Chris Hipkins

Why do you think they haven't done those things?

Is it that they don't care?

The National Party told, in my view, it's a whopping lie before the last election, which was that the reason that we had high inflation in New Zealand was because of the spending of the New Zealand government.

And it was not true.

New Zealand's inflation and that spike in inflation that we experienced post-COVID did really hurt.

It hurt families.

But it was in line with the spike of inflation that you saw all around the world.

We were about average.

We certainly weren't the highest.

Countries like the UK got into over 10% inflation.

We were about 7.5%.

That really hurts, though.

It's 7.5% more when you're going into the supermarket.

You're going to really feel that.

But the National Party's view was that this was all down to actions taken by the New Zealand government.

And that just simply wasn't true.

That inflation happened all the way around the world.

And so now they're so keen to stick with that story that they created, they're not willing to do things in New Zealand that support people through this next spike in inflation that we're seeing.

And a lot of that is driven offshore.

But the current government are wedded to the view that it's all down to New Zealand government decisions.