the engine speed in the approved textbook manner in an attempt to save themselves and the aircraft.

Too often it's all to no avail because the causes are different to what they suspect is the problem and the textbook responses no longer hold the answer.

Prolonged exposure to these horrific programmes mean I am now not only an extremely nervous flier but I have begun to sense looming disaster in everything around me.

I watch John Key and Bill English frantically pulling on the joystick of the economy, revving the throttle and flicking every switch they can find and I'm certain we are still in a vertical dive.

Key's recent calming words about the recession, saying we are faring better than most, sound a little like the pilot coming on the intercom and telling terrified passengers "we have a small technical malfunction" as they watch the port engine burst into flame.

Bill English relaxes the rules on foreign investment to attract overseas capital except there are precious few overseas investors left with capital to invest.

The Government moves to trim bureaucratic red tape and takes some of the lunacy out of the Resource Management Act to encourage development but there are few developers left to encourage.

It pumps money into roading infrastructure so people can get to work and goods can get to market more efficiently but fewer people have jobs to go to and so fewer goods are being sold.

It pushes the high-tech button promising billions spent on faster broadband that the Telcos don't want because it is too expensive and many consumers can probably no longer afford even they wanted it.

It holds a jobs summit to encourage employers to retain workers but at the same time embarks on a long overdue cost-cutting campaign in the public service that will inevitably result in job losses and increased welfare bills.

It rightly demands better dividend returns from its SOEs but that, too, is likely to put more people out of work and eventually lead to increased charges from SOEs for their services.

It is dumping cash into the economy through the coming tax cuts but, even for the better off, I suspect their extra $20 or so a week will eaten up by rising costs, such as ACC charges and excessive local body rates.

It is at this point I feel like donning my lifejacket, adjusting my oxygen mask and adopting the approved crash position that will handily allow me to kiss my butt goodbye.

Up in the cockpit Key and English can do whatever they want, and frankly most of what they are doing is theoretically right, but back in economy class I get the feeling that their efforts will have only a very limited effect, the economy will follow its course and eventually have to right itself as the condition of our major trading partners improves.

Actually, the good news is many of those top trading partners are across the Tasman or in Asia and, as Key points out, those economies are in a better position than elsewhere in the world not only for a faster recovery but they may come out of this stronger than before.

He is right that we are in a better position than, say, the United States. There, the economy is in freefall.

We still have a flow of credit, our mortgage rates are dropping fast, our banking system is stronger than most with better lending practices.

Apart from a few lemming-like finance companies and property developers we haven't had what Key calls the "rinky-dink housing and finance deals that led to bad-debt problems in the rest of the world".

And, as he pointed out last week, even in a recession the world still has to eat and we export huge amounts of tucker not high-end electronics and high-priced cars.

Key used a great example at a Combined Trade Union conference on productivity when he pointed out only 10 luxury 7 series BMWs were sold in the whole of the USA last month.

Luckily the Kiwi dollar has now fallen to a level where our exporters can make the maximum bucks for everything we ship abroad.

The Government can go on making its adjustments and trimming here and there.

It will not do any harm but the answer to New Zealand's recession is largely out of its hands.

We'll come right as the world comes right.