Andrew Dickens Afternoons Newstalk ZB

It is fair to say the country is not in a good place right now.

Job cuts dominate the headlines. A double-dip recession came true. Inflation is robbing us of our purchasing power.

Last week an IPSOS poll found that 60 percent of us think that New Zealand is in decline and 65 percent believe that the economy is rigged to benefit the rich and the powerful.

And when people bemoan our situation and wonder how we got here a common response is to blame the Labour Government and the Reserve Bank.

A common refrain is Robertson blew all the money so we can't afford to do anything now, even something as important as paying our police more so they don't quit or leave the country. You also hear that Labour caused a debt so large our children and their children will be paying for it for decades to come.

So I pricked up my ears last week when Mike Hosking talked to ASB economist Nick Tuffley about inflation and the economy in general.

Mike asked him how bad was our economy and he said pretty bad but still nowhere near what happened after the GFC.

To remind you, the GFC ended early in 2009 and John Key's government was in charge. To remedy the situation we borrowed, we opened up immigration and we went through austerity to a far greater degree than we're doing now. And it worked.

Need I remind you that within 5 years we were described as having a rock-star economy.

This is not to diminish the situation that we're in right now but it is to put a perspective on things.

But Nick was also asked why inflation and bad economic tidings were still happening here when other economies like the States, the UK and Australia are bouncing back. Economies with far greater debt and spending.

Tuffley essentially blamed our static productivity. He says considering we imported nearly 3 percent more population over the past 2 years our GDP should have raised, but it didn't.

We seem incapable of making more money per person year on year. And it's a problem that we've had ever since Ruth Richardson's Mother of all Budgets early in the 90s. And it's a problem that exists no matter the colour of the government.

It's something we need to look to ourselves for not something we can blame on the government.

And it relates to the comments that Christopher Luxon made overseas that angered some when he boasted that New Zealand is now open for business.

We've always been open for business. The real question is how much business are we open for?
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Since we were last together, the collapse of television news and current affairs has continued.

And with it, we have been subjected to a lot of highfalutin thinking about the metaphysical and cultural reasons why linear TV is dying.

You know - go woke go broke. Or- this is because nobody trusts you, because you're all raving lefties.

Meanwhile, Melissa Lee has been asked what she is going to do about it, when it's obvious that there's very little she can do.

These are commercial entities that are suffering at the hands of market forces that have been long predicted to hit.

Commercial broadcasting and journalism is an easy business model. Inventory control and labour costs. In other words, you can't employ any more people than the money you make from the advertising.

Hearing that more than 300 were employed by Newshub was pretty revealing. That's a lot of salaries.

For some perspective, NZME employs just over 200 for it's papers and radio and digital content. And the lid has been sinking steadily for a years now.

That's because digital players are siphoning off $100 million a year in advertising content

Despite the 6 o'clock news having the highest spot rates, they were unable to make the budget balance

Faced with this environment I was confused after Warner took over 3 that they added to the news output with full-service late-night shows and more. They increased their costs at a time when revenue was going down.

It seemed to me that no matter how woke or unwoke or how biased or unbiased, Newshub was increasingly modelled to lose money without a huge recalibration.

Meanwhile, despite warning bells sounding about the theft of revenue by digital companies, our TV operators seemed timid to adapt.

Facebook and Google sell clicks. They gain news content and then clicks when punters repost links. Yet the links from so many news operators continue to be free.

There's a reason the Herald is now behind a paywall, so at least we can clip the ticket. When we did it the industry thought we were audacious. It's beginning to look very smart.

Furthermore, TVNZ in particular has made a foray into the digital world with TVNZ+. But it's free to air and the ad inventory is so low it's better to watch it online with time shifting, thereby missing out on the ads that pay for the whole shebang.

The model is broken not because of politics or bias but because of fear.

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I vividly remember the first time I saw Christchurch Cathedral.

I was 10 so it was 1973. I was on tour with the Auckland Boys Choir.

It was winter and it was twilight and we went into the Square, which was bustling with cars and buses and Victorian buildings and a marvellous magic shop. People wore overcoats and scarves and there was the cathedral.

It as like being transported to England.

We went in to listen to the cathedral's boys choir performing Evensong and my choirmaster said they were the best in the land. And they were.

I say this after the news that the restoration may be put on hold due to the escalating cost.

I can't comprehend stopping something halfway through. It's too late to go back. Forward is the only way to go.

To paraphrase the Prime Minister - we have passed through the decision gate and in passing that gate there can only be commitment to finishing the job, even if it seems to be escalating out of control.

It's called aspiration. It's called determination. Perhaps this is the lack of ambition that our Prime Minister accuses us of.

Opponents say tear it down, because in 100 years who will know the difference? But using that logic, why do anything outstanding?

I'm reminded of the Notre Dame in Paris which will open to the public in December - 5 years and 7 months after being gutted by fire.

They have harvested an entire oak forest for the timber and raised 2 billion dollars through donations.

French billionaires are scrambling over each other to fund the thing so that their name lives on through generations.

The cathedral is 160 years old this year. Notre Dame is 860 years old. But they're worth the same to their cities.

Marking stones to the start of great cities. And in 100 years, who'll care how much it cost?

Sometimes it seems that New Zealand knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.

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I was not going to talk about dolphin-gate- but from first thing this morning, everyone was talking about it.

Sir Russell Coutts has had an epic meltdown over the cancellation of Saturday racing of his SailGP series.

He had to refund the spectator's tickets, which meant at least a third of his income went up in smoke.

Now he's belittling all New Zealand for their bureaucratic torpor that stops go-getters like him getting their way.

I would have raced. And if a foiling boat traveling at 80 kilometres an hour ran over a calving dolphin, turning it into sashimi, I could then say we learnt our lesson- and please pass the rice and the wasabi.

But I think it's important to realise how we got here.

Coutts sailed Lyttleton last year. With dolphin protocols. 1 race-day got delayed. He knew the Lyttleton problem but carried on.

This year he decided to race in Auckland. He wanted to build a stadium and hospitality on the site of a former oil and chemical storage site.

Auckland said you can't put people and food on poisoned land.

Russell said stuff you and flounced back to Lyttleton. There was no investigation of alternative Auckland sites. Or even going to Wellington.

He went back to Christchurch and signed a contract knowing all the protocols and the possibility of disruption. He knew the Lyttleton problem but carried on, hoping for the best.

When the Saturday race was delayed because of a mammal on course the telly coverage, owned by Russell, promptly played a promo praising SailGP's respect for the environment. That they were powered by nature and they look after our marine mammal buddies.

It was good press. Until the dolphin didn't move on.

Then he unleashed a spray about New Zealand holding people like him back. I don't think it's in his construction to admit he made bad choices and to assume some personal responsibility. And then he tried to make it seem like he was a victim.

I don't think this is a left versus right issue. Or a nature versus industry issue.

It was all good until Sir Russell lost some money.

So take a deep breath. Realise New Zealand loves the product. Put it on in an appropriate venue and let's move on, shall we?

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So if you've listened to me for any length of time, you'll know I respect Liam Dann very much indeed.

Liam is the Herald's Business Editor at Large. He hosts podcasts and writes stories about the business world and he's been at the NZ Herald for 21 years.

He's at pains to stress he's not an economist. He's the guy who interviews economists and then translates their technical stuff into news we can all use and we need.

He's just written a book called Barbecue Economics, which explains all this stuff for the average man and woman on the street.

He also writes a column every Sunday, and yesterday he asked the question I've been asking myself for a long time.

"Is the Government’s shock about this 'worse than expected' economy political theatre or just ignorance?"

Last August, Nicola Willis stated the cupboard was bare, and we all knew that.

They then campaigned on fixing it all up. Killing inflation. Solving the cost of living crisis. Building the missing infrastructure. And then on top of it all, giving up on $14.5 billion worth of tax revenue by giving us a tax cut.

But some of us wondered that if the cupboard was indeed bare, was all this possible or was this exaggerated rhetoric to get votes based on some magical thinking that all will be fine in the end?

Now the Finance Minister is saying the economy is worse than expected and maybe some of the policies can't happen.

I'm not sure it is worse than expected, because the government's accounts have never been secret- thanks to the Fiscal Responsibility Act introduced in 1994 to stop nasty surprises. And people were warning National of this last year.

Liam Dann reckons: "To put it generously, it looks like National was using best-case economic scenarios to justify policy promises that were marginal at best."

The question that remains is whether National knew the promises they were making were unaffordable or whether they just don't know what's going on.

Or to put it more bluntly.

Are they stupid or were they lying? And if they were exaggerating their ability to afford their policies, did they think we'd be too stupid to realise?

We all got sick and tired of the last Government gaslighting us and making promises they can't keep. I'm not going to be happy if it happens again.

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When National formed it's new government there was a snappy little phrase that supporters were fond of using.

Thank God the adults are back in charge.

Suggesting that the left wing Labour Government were naive, inefficient fools who had driven the country into the ground like a 12 year old in a ram raid.

National would lead a government run by grown ups who know what to do and how to do it and then actually DO it.

So when Christopher Luxon presented his State of the nation address yesterday, the expectation was that the grown ups were about to tell us how all our problems will be fixed.

What we got was a warning that times were going to get tough. What we got was a promise that our PM would not shy away from tough talk.  What we got was a lot of talk about beneficiaries. They were told the free ride was over. And then at the end an admission to reporters that the Government was yet to explain how it would address and finance the solutions to our woes.

We also got a lot of talk about how bad the last Government was and the implication that they were the root of the parlous state we find ourselves in.

That our water problems and our transport problems and our health problems and our labour problems and our housing problems and our energy problems and our weather problems and our farming problems and of course our economic problems all rest with one cohort of politicians who were in power from 2017 to 2023

It's that sort of blame game that got the Labour Government called childish. I would like to think that this government might have resisted that urge. To be the adults.

I think what many of us want is governance that is future focussed. That considers a time 30 years in the future when our population has doubled or even tripled.

That acknowledges that the mess we're in has taken many different governments and decades to create and will take many different governments to fix.

The most powerful part of Christopher Luxon's speech was the line that New Zealand is fragile.

We are. At a very fundamental level. And have been for a long time. And will be for a very longtime.

So the sooner the adults turn up with a real plan that we can all get behind and that will work, the better.
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