“It’s the darkest right now... it’s darkest before dawn and it’s dawn now according to our projections,” Orr said.
Herald business editor-at-large Liam Dann told The Front Page that Orr’s comments come as forecasts show we are in the third round of recession.
“They see that the next set of GDP data we get will be negative, and that the quarter we’re in now, which is in GDP data we don’t get for a long time, will be negative, and they see that unemployment will keep rising.
“You have to be a bit cautious with sounding celebratory about all that. It’s sort of the beginning of the process of things actually starting to get better.
“So it’s still pretty dark out there, but at least we can see that the direction we are moving in is the right one.”
On the unemployment statistics, Dann said that the most recent statistics have shown that there are 33,000 more jobless people in the last year, and the unemployment rate for 15-19 year olds is now 20%, up from 15%.
“I guess my concern is that we want to get through this quickly and we want to stop it peaking at a high level because if it stays high for a long period of time, you sort of create a culture of unemployment, which I think we still suffer from in this country, and I think we suffered from it at the various points in time when we’ve pushed unemployment up really high to beat inflation.”
Dann said that despite some figures pointing to a negative outlook, it has been a horrible time and it is worth celebrating, noting in one column earlier this week that the markets were celebrating “like it was VE Day”.
“I know we’ve got a long way to go and I think the reality of the economy will sink back in. But you know, it’s sort of like, VE day was Victory Day in Europe and World War II, people celebrate it, [but] they still had to beat the Japanese.
“There’s still battles to be fought and there always will be in economics, but really, unless there’s a major reversal of the trend or oil prices spike badly or something like that, it looks like the win that we were looking for in the war on inflation.”
Listen to the full episode on why the Reserve Bank has faced criticism for cutting the OCR, and what other recent stats say about the economy.
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
