LINDSAY MITCHELL: PM's new line
- Administrator
- Jul 14
- 1 min read
The Prime Minister is back from his holiday and insists the economy has turned a corner.
But it's not showing in the unemployment data. June 2025 benefit data is just out (scroll down).
All benefits are up 6.6 percent on June 2024. Jobseeker is up 10 percent year on year.
Significantly, the rise in those people on a Jobseeker benefit due to a health or disability condition has increased by 15.4 percent. That points to a health system that is continuing to under-perform.
Talking to Heather du Plessis-Allan on NewstalkZB this morning Christopher Luxon said that his party is trying to pull NZ out of a recession worse than any since 1991 - he reiterated this minutes later saying the recession is the worst since the early 1990s and is worse than the GFC.
This is his new line. Watch out for it.
This is an adjustment - a new explanation - because the economy is not improving anywhere near as fast as he had hoped or it needs to.
At half-time National is struggling to make a real difference to voter's lives.
That's what the polls are saying.
New Zealand needs him to do better. Because another innings for Labour, with the Greens and Te Pati Maori, would be a disaster.
Source: https://www.msd.govt.nz/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/statistics/monthly-reporting/
Lindsay Mitchell blogs here
This acceptance of welfare dependency is just another indication of the failure of our western civilization and rejection of the values, principles, moral and ethics that made it so successful.
Studying more about the history of civilizations, empires, nations and other "human" organizations reveals recurring and inevitable cycles like those of the seasons in a year or the stages of life. Wise people in the past like Polybius and Plato discovered how and why these cycles occur and cannot be prevented. The essence of these cycles is best summarized by.
Hard times make strong people.
Strong people make good times.
Good times make weak people
Weak people make hard times.
The cycles begin with disorder, anarchy and chaos. Strong leaders emerge and begin…
So, keeping on track, this time.
Across the board there has been an increase, except for Student Hardship support, there has been a rise. Cynical me would suggest that ex Students have been recategorised. The biggest rise has been Jobseeker Support - I'd like to see how many job vacancies there are against this as even putting square pegs in round holes gets people off benefits. The highest increase within this category is Health Condition or Disability (HDC). I can't imagine that we have all become suddenly so much sicker or there has been an outbreak in physical disabilities, so I suspect that people are claiming "mental illness" or "anxiety", and while these are real, but rare conditions, too man…
WAFFLE WARNING - I apologise to Lindsay for going slightly off-track but think this is relevant.
While scrolling down after reading this article I accidentally clicked on the source link and what I read stunned me. Statistics are often referred to as "White lies, Damned lies and Statistics". What I read makes me wonder how accurate NZ Statistics really are and if this shows a case of "double dipping"!
Some extracts from the link about reporting ethnicity (my comments/questions are in bold):
Background
Ethnicity is about people’s identity and sense of belonging. Ethnicity measures cultural affiliation, rather than race (?????), ancestry, nationality, or citizenship. Ethnicity is self-perceived; people can identify with more than one ethnic group and change their affiliations…
It seems to me that, while the "civilized" environment we have created has changed dramatically, our basic nature, instincts and species behaviors have remained much the same as those of our "primitive' ancestors.
We are still hunters and gatherers but the hunting and gathering is now called a job.
There is also what I call a "scarcity gene" that motivates us to accumulate and store away things we do not need or even really want more of.
Money was invented to facilitate the exchange of goods and services between willing buyers and sellers but was also a means of storing the value of the labour required to source the raw materials and produce the products. As in the past, real money…
Missing from the graph are the numbers of unskilled immigrants reliant on taxpayer benefits Adern brought into the country, ultimately to sway political bias to the left.