Robert MacCulloch
Robert MacCulloch is a native of New Zealand and worked at the Reserve Bank of NZ before travelling to the UK to complete a PhD in Economics at Oxford University.
It’d be nice to think we’ve added something these past years to improve the prosperity of NZ. We were the only economic commentary source that regularly pointed out how the huge fiscal expansion, and money-printing program, of the Covid years would end in high inflation and subsequently economic stagnation.
Before the blog started, we urged National in the 2010s to sort out the nation’s ailing infrastructure when it had the chance and provided a plan. We begged National and Labour many years ago to pre-empt the looming fiscal blow-outs on healthcare and pensions due to the ageing population. Although offering a fully-costed solution to that challenge, with the budgets completed by a former finance minister, both main parties threw it back in our faces and laughed it off. We pushed for a new Ministry of Regulation a long while ago – that would subject rules to the discipline of cost-benefit analysis – arguing hair-dressers would be a good place to start, which has been taken up.
We exposed the cosy, inbred, club, made up of people promoted way beyond their abilities, that is running NZ, both in the public and private spheres. In spite of the top classes in all of my children’s schools having a majority of Asian students, there is not one Indian member of parliament representing the National Party and the only Asian Cabinet minister, Melissa Lee, got shafted, demoted and replaced in the media portfolio by Choir Boy Paul Goldsmith. She has much experience in media – he has none. Meritocracy does not exist in NZ, wherever you look. We exposed the links between the Big Banks, Supermarkets and Building Firms with our minister of finance and PM. It has all been too much for the establishment to bear.
National, Labour and Big Business NZ have begun to complain and threaten me at the highest levels about my writings. The game has become clear. Continue doing so and it will mean the end of your future in this country. DownToEarth.Kiwi has been told in no uncertain terms that for me, as principal writer, due to this commentary, I’ve been wiped for consideration from top public and private appointments.
So good luck to NZ. Good luck to maintaining the status quo of the same old people, in the same old big jobs, who together with their same old mates have driven NZ into division and economic decline.
As for me, taking a fresh perspective and offering different solutions to the tired old, failed approaches of the past – the ones our two main political parties and their buddies in corporate NZ promote to protect their territories – is something I no longer wish to do. It would be good for them to be required to wear their gang patches announcing to Kiwis who and what they truly represent, rather than hiding in shadows. A lack of imagination threatens our future. Good luck and good night.
This article was originally published by Down to Earth Kiwi.
