Fixed it for you
I don't get it. New Zealand has one of the most endangered bird species in the world. Plant native tree habitats for them to feed on.
New Zealand loses $6 billion a year to the Australian banking system. Switch our accounts to Kiwibank.
No venture capital and too much
invested in housing? Kiwisaver is trying to peg back the 40-year lag after compulsory super was cancelled. How about a sharemarket regulator with dedication and teeth, so people feel confident investing in it again?
Covid getting out of control? Wear a mask. Want to change the government? (Why would you? Things are fine, given the circumstances.) Then get out and vote. Stop writing character assassinations on social media denigrating a fine couple.
Congestion on Auckland motorways? Pay people to take their bikes on the trains. (LA has 60 lanes in and out and it still jams up around peak hour).
Three Waters proposals? Listen to the water experts — not the mayors and councils with political axes to grind. Iwi can't possibly stuff up more than it already has been.
Are all the problems solved? Maybe I should run for PM.
Paul Cheshire, Maraetai.
Robertson's role
Grant Robertson has to accept responsibility for a fair bit of generated inflation. He made several decisions with serious consequences. Firstly, he diluted the Reserve Bank's focus on inflation by making employment part of their mandate. Secondly, prior to Covid, the Reserve Bank told him that if they were ever to use Quantitative Easing, the Minister of Finance would need to adjust fiscal policies or accept runaway inflation. This advice, however, was ignored.
Lastly, he was warned that increasing minimum wages by 35 per cent over five years could start a wage/price inflation spiral. Whilst full employment and increased minimum wages sound like they would help low income households — inflation hurts them more (as we are now seeing). It is very worrying he is once again saying the Reserve Bank Governor's warnings this week urging fiscal restraint were not directed at him. If Robertson fails to adjust his policies, inflation is set to go much higher yet.
Lucas Bonne, Unsworth Heights.
Keys to prosperity
John Gascoigne is right in "Paradise lost" (NZ Herald, April 19). The expected optimum allocation of resources under neoliberalism did not result in increased wealth ownership and prosperity for all, but in intensified polarisation of the nation into haves and have-nots.
Efforts to rectify that only through increasing benefits and subsidies to raise consumption potential by the poor led only to widening (hidden) poverty and economic plutocracy.
Yet, our one-time predominant faith in a property-owning democracy embodies the cure to poverty in (illiberally) enforced higher personal and national savings rates, to achieve at least a meaningful level of individual wealth ownership by all citizens eventually.
Even welfare beneficiaries can participate in this effort through the taxation system.
While housing is a basic, universally-needed and rewarding investment, even a country with very limited resources can be wealthy by owning assets abroad.
Jens Meder, Pt Chevalier
Disastrous doctrine
Thank you to John Gascoigne for the insightful columns that bring the "science" back to reality and set forth why certain doctrines as promulgated by neoliberals need to be shown the door and why. Such usually right-leaning proponents, including their political friends, have a vested interest in promoting the failed unbridled and unregulated market forces to line their pockets at the expense of increasing inequality.
Dennis Pahl, Tauranga.
Decades of decline
The column by economics commentator John Gascoigne sums up the decline in New Zealand's prosperity over the last few decades precisely. The early pioneers that set the benchmark would surely turn in their graves now as we witness a rise in homelessness, increasingly violent criminal acts, and health and education systems that are but a shadow of what they once were.
In addition, we now see politicians determined to make this country the go-to place for almost anyone, it seems, who is dissatisfied with life in their native countries. Why would you do that for example when many of your own people are unable to buy a house? We are only a very small economy that simply can't afford to do that, plus, it has changed our culture significantly and not always for the best. Look after your own first.
As Gascoigne stated, it has resulted in a decline in living standards that was decades in the making. Very well said.
Paul Beck, West Harbour.
