What should happen to prices when productivity jumps? Logically, they should fall.
So, shouldn’t prices generally have fallen during the great computerisation-driven productivity boom led by the United States in the 1990s? And, given the rapid increase in productivity of the enormous Chinese workforce, shouldn’t prices generally still be falling?
The Treaty partner has come to Parliament. That is how Maori party president Whata Winiata sees his party — as a symbol of a parallel politics.
How well the four Maori MPs navigate the opportunity and challenge their success last year delivered them could have profound implications not just for the party but for politics and the nation. And this will be the year that is essentially decided.
Here are five ways we might usefully think about 2006 before we settle back from the holidays and lose perspective.
First, the economy. This year the party ends and household balance sheets have to be put in order.
The Treasury and the Reserve Bank both say house prices may fall a bit. That’s OK if you have stayed put. It’s not OK if you have recently bought a home or an investment property on a big mortgage.
When the Prime Minister gets back from her mountaintop there’s a job waiting: clean out the fridge.
Just look at the jumble in there: some vegetable has squished out of its plastic bag all over the tray, the pumpkin has fur and potatoes have sprouted; up above are half-eaten cheeses, curling salamis, old cold chicken and lamb, curdled yoghurt and cat’s meat the cat won’t go near any more.
Here’s a post-Christmas thought: think big. We’ve largely lost the habit.
You can see that in the way we do most things as a nation.
Roads are a good example. Transit New Zealand is cheese-paring costs from the death road, state highway 2. In Wellington its new feeder road into that think-small oddity, the three-lane Terrace tunnel, will grind across the surface through multiple traffic lights instead of in a trench out of sight and largely out of hearing — and still leave its off-road slicing Cuba street inhumanly in half.
Here is a holiday quiz for when the patience runs out, the scrabble is scrambled and the crosswords are crabbed.
1. Where have the British gone?
We’re all tangata whenua now, Trevor Mallard said (sort of). Which eliminates the British. But where did all those colonisers go? What will keep the Treaty alive if there are no British here any more? And who will defend the Union Jack and God Save the Queen?
It’s the time of the year for political plaudits. My first goes to John Armstrong.
Armstrong does not do politics. He watches and analyses politics for this paper. He does that with honesty and clarity and every now and then with punch. One of his punches in 2003 knocked out Bill English.
For that honesty and clarity and punch he is much respected by peers and politicians. He is without superior in our trade.
Alan Bollard is really bothered about our savings habits — actually, our habit of not saving. Finance Minister Michael Cullen is bothered, too.
The Reserve Bank calculates that households’ dissaving rate is 12 per cent of their disposable income. The country’s dissaving rate is impressive, too: the current account deficit is 8 per cent of GDP and climbing.
I idly bounced a tennis ball Thomas’s way the other day. Thomas caught and held it in his mouth. Interesting. Thomas is a cat.
So it can be done.
Whether it was done 23 years ago is not a matter of great political moment. That was teaching then, as other teachers on both sides of the House could attest. Had David Benson-Pope said in May what he now says — that he can’t recall any such incident — it would have blown over with the police report.
When Jim Sutton was first Minister of Agriculture in 1990 his Australian counterpart assured him New Zealand apples would be in Australia by Christmas. Fifteen years on, we still don’t know which Christmas.
Australian apple growers are the sorts of primary producers who farm politicians in preference to battling the elements and the market. We may yet need the World Trade Organisation to sort them out.