Zoe Wallace

No, look, I think that's probably a relatively small part of the puzzle.

Productivity has been something for New Zealand that's been a long-standing issue and probably about 50 years in the making if you look back through the data.

Yeah, look, I think it's probably good to, you know, the 2025 figures that we're talking about are one year.

What we generally recommend is looking through bigger cycles.

But even then, it's quite clear to see that our productivity has been poor and declining.

Particularly when you look at things like real wages, they're actually lower today than they were in 1992, about 5% lower.

And that's with workers putting out, in terms of output per hour, somewhere between 20% to 60%, depending on what industry, more output than they were back in the early 1990s.

Yeah, look, I think that's probably a bit of a sort of one-off period.

You know, when you cut workers faster than your output falling, it does maybe imply that, OK, you've actually got a boost.

But realistically, I think that's a bit of a false number, essentially, because you should be looking over longer time periods, essentially.

No, absolutely.

And look, I think when you look back through the research from MBIE, from Productivity Commission, even from the Reserve Bank itself, you can quite clearly see that New Zealand has some structural challenges, but also that we have work to do, long-standing work to do that we haven't really managed to turn the ship around.

And it's a slow-moving ship.

It won't be one government's job to solve.

but we fundamentally have been failing to allocate capital to the most productive sectors.

Really depends where you're concentrating it on.

So one thing that you can see from the data in New Zealand is that we've shifted from very much a primary sector-driven economy back in the 70s and 80s

to something that's much more services focused.

And services, things like tourism, hospitality, they tend to also be quite hard to measure quality improvements in, but they're also hard to scale.

And therefore, they just naturally tend to be lower productivity.