Latest / The SME Stream / Andrew Dickens: My thoughts on Luxon's State of the Nation speech

Transcript

Andrew Dickens: My thoughts on Luxon's State of the Nation speech · The SME Stream

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: So election year is often running with Christoga Laxon's State
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: of the Nation address yesterday, where he declared the recovery
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: has arrived. We should know the election date later this week.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: What we do know is the theme of National's campaign.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: He was telling everybody yesterday. He told Mike it's fixing
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: the basics and building the future, which is not a shock.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: It's just a variation of the way they've positioned themselves
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: for a while. They are the party that concentrates on
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: the need to haves, not the knights to haves. They're
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: the party that says that Labour trashed the economy in
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: six years with their spending. They're the party that is
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: said all along, we're the guys who'll fix it up.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: But the real question is what are they fixing and
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: what are they building. So Treasury's figures from the half
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: Yearly Economic and Fiscal Update delivered just before Christmas showed
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: that the government has both cut capital expenditures since its
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: election and lowered forecast for new spending. So capex fell
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: by six billion dollars between the twenty three, twenty four
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: and twenty four to twenty five years, and spending was
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: one point six billion dollars less in twenty four to
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: twenty five than was budgeted. So that's not a lot
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: of fixing of leaky hospitals and rickety courtrooms going on.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: That's a lot of cutting or spending. And yet despite that,
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: their spending has gone up, and we know that from
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: their borrowing. And that's because the big ticket items like
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: benefits and pensions keep going up, and so have the
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: costs and services like education and health. So what can
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: you fix and what can you build? There's not a
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: lot of invigorating news in the near future. It seems
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: as though our fundamentals room will remain basically unchanged. The
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: great hope for all of us is that the private
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: sector just gets on with it, understanding the limits to
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: our capacity, and we get back to what I would
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: say is the unofficial slogan, which is we are the
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: national party. Vote for us. We're not as bad as
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: the other lot. For more from Early edition with Ryan Bridge,
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: listen live to News Talks it be from five am weekdays,
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.