NZ Productivity Commission Woked Up
April 22, 2021
By NZB3
Amused to see now that the Productivity Commission has finally been taken over by Labour 6.0 they’ve lost no time using it to attack business.
New Boss, Nana, seems to be talking off the seat of his pants only. His opinion is that our leading firms (doesn’t go as far to attack them by name, more a shot across their bow) are not diverse enough or work with government enough…and something to do with marmite.
The new Chair, Ganesh Nana, says industry needs to get together with Maori and Government as a way of working ‘smarter not harder’ so we can become more productive just like our ‘global counterparts’.
There is no mention of who these global counterparts are or who these ‘frontier firms’ are or examples of what is meant or reference to any report or research¹. Appears the new chair is just making this stuff up as he goes along. Appears also not to be an interview or else Mike Yardley might call bullshit. It’s an advertising slot, propaganda.
“The New Zealand Productivity Commission was created by National 5.0, established on April Fools Day 2011. True paternity belongs with that Government’s coalition partner, the ACT Party of Rodney Hide.
“The Productivity Commission is the naive Libertarian’s idea that Governments have New Zealand’s best interests in mind and would do the right thing if only they got good advice.
“The Productivity Commission with their $5 million annual budget have been doing deep-dive economic analysis into New Zealand economic productivity for the past decade. It provides a few jobs for economics graduates and for some graphic designers such as the ones who came up with their nice box-and-whisker logo. They basically write joke book sheets and make satirical videos at taxpayer’s expense the same way the CATO Institute or NZ Initiative do for free.” –2011: NZ Productivity Commission, AHNZ
This is the problem with ACT’s 2011 libertarian economics baby. Eventually it would fall into the hands of the Left and they’d use it as their weapon and so here we are.
Nana’s next agenda appears to be to go on a warpath against labour-intensive jobs who employ migrant workers. He, and anyone from the old Productivity Commission staff who don’t quit their jobs in droves to be replaced by Lefty Econ graduates, will provide the intellectual cover for Labour 6.0 to attack the fruit industry in particular then. After all, you can’t get Heather Simpson to be the only intellectual cover agent for Labour Governments!
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1 There probably is some sort of paperwork but you’d have to hunt for it and at any rate it’s not being discussed in this interview
Ref. Inquiry finds our frontier firms are half as productive as global counterparts, Newstalk ZB (April 2021)
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