Christopher Luxon

I mean, we've been through a pandemic, painful process.

We've been through inflation and cost of living.

It's terrible.

We've been through Trump's tariffs.

We're now going through a war that's causing consequences for us here at home.

All I can tell you is having been around the region, there are countries in the world that are doing it incredibly difficult and tough.

Now, that means nothing to a New Zealander because it's actually about what happens for me here at home.

But it's about our relative performance.

If you think about it, we went into this crisis actually with some quite good economic momentum.

We want to come out of it as clean as we can and pop back up on those rails and not have a two- or three-year hangover like we did with COVID.

The reason it's been hard is because that COVID spending –

caused a massive crash hangover the night after.

They're not good numbers.

Yeah, well, on one level, it's the first time we've seen a slight dip in unemployment.

But that's cows on the South Island.

There's a month in there of the conflict of that quarter.

But there's more for us to do.

But if you look at the fast-track projects, we've got 20 fast-track projects with thousands of jobs coming through that.

you know, that have been kicking off.

You think about the Auckland Wharf, you think about the developments in Drury.