to depress demands, but how much can they do?

They used to have a dual mandate, of course, which may have made a difference or may not have, but they will argue that the bigger evil here, that unemployment is most certainly evil as well, but the bigger evil is sustained inflation where it starts to build on itself more.

and it starts to become embedded in people's expectations.

So they're thinking, well, if it's 4% now, then I need to get 5% for my wage increase, and then I'm going to have to raise my prices 5%, and you get the spiral.

And they would argue that that is far more damaging overall to everybody in terms of this cost of living crisis, so that they have to deal with it and get it back to 3%.

The other thing to remember is they will also argue the Reserve Bank that the official cash rate at the moment is actually foot on the pedal.

They're actually stimulating the economy.

now i hope i get this right there's monetary policy and fiscal policy and we've been talking about monetary policy so far this idea that we might hike the rates um and try and take some of the heat out of the system what about what are our options what are government options policy options for trying to deal with inflation

Do they drill down into particular areas of the budget, such as health?

Yeah, well health is an interesting one because, so let's go back a step and say The government, as they do with these things, they basically say you've got an operating allowance, so you bake in all the funding and the spending and all the things the governments have to do, and then each year they say you've got another $2.4 billion for each of the next three years.

So that is to accommodate the extra costs from inflation in things like health, which is the big bulk of that.

And already I think in the There were signals that there is going to be a large amount of money allocated towards health over a three-year period to accommodate those costs.

So that would already suck up a big chunk of that $2.4 billion.

not leaving a huge amount left for new things.

And that is what that money is for.

preview?

So what was her drinking like from where you were standing?

Well, the thing was we'd always been, um, people who would, you know, we had a good social network of people and we'd always been, you know, drinking.

Um, The difference was that it became more of a daily, nightly, regular, you know, so there was the weekend get-togethers and drinking was one thing.

But towards the end for Lotta, it had become she needed to drink, you know, a bottle of wine every night and possibly more, which I didn't know about.

That was one of the catalysts obviously talked about in the book.

So that's where it had got to that point.

And then she was in that internal wrestling world.

Um, once Lotta did decide to stop drinking, what was that experience like for you as her husband?

I mean, it's quite extraordinary to stare down something like this and survive.

The, the, the sense of self-confidence that he has [laughs] is truly incredible, and to have done that twice and come through with all the criticism from all his base, as Andrea said, it's, it's quite, um, extraordinary that he just doesn't seem to have that visible sign of self-doubt, doesn't seem to be there.

Uh, i- I was just as g- as g- gobsmacked as anyone else today.

Um, I, I thought, uh, the Pink decision, though, might have been a, might have been a mistake to have-

The second time round.

Oh look, I think it's clear people are disillusioned with the major parties, and they're looking around, um, on both the left and the right.

They're frustrated that politics isn't working.

Um, you know, they're frustrated with the length of time the economy's taken to recover.

Mm-hmm.

No, we do not, and the government adamantly insists that we are not in breach of any forced labor laws.

The issue seems to be that the US is saying, not necessarily in New Zealand forced labor, that we don't do enough to block goods coming into New Zealand from other countries that may have used forced labor, and that is where they say we aren't doing enough, therefore, that's the justification for this twelve point five percent tariff.

Uh, again, the government rejects that because we don't actually on forward a lot of goods from New Zealand, um, that have come from somewhere else to the US.

But there you go.

That's the reason.

Look, a lot of trade experts are just going to say, "Look, this was just whatever they could find to g- to get Trump's tariffs over the line." He's always said he wanted them.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

No, we do not, and the government adamantly insists that we are not in breach of any forced labor laws.

The issue seems to be that the US is saying, not necessarily in New Zealand forced labor, that we don't do enough to block goods coming into New Zealand from other countries that may have used forced labor, and that is where they say we aren't doing enough, therefore that's the justification for this 12.5% tariff.

Uh, again, the government rejects that because we don't actually on forward a lot of goods from New Zealand, um, that have come from somewhere else to the US.

But there you go.

That's the reason.

Look, a lot of trade experts are just gonna say, look, this was just whatever they could find to g- [chuckles] to get Trump's tariffs over the line.

Right.

What have people been saying about that?

Yeah, this is massive because the thinking here is that New Zealand, yes, we have to improve our environmental and climate work on the farm, if you like, as well as productivity.

Now, National has been at pains just about every opportunity to sort of say, oh, we're not going to tell farmers what to do.

We're not going to force them to do anything.

And they're trying to take this more collaborative approach with money announced yesterday, millions announced yesterday, where they work with farmers companies and industry groups to try and deal with some of those environmental problems.

They're not denying that there are problems and that there are issues and there are trade issues because other countries will potentially punish New Zealand if we don't do our part on climate and on our environmental practices.

So they're very much alive issues and that's what Trade Minister Todd McClay reiterates.

I mean, obviously, that's highly interesting given the free trade agreement.

Yeah, well, a similar story for SpaceX, actually,

because they're going to list as well, and that's Elon Musk's company, and he reckons it was valued at $1.75 trillion, and I think revenue or profit was like $5 billion or something.

It's based on the future.

It is people looking at these companies, how much they are being used.

They are now starting to earn... through obviously companies that use them and buy the licensing for them.

It's not just us at home on our PCs chatting to Claude, which is the anthropic version of ChatGPT.

They are now becoming far more widely used.

yeah.