The Prime Minister is back from his holiday and insists the economy has turned a corner.
But it's not showing in the unemployment data. June 2025 benefit data is just out (scroll down).
All benefits are up 6.6 percent on June 2024. Jobseeker is up 10 percent year on year.
Significantly, the rise in those people on a Jobseeker benefit due to a health or disability condition has increased by 15.4 percent. That points to a health system that is continuing to under-perform.
Talking to Heather du Plessis-Allan on NewstalkZB this morning Christopher Luxon said that his party is trying to pull NZ out of a recession worse than any since 1991 - he reiterated this minutes later saying the recession is the worst since the early 1990s and is worse than the GFC.
This is his new line. Watch out for it.
This is an adjustment - a new explanation - because the economy is not improving anywhere near as fast as he had hoped or it needs to.
At half-time National is struggling to make a real difference to voter's lives.
That's what the polls are saying.
New Zealand needs him to do better. Because another innings for Labour, with the Greens and Te Pati Maori, would be a disaster.
Source: https://www.msd.govt.nz/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/statistics/monthly-reporting/
2 comments:
I just couldn't get past the fun bit in that interview where the PM talked about Fast Track as a "corruption." Right on mate.
Ref. https://www.facebook.com/reel/2416051145445633
It sounds as though he's surprised that things haven't recovered with his party in power. And if he's going to cast comparisons back to the 1990-91 recession perhaps he should take a look at what the National Party did back then.
But I suspect that scares the shit out of him and the rest of National. At least as much as Labour, National does not want to repeat the era of Ruthless Ruth, which saw them go from landslide in 1990 to hanging on by their fingernails in 1993.
Trouble is that the softly, softly, incremental approach isn't working either.
But to me the biggest tell about our future are the people leaving in their tens of thousands, specifically those in their 30's with families and houses, the very people you'd expect had done their Big OE and were now settled and tied to NZ.
Their leaving means they've given up on this government and fear what the next Labour-Green-TPM one will do, possibly after 2029, certainly after 2032, and, at this rate, possibly even after 2023.
Meantime the voters who support those parties are not going anywhere.
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