Matt Harris

They also go, if I liquidate that, guess what shrinks?

The debt book.

Guess whose policy outcomes met?

Because you know there's a minister somewhere who's driving this.

So it all makes sense.

It's just business.

No, I agree with that.

I fundamentally more and more believe that we do actually have a productivity issue.

At first it felt like a nice thing to throw around in a business chat, but it definitely looks like businesses increasingly face more and more costs in everything that they do, even right down to little stuff like extra five days sick leave, extra half a percent of KiwiSaver.

I think that's a great thing, but that's a cost.

And immediately in here it added quite a bit of cost to our payroll from one fortnight to another where we haven't done anything different in the business between those two fortnights.

So you have all this stuff.

So what happens in a business is that people have to work a lot harder and smarter to get to the same level they were before and we have to charge more but every time you charge more, people have to charge other people and it goes around in a big circle in this economy.

I wonder if the solutions in tech and maybe it is but otherwise it's work ethic and people get disenfranchised when we're in long periods like we are at the moment where it's hard.

That's how they treat it.

No, I fully agree in that there was a great description of how the Americans actually feel about their business owners and their entrepreneurs.

And you do look at this long period of headwind and you go, it surely has to stop at some stage.

Is there anything in anyone's life that hasn't doubled in cost?

Yeah.

rates, insurance, petrol, milk.