Ep 41. Election Year Excuses — Why NZ Manufacturers Can't Afford to Wait

So Rob, We're back in it.

It's the three year cycle of hesitation in New Zealand.

We've got election year.

Now, whether or not you think we should have four years or three years, I personally would like four years and we could actually deliver a few things potentially.

But it's wait and see.

What do you see out there with it? Does this just piss you off every three years?

It is frustrating because I think, again, part of the beat up is media driven.

So I think people listen to the media and what's going on a lot more.

But lucky enough, and I know we wrote this at the start of the year for the New Zealand Manufacturing Magazine, but I haven't heard too much chatter, you know, in the welding bays around the manufacturing companies that I work with.

I haven't had too much chatter about the election, which is really, really good.

I think it's more of it could be more focused around just the economic recovery, full stop.

But we know that it usually flatlines around elections, so it might come in hand in hand.

I don't know.

It's an interesting one this year.

Hopefully, business leaders, business owners don't listen too much to the media this time.

Well, they say hope is not a strategy, right? What I'm sort of seeing is we're in this position now where, oh, inflation is is back up above the Reserve Bank's rate or area where they want to keep it.

So there's all this talk about interest rates now going up.

But I saw something the other day that, you know, we're going to have record closures of businesses this year, or maybe it was over the last 12 months.

So we've got businesses shutting down left, right and centre.

Apparently inflation's going up.

Apparently the recovery is coming, but is it?

Yeah, it's really interesting because, I mean, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but those businesses closing down, there is a lot of work done by IRD in New Zealand chasing up some of those long-term debts that are carrying on, and I know that that's been a big focus coming out of Wellington.

So that has tended to speed up some of the closures of those businesses that may or may not have been right on the edge and because of some of those tax benefits that have been sitting around that may not be there as fluently as it has in the past some of those more how I say skeleton businesses have been closed down and tidied up as well so I think one of those things numbers could mean a lot of things depending on your viewpoint I don't think the businesses and the record of businesses closing down is a bad thing.

And we know that from an economic point of view, a recession that we've just gone through or going through or coming out of, depending on the facts and figures and statements you follow, a good recession naturally takes care of those 50-50 businesses anyway.

I think we've talked about this in the past.