AndI’m not talking about giving birth. That’s over in a few hours.
I’m talking about raising a newborn. That takes two years of sleep deprivation and anxiety. It feels a bit like getting ready for a bungy jump. You’re going to do it because you won’t regret it in the end, but you don’t actually want to do it.
Anyway, because this is the last you’ll hear from me for a while, I want to use this column to ask the Government a favour.
We won’t make a surplus in 2028 like we’d hoped. We won’t make it the following year. In fact, we don’t know when we’ll make it again. The Treasury can’t see that far into the future.
The only way to make a surplus this decade is to change our accounting methods and strip out ACC’s deficit. It’s a fair thing to do, but it’s still like hiding the rental property’s mortgage to pretend that debt doesn’t exist.
We’re no longer the success story of the world. We rank at the bottom of almost every economic comparison of similar countries that you see put together nowadays.
We have piled so much debt on that just paying the interest costs us $8.8 billion a year. That’s more than we spend on the Defence Force, police, Customs and Corrections combined, with $1b to spare.
We’ll have to take on $18b of debt just to make ends meet in the next three years. That means our interest bill will increase to over $10b a year.
We can’t figure out how to get our productivity up. We’ve just had the worst recession in 33 years. We’ve basically been in recession for two whole years. Per capita, we’ve all got 5% poorer than we were in 2022.
Even when growth picks up, it’s anaemic. Only 0.5% next year.
We’re no longer riding the wave of China’s insatiable appetite like we were 16 years ago. Those glory days are over.
They need to rip, sh*t and bust. Slash unnecessary spending. Cut tens of thousands more public service jobs.
Which means getting us out of this hole will take courage.
Courage does not look like doing what John Key did. This is not a criticism of the way he and Bill English ran the country. They managed according to the times. And those were good times. They could afford to tinker and make change slowly.
The coalition Government does not have that luxury. They have been left with enormous debt, increased (unnecessarily in some cases) government spending and a trading world damaged by Covid and war.
They need to rip, sh*t and bust. Slash unnecessary spending. Cut tens of thousands more public service jobs. Scrap ministries we don’t need. Bring in private money to pay for things so we don’t have to. Do something brave to attract international investors.
Barry Soper and Heather du Plessis-Allan with son Iggy. A baby girl is joining the family next year.
They haven’t done that yet. They still employ 14,000 more public servants than John Key’s Government did. They’ve only cut one agency: the Productivity Commission. Nicola Willis spent more in her last Budget than Grant Robertson ever did and will spend even more next year. She can’t blame inflation. Her increase is far more than inflation.
If they don’t get this right, we will sleepwalk our way into being just another big Pacific island where life is slow and expensive, and which kids leave when they’re old enough.
I don’t want that to happen in 18 years when this baby is old enough to make that decision for herself.
I’d like us to be the kind of country where she wants to stay because life is good and opportunity is plenty.
But that will take courage from this Government. I hope they have it.
