Last month, I outlined a plan to address our high exchange rate - a plan that would protect our productive industry here at home while making our exports more competitive abroad.
As a nation we have to live within our means. For the last 30-odd years, we've almost forgotten what this looks like. Successive governments have chosen to turn their backs on this difficult truth, preferring to run the economy through increased borrowing from offshore or by selling our assets offshore.
At some point, this is all going to have to come to an end. At some point, foreign lenders will doubt our ability to repay our debts, our credit rating will be rapidly downgraded, and our small economy will receive a shock so severe that it will set off new rounds of job losses, government cuts and another generation of New Zealanders lost to Australia.
Successive governments have taken the gamble that this shock won't happen under their watch. They've tinkered with traditional monetary policy settings while overseeing the gradual accumulation of $311 billion gross debt ($149 billion of net debt) and great swathes of our economy sold offshore. Think banks, telecommunications, farms, and now power companies.
The Green Party has proposed a plan to carefully manage our transition to a country that lives within our means once again, rather than a repeat of the pain inflicted on us by the cruel and unfair reforms of the 1980s and 1990s.
