Economists Eric Crampton of the New Zealand Initiative and Craig Renney of the Council of Trade Unions share their views on what Budget 2023 got right and what it got wrong.
Crampton explains why giving subsidies to the game development industry is a sort of mutually assured waste of taxpayer money, and how tobacco tax could mean the government books take an extra year to return to surplus.
Renney tells us how S&P Global Ratings said NZ government debt was not unlike a designer Hermès handbag and makes the case that Budget 2023 is not as inflationary as some have claimed.
But neither think that it matched up to its 'No-Frills' moniker. Listen below!
You can find all episodes of the Of Interest podcast here.
9 Comments
Lets get our priorities in order. Australia is also aggressively head hunting our nurses. Access to basic health services and the services provided by our hospitals are many times more important to all Kiwis than the success of the computer game sector. Lack of nurses is at the heart of our health system failures . It is far more important that the government stop going out of their way to treat nurses like dirt, pay them at a rate appropriate for an intensive 3 year degree qualification and all the hard work and dedication that they put into their work.
Here are the details from graduate to experienced registered nurse salaries;
https://www.careers.govt.nz/jobs-database/health-and-community/health/registered-nurse/
I'm curious as to what you think new graduates ought to start on (it's $67K currently according to the above)?
And whether the top of the band is seen as too low as well?
67k per year would leave you about a thousand a week before student loan and kiwisaver deductions,and would have sounded pretty generous a couple of years ago.there is an international market offering much more and now the easier path to citizenship in australia makes 67k paltry in comparison.its still only 30 bucks an hour and the airport and others have realised they had to pay at least that to get those with the right stuff.
The hospital seems to be attracting a much larger proportion of younger and inexperienced nurses. They are still loosing the experienced nurses hand over fist. The consequence of this is that the work ethic, professionalism, care (who has got the time, energy and emotional reserves to care), discipline, attention to detail and care have gone out the window. and so we venture deeper into the swamp. The worse things get the faster people leave and the faster things get worse. We desperately need to throw lots of money at experienced nurses to hang onto them.
There is another issue also. Because the hospitals are so strapped for cash it is practically impossible to get any training to advance you skills and career. They only want to pay for minimum skilled and qualified nurses,
Nurses are doing significantly better than the rest of the allied health workforce since their recent pay increase (and good on them, too).
The government's disjointed ad hoc approach to the health sector salary problems (that have been years in the making) have resulted in an allied health workforce where a large unionized group are now treated much better than everyone else.
A graduate nurse aide (18 months training) now gets paid more than a graduate physiotherapist, occupational therapist, or speech language therapist (4 year degree). Good luck keeping those therapists in NZ after they graduate.
If I hear any more whinging from the nurses about how they should have their final year of study subsidized, or their student loan forgiven, I'm going to get myself very unpopular for calling them out on it when that are not supporting the other health professions.
It's about balance. Maybe we need the success of the computer game sector to help fund areas of importance.
National have proposed partial write off on student loans which is great, but they need more money. We have no issue covering the $1b per year increase in super, equivalent of a $14k payrise for all nurses. Hell, non-means tested super is $17b yet my crude calculations 70k nurses x $70k average salary = $4.9b.
"Sorry nurses, back of the queue, we have some wealthy pensioners that want their superannuation payments."
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/131902155/national-promises-t…
~9% current account deficit a year means we're a nation heading into insolvency. NZ can no longer afford first-world amenities like universal healthcare and modern infrastructure.
We either raise our export income by building new high-paying industries or accept the harsh reality, i.e., we're a developed has-been economy.
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