Posts by Marcus Neiman
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Sorry to be a little bit cynical here, but is this only going to be the "Good News from the Sweatshop" tour? Or are we in for some more critical reportage of "Oriental Despotisms" meeting Western (and Japanese and Singaporean) Capital?
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Word, Anjum.
And putting aside the effects of offshoring on blue collar NZers and Vietnamese, very little of the windfalls of the slashing of labour and environmental compliance costs seem to have been passed on to consumers.
Icebreaker and Macpac clothing, Fisher and Paykel products (for example) just don't seem that much cheaper in light of the reduction in costs those firms would have experienced...
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Michael: Under international law everyone has a right to citizenship of a country - you can't go around stripping citizenship unless other countries are going to come to the party and give this people new citizenship.
In any case, given that NZ governments for the last 30 years have actively pursued the making of NZ as a branch office of global economy rather than a distinct national economy in the global economy I struggle to blame NZers who choose to move to whereever head office is.
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As has been noted by all-too-many, interest rates are a very blunt instrument. The high NZD has not been driven by our exporting success - far from it - but rather a willingness of NZers to pay any price in a frenzy for housing, and the ready supply of overseas savers willing to indulge us.
If the problem is at core, an overheated housing market, it should be dealt with with a targeted solution to that problem - an increase in housing supply - that doesn't needlessly affect the rest of the economy.
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Craig: I noted your subtle inclusion of economic nationalism in the same breath as jingoism and immigrant-bashing. One can very much be economic nationalist and an inclusive multiculturalist.
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To be fair, I suspect that it would be much easier to ease down the NZ dollar in 2007 that it was to try and prop up the Pound in 1992, given the relative states of those two economies...
It does seem though that the RBNZ aren't sparing any expense in doing this though. Surely it would have been much cheaper for Bollard and Cullen to make public statements describing NZ as a banana republic, with a massive current account deficit, ever increasing private debt being used on consumption rather than purchasing productive assets, and a gaping lack of savings.
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"Thinking New Zealand" indeed...
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Rich: But then you have any number of devices like the EU and the Australian Commonwealth has to ensure that certain regions don't get swamped to the extent that they might otherwise - eg. the equal representation of the states in the Commonwealth senate.
We already have a common labour market, an increasingly common market for goods and services, a far more similar cultural sphere than almost any two given EU member states, an increasingly shared mass media environment, plus significant population transfers - our political institutions should reflect these shared concerns, and they should be democratic rather than in the hands of bureaucrats.
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Eleanor: The problem people such as yourself face is similar to those by other groups practicing 'special pleading' in the European integration process - everyone outside of the industry is going to say that it makes no sense to make an exception for essential oil producers and sellers.
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To put this in wider perspective, this common standards business is an element of the creation of a single Australasian market that has been underway since CER kicked off, and which is probably a good thing.
It is also interesting though to contrast this to the European Union project where the making of a common market has been accompnied by attempts at closer political and democratic links - common European citizenship, a European Parliament, European political parties, etc. This has been absent from the Trans-Tasman relationship.
I find the economic sovereignty argument made by Kedgley and others here parochial and anachronistic. Instead of wishing for the past and Little New Zealand, we should be seeking to democratise Trans-Tasman relations, rather than retreating into ourselves.