Christoph Schumacher

But that's probably not a very sensible idea because that A, would require New Zealand to take on more debt and more debt needs to be serviced so there will be less money later on.

And it's, well, it would put more pressure on inflation.

Provide handouts and people will start spending more and inflation will go up again.

So that's not a fix.

So what might be the quickest cure might not be the smartest thing to do.

And I think the government has signaled this quite well in the budget.

It's a very no frills, be disciplined now so we have more later kind of budget, which is not unusual in election years.

But it's a very sort of kind of grown up, very liberal kind of budget.

And political liberalism doesn't mean anything goes.

No, it simply means that the government puts responsibility back to the individual.

You need to look after yourself and we won't intervene.

So that suggests that we are not providing handouts or the government will not be giving handouts, but it puts the responsibility back on each of us to make sure we make the savings we need.

to make to solve the cost of living crisis and need to just get better at the things we do at the heart of it is our low low productivity right we rank right at the bottom of the oecd in terms of of productivity we just need to start solving that problem i mean one of the first things david seymour did was get rid of the productivity commission because it hasn't done much because productivity had been falling even so we had a commission but

We didn't really do much to improve productivity either.

Just by getting rid of the productivity commission doesn't mean we have gotten better.

We haven't quite figured it out how to increase productivity.

And if we could, then that would help.

That would actually generally increase the pie.

It's not just cutting it the same pie in different ways, but it would actually increase the pie and that would help.

The issue really is that the industries we focus on and we are good at are sort of at the end of their productivity growth.