Up again. There are now 417,000 working age people on a main benefit.
Christchurch, New Zealand's second largest city, has a population of 411,000. Think about that.
Up until the mid seventies the percentage of 18-64 year-olds on a benefit never exceeded two. One person in fifty. Right now it's 12.9 percent, or one in eight.
Every type of main benefit is up - Jobseeker, Sole Parent and Supported Living.
This is not a sign of success.
But it's even worse than you might imagine. As Dan Mitchell (no relation) writes: "to fully understand the level of dependency in a country, you have to know the share of people who actually produce value compared to those who live off of government."
Mitchell, D. calls it the ratio of moochers to producers. Here’s his chart for four major European nations. "In every case," he notes, "the number of people riding in the wagon is greater than the number of people (the orange bars) pulling the wagon."
The ratio in France is especially bad, which may explain why there’s a strong case that it will be the first domino when the next fiscal crisis occurs (as it almost certainly will).
Appropriate then that it was a French economist, Frédéric Bastiat, who observed way back in 1848 that "the State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else."
"It works for a while," notes Michael Arouet, "as long as markets buy more sovereign debt at reasonable interest rates. The party ends when they stop though. For France, they stopped this month, Belgium will be next."
So how do you think New Zealand ranks in this sad statistic? Answer: Better than these four, but only just. The ratio is virtually one-to-one.
This is the (welfare) state we're in. Every worker is involuntarily carrying one other person on their back. And this is long after the so-called "neoliberal experiment" we've all "endured" since the 1980s.
Here for comparison is the same chart for NZ in the mid-sixties, long before "neoliberalism" was even a buzzword on a Jane Kelsey book subtitle:
The trend is clear. Two-to-one (roughly) has become one-to-one. Or to think of it in absolute terms, while the producers have grown just over three times since then, the number of those for whom they're providing largesse has enjoyed a five-fold growth!
Is this sustainable?
And since "the number-one goal of politicians is to retain power, and the number of voters living off the government is now virtually the same as the number of voters paying for government, it’s very likely politicians will fight to preserve the status quo." And you know what that means. "Indeed," says Mitchell, D., "this depressing observation is why I put together my 17th Theorem of Government":
That said, there are still grounds for hope. People can wake up. As he said to a TV audience back in 2009, "parasites should understand they need a healthy host."
* * * *
Source for European figures Michael A. Arouet. Bibliography of sources for NZ figures:
Current NZ figures (2025–26)
Ministry of Social Development. Benefit Fact Sheets: National level data tables, June 2026 (via Figure.NZ, “People receiving main benefits in New Zealand”). https://figure.nz/chart/DQumSxjiCtroXlcC (working-age welfare, about 413,700, which I summed from the four benefit types).
Department of Statistics. New Zealand Official Year-Book, 1966, Section 6A (Social Security) and Section 3 (Population). https://www3.stats.govt.nz/New_Zealand_Official_Yearbooks/1966/NZOYB_1966.html(superannuation, age, widows’, unemployment, emergency and miners’ benefit counts at 31 March 1965; 1961 census population aged 15–64).
An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand (1966), “Employment” (Department of Labour survey), via Te Ara. https://teara.govt.nz/en/1966/27974/print (basis for the private-sector estimate).
Derived numbers (calculations from published figures)
Private sector, 2025–26: about 1.97 million, from the 2,450,500 total workforce minus the 477,400 public sector (source 3).
Private sector, mid-1960s estimate: about 599,500, from the survey’s roughly 741,500 employees (source 8) minus the 142,000 central government employees (source 6). This is a rough lower bound.
Welfare, mid-1960s: about 17,900, from summing the individual benefit counts in source 5. The widows’ benefit count (14,529) is my inference from the order of the yearbook text.
All percentages and shares: simple division, using the figures above.
"It's hardly surprising that foreign policy isn't a big issue in the New Zealand election, and to some extent it is a relief, but on the other hand it should matter -- mainly because the international environment has not been this febrile, dangerous or uncertain since the Cold War. ...
"NZ is vulnerable, not least because supply lines for everything from mechanical parts to fossil fuels to pharmaceutical, as well as export revenues, are dependent on safe shipping lanes and there being an international environment of peace and relatively open trade in goods and services. ...
"As a small country, NZ's preference traditionally has been for an international order, based on respecting the territorial integrity of nation states, and their sovereignty, to be maintained. That is increasingly difficult ...
"[T]he wider foreign policy concern is that there is just an absence of understanding that the international environment is not favourable to multilateralism anymore. ...
"The US has decided to abandon Europe's defence ... and to appease Russia ... and to treat personal relationships as a substitute for principle and rule of law. ... The international trade environment has seen the WTO be gutted by both the Trump Administration, and the likes of China, the EU and India, all of which are responding unilaterally.
"So where do the political leaders see NZ going in defence? Who knows?
"How would they respond if China attacked Taiwan? Who knows?
"What's their view on the USA as an ally? Not clear.
"Do they think NZ should contribute more to the collective defence of the South Pacific? Maybe.
"Do they think Israel's right to exist is worth defending loudly? Maybe.
"Do they fully support Ukraine remaining within its internationally recognised boundaries? Probably.
"Do they think that the main meaning of the 'independent foreign policy' is being antagonistic to other liberal democracies, including our allies? Who knows?
"I suspect Hipkins and Luxon don't know or care very much about foreign policy, except (in Labour's case) where it grabs votes from more radical rivals.
"But then given NZ is not directly exposed to the consequences of the breaking world order, not many care either."
"[T]HE BRITISH EMPIRE ... CONTAINED ITS FAIR share of errors, failures, and evils—both innocently inadvertent and culpable. That should not surprise or horrify ...
"But that is only half the story. For ... the British Empire was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish slave-trading and slavery in the early 1800s. It then spent the second half of its life leading the campaign to suppress slavery the world over ... all during a period when the British government’s resources were but a quarter of what they are now.
"In addition, the Empire suppressed the self-immolation of widows and female infanticide in India and female genital mutilation in Africa.
"It moderated the disruptive impact of the inevitable arrival of Western modernity upon very unmodern societies in North America and especially Australia.
"It created regional peace by imposing an overarching imperial authority on multiple, warring peoples—unifying, for example, much of the Indian subcontinent.
"It promoted a worldwide free market, protected by the Royal Navy, that gave native producers and entrepreneurs in India and West Africa new economic opportunities. It made foreign investment attractive by reducing risk through establishing political stability and the rule of law. Consequently, Australia’s gross domestic product per capita became the highest in the world by 1890, and by 1914 India was the world’s fourth largest textile-producer.
"The Empire built canals in India, bringing five times as much land under irrigation as the Mughals had in the 18th century. By 1900 it had figured out how to prevent food shortage escalating into famine there and went on to fight disease in tropical Africa.
"It provided a civil service and judiciary that was generally and extraordinarily incorrupt.
"It introduced liberal ideas and liberal institutions of a free press and representative government to places that had never known them. New Zealand was the first country in the world to grant the vote to men and women on equal terms, in 1893, and by 1935 electoral democracy had been established in Indian provinces.
"From May 1940, when France fell, to June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, The British Empire offered Nazi Germany the only military resistance—with the sole exception of Greece.
"Inspired by the ideal of the Commonwealth, it helped to plan and realise the League of Nations after the First World War and the United Nations after 1945.
"And it brought up three of the most prosperous and liberal states in the world—Canada, Australia and New Zealand—and gave birth to one more, the United States. ...
"SO, HOW CAN WE MAKE OVERALL ethical sense of the British Empire? Can we say that it achieved more good than evil or vice-versa? No, because the goods and evils that the Empire caused, intentionally or not, are of such different kinds that they cannot be measured against one another. They are incommensurable. How much chalk is worth so much cheese? How much racial prejudice is worth so much immunisation against disease? How many unjustly killed people are worth the blessings of imperially imposed peace? How much humanitarian anti-slavery would make up for the evils of slavery? Such varied good and evils as to conclude that one set ‘outweighs’ the other. Here, as often elsewhere, a utilitarian calculation cannot be conducted rationally. ...
"What we can say, however, is that, notwithstanding its very human mixture of virtue and vice, good and evil, the British Empire did display something of a “progression in virtue”.[vii] First came the movement to abolish slavery in the late 1700s. Then came the extension of humanitarian concern to indigenous peoples in the 1830s. With the granting of ‘dominion’ status to Canada in 1867, the idea of the Empire evolving into a voluntary association of independent states began to take root, acquiring the title of the ‘British Commonwealth of Nations’ in 1917. From 1919 India was put on track to become a ‘dominion’ and by the mid-1930s it had acquired the beginnings of representative democracy. In 1939, the British Empire showed its mature, liberal character by committing itself to oppose the massively murderous, racist, totalitarian regime in Nazi Berlin. And after 1945, Britain did not use violence to resist the demand for independence in India and Africa. ...
"THE BRITISH EMPIRE'S HISTORICAL LEGACY CONTAINS virtuous people, noble deeds, and major humanitarian achievements. To admire them is not to indulge in ‘imperial nostalgia’. It is to do them justice."
"There he stands in bronze in the airy space through which a chill breeze blows. And on the walls are his words. Around the bottom of the rotunda, it reads: 'I have sworn on the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.' Jefferson’s defence of his stance on freedom of thought and conscience, specifically pushing back against clergy and political leaders who were attempting to control or dictate personal beliefs. The phrase is a passionate pledge to defend the human mind and personal liberties from authoritarianism, censorship and control, no matter the source.
"On one wall are some of the phrases Jefferson crafted in July 1776 and which appeared in the Declaration of Independence – 'We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.'
"Stirring words that have been a beacon for me ever since.
"This article is a reflection on words written 250 years ago and that have resonated with me for more than 60 years.
"Jefferson’s sentence is not merely a historical artefact. It is a revolutionary act of prioritising the individual – a declaration that the human person stands before the state, above the state, and beyond the reach of any majority that would diminish him. It is the clearest, most potent expression of the individualist ideal ever written in English.
"New Zealand has never written such a sentence. It has been invited to, repeatedly. It has declined, repeatedly. And that refusal is not benign. It signals a constitutional culture that has quietly hollowed out the individual and replaced him with a managed, supervised, state‑dependent citizenry."
'Sacrifice,' by sculptor Rayner Hoff, inside the Australian War Memorial in Sydney's Hyde Park
"It's gratifying, in a way, that we start Anzac Day every year with a commemoration of a shambolic dawn landing that kicked off a pointless and wholly tragic military campaign that snuffed out some of the best young men of two young nations. It's not a victory march, but a sobering commemoration of the destruction of war. "This is healthy. This much is good. "'Lest we Forget!' we say" "It's said every year. And yet year after year, the numbers grow fewer who remember what it was we're not forgetting....
"THE MYTHOLOGY OF ANZAC is that the battle at the Dardanelles gave birth to two nations. If that’s true, it is an odd birth, fathered out of failure by way of disaster.
"In the end, the attempted occupation [of the Gallipoli peninsula] was decided upon partly because in any bureaucracy once plans are begun they are very hard to stop ..."
[T]he reason they embarked [was] not to beat the Hun, but to save the Czar [and to] gift Constantinople to Russia.... as an altruistic gift to an 'ally' who was the most autocratic in Europe, who had shown no sign of earning British trust ... the price for the sacrifice to be paid for in the blood of those Australian, New Zealand and British young men and their families....
"Such is the code of sacrifice under which the decision was made to go.... [in pursuit, said Churchill, of] 'a victory such as the war had not yet seen.' "It never would. It never could. "Instead, it all turned to omnishambles. The only thing in the end about which anyone had anything about which to boast was a successful and well-executed withdrawal. "It was a bloody mess that achieved nothing, that could achieve nothing, purchased at the price of a wholesale sacrifice of young lives that could have meant something. It was a total unmitigated disaster, but at least, now, dear reader, some reason for the whole, sordid shambles might be clearer. "The reason however for commemorating the shambles as the botched 'birth' (in some way) of our nation is very much less so."
"New Zealand has just been ranked one of the happiest countries in the world. This is obviously good news. But there is something badly wrong beneath that glossy headline, especially in terms of loneliness and youth.
"The 2026 World Happiness Report, released last month, ranked New Zealand 11th out of 147 countries – up one spot from last year, and the highest-ranked English-speaking nation. On the surface, that sounds pretty good. Better than Australia, better than the United States. Finland, inevitably, came first.
"But buried inside the report was the figure that actually matters. For changes in happiness among 15-to-24-year-olds, New Zealand ranked 126th out of 136 countries. Young people’s happiness over the last decade has been plunging. We sit alongside the United States, Australia, and Canada in what researchers have labelled the 'NANZ' group: affluent nations where youth happiness is in freefall while older generations report world-leading life satisfaction. In contrast, according to the report, 85 of 136 countries saw youth happiness increase."
NB: How are these things measured? In short, the rankings come entirely from how ordinary people in each country rate their own lives on a 0–10 scale -- it's self-reported wellbeing, not a composite of economic or social statistics.
"New Zealand does not possess the people, the capital, or the institutional settings to maintain our first world status. We are moving from the bottom of the OECD to the top of the developing world.
"[It's a] problem [when] ... the price of construction is the highest in the OECD, more than double the average, and ... the cost of capital formation '…which covers machinery, equipment and construction -- is 70% above average in New Zealand and also the highest in the OECD.'
"Meanwhile, global rating agency Fitch confirmed [this] gloomy assessment by downgrading the outlook for New Zealand from dismal to hopeless. I am paraphrasing. They noted that our promised return to fiscal surplus is perpetually delayed due to weak economic growth and expenditure proving more persistent than anticipated. ...
"[T]his [fuel] crisis [however] represents a greater opportunity [for real leadership]. It is chance for the Prime Minister to explain that we cannot borrow our way out of every economic shock. That the path back to fiscal solvency and economic vitality lies not in leveraging the sliver of headroom on the Crown’s balance sheet to avoid addressing our structural deficiencies but in aggressively dealing with those deficiencies.
"I do not mean to diminish the real progress his administration has been achieved but the underlying structural issues of over-regulation and lax fiscal discipline mean all we are doing is slowing the rate of decline.
"Leadership is about telling the electorate what they do not want to hear but need to understand; and that extends well beyond the prospect of a temporary fuel shortage."
"My fellow New Zealanders, whether citizens, residents or those just passing through en route to Australian pastures, it gives me little pleasure to deliver this State of the Nation address on behalf of the Honesty Party because the State of the Nation is, to use a variety of technical terms, knackered, stuffed, buggered.
"While I am sure many of you use far more less technical terms, we can all agree, in the spirit of total honesty that this great party proudly stands for and embraces, that the country is not what it was nor indeed what it claims to be – and hasn’t been for decades.
"The Honesty Party recognises that our problems and issues as a country predate Rogernomics and Ruthenasia. Muldoonism was a failed experiment in populist authoritarianism and economics that failed to adjust to a rapidly changing world. What was once the (if briefly) wealthiest country in the world had already begun its decline and fall. The long snooze of the Holyoake years had set the tone of a ‘steady as she goes’ mentality, one that too often has meant the ship of state has steadily gone aground on the rocks of despair and desperation.
"The basis of our economy is one that no other first world nation has decided upon. A primary-production exporting economy to which we have added tourism, an overinflated housing market and high levels of immigration sets us apart, for a reason. New Zealand used to be the social laboratory of the word; today in all honesty we could say New Zealand is the economic laboratory in how to over promise and under deliver."
TERMINOLOGY IS CHANGING. WHAT USED to be called "swamps" are now wetlands. Heavy rain is now an "atmospheric river." A violent storm is now a "weather bomb" And extreme and large-scale warming events in the ocean have been dubbed "marine heatwaves."
It's said that recent flooding in New Zealand—a "glimpse into the future of climate change"—is due to our present La Niña summer and an increase in these "marine heatwaves." First arriving in the summer of 2017/18, they are now said to be "commonplace."
One of these "new" marine heatwaves helped cause the warm summer of 2018/19. Rainfall that summer "was below normal (50-79% of the summer normal) to well below normal (<50 % of the summer normal) in Northland, Taranaki, Nelson, Tasman and the West Coast as well as parts of Marlborough, Manawatu-Whanganui, Otago and Southland. Above normal rainfall (>120% of the normal) was observed around Hawke’s Bay and parts of Gisborne. Rainfall was near normal elsewhere (80-120% of the summer normal rainfall)."
The new arrival combined with La Niña conditions to get the blame for the unseasonably hot 2017/18 summer. Rainfall that summer was "highly variable from month to month and heavily impacted by two ex-tropical cyclones during February. Summer rainfall in the South Island was above normal (120-149%) or well above normal (>149%) over Canterbury, Marlborough, Nelson, and Tasman, and near normal (80-119%) to below normal (50-79%) around Otago, Southland, and the West Coast. North Island summer rainfall was above or well-above normal around Wellington and much of the upper North Island, and near normal or below normal over remaining North Island locations including Taranaki, Manawatu-Wanganui, Hawke’s Bay, and Gisborne."
2022/23's summer was "a summer of floods and droughts, and very warm," with "a protracted marine heatwave that peaked during January." Cyclone Gabrielle of course arrived a month later when the Antarctic Oscillation "dipped negative."
Summer of 2023/24 was warm, with another marine heatwave and, for most regions, drier. The narrative of causation is already breaking down.
As it did nearly a century ago in 1934/35 when New Zealand experienced its hottest summer because of a massive warming events in the ocean. Or 1938. But this time the floods came in winter.
SURROUNDED BY OCEAN AND WITH warm air and occasional cyclones brought down from the tropics, flooding is this country's most frequent form of natural disaster—and always has been.
Māori legend includes a story of a great flood. Tāwhaki, god of thunder and lightning, was almost murdered by his brothers-in-law. When he had recovered, Tāwhaki took his warriors and their families and built a fortified village on top of a mountain. Then he called to his ancestors – the gods – for revenge, and they let the floods of heaven descend. The earth was overwhelmed by the waters and the entire population perished. This was known as Te hurihanga i Mataaho (the overwhelming of Mataaho – one of the places that were destroyed). ...
Māori history tells of a pre-European flood in the Tūtaekurī area of Hawke’s Bay in which a party of 50 men, women and children were drowned when two streams rose.
The early European settlers failed to realise the intensity of rainfall in New Zealand and how rapidly rivers could rise. The New Zealand Company's very first settlers were dumped on the Hutt Riverside in Petone to begin building Britannia, their new town. It was only a matter of weeks before they discovered what a stupid idea this was, relocating after a few months of regular flooding to Thorndon.
The South Island’s broad gravel-bed rivers were particularly deceptive: they were usually shallow enough to wade across, but when in flood their currents were powerful. By 1870, just three decades after European settlers began arriving in large numbers, rivers had been responsible for 1,115 recorded drownings. Drowning became known as ‘the New Zealand death’.
The greatest flood ever observed on the Clutha River Mata-Au, New Zealand’s largest river in catchment area and volume of flow, occurred in 1878. It was the result of a succession of weather systems bringing in warm wind and rain, which melted the winter snow cover. At the height of this flood, more than 5,700 cubic metres of water poured down the lower reaches of the river every second. ... A 1938 account described the Clutha in flood: [i]ts angry surface [was] strewed with dead horses and cattle, houses, bridges, furniture, timber and farmstacks. Some days the spring sun shone with a ghastly pleasantry on the devastated towns, while 100 miles away more heavy rain on the mountains was preparing still greater strength for the flood. ...
Twenty-one people were killed in the Kōpuawhara flood of 1938 – the largest number of fatalities from a 20th-century New Zealand flood. It is a sobering reminder of the dangers of building on low-lying land close to rivers.
A reminder we're still receiving.
And those tropical cyclones just keep arriving, as they did long before CO2 levels were rising. The fifty-four people who died in the 1968 Wahine disaster, for example, are one tragic reminder of that. That was Sub-Tropical Cyclone Giselle. And we've been through several alphabet's worth of cyclones since then, everything from Bola to Hola, and worse, to come around again to Gabrielle's letter 'G.'
And there have been many worse cyclones in the South Pacific over the centuries before human industry began. But they either didn't hit these islands, thank goodness, or there was no-one here to record them.
WHILE THE NARRATIVE WAS breaking down on the ground in 2023, it was nonetheless ramping up in the world of climate modelling. A worldwide study (above) published in 2025 claimed '2023 Marine Heatwaves [Were] Unprecedented and Potentially Signal a Climate Tipping Point.' It's that study generally referenced by warmists here. Its "breathless tone is familiar," says Anthony Watts ("new records"! "unprecedented in intensity, persistence, and scale"! "may portend an emerging climate tipping point"!) but its "underlying logic is seriously flawed."
But as Watts argues, "context matters. Particularly in climate, which has cycles that span millennia, not just decades."
The foundational flaw in this study is its timescale. The research relies on satellite data beginning in 1982. That gives us about 40 years of observational history, which is virtually nothing in terms of Earth’s climate system. Prior to satellite coverage, comprehensive, high-resolution global measurements of sea surface temperatures simply didn’t exist. Claims of “unprecedented” events must be framed within that very limited context. As I’ve said before, declaring a “record” based on such a short window is like calling a coin flip streak a “trend” after four tosses.
Ocean temperatures fluctuate naturally over decadal, centennial, and even millennial scales. Our current observational capacity doesn’t cover even half of one oceanic oscillation cycle, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which paleoclimatology suggests runs as long as 50-70 years. To suggest a climate “tipping point” based on this short dataset is not just premature—it’s scientifically irresponsible.
Yet here we are. The marine heatwave cycle in the Southwest Pacific Ocean (our area) has an estimated return period of 141 years. Yet the longest-running evidence for this, says the study, is the coastal station in Leigh, whose records go back just 57 years.
Not just short on temporal context, but also on geographic. The climatic change is said to be global, due to increased global CO2, yet "the authors cite “region-specific drivers” for each major marine heatwave."
In the North Atlantic, enhanced shortwave radiation and a shallower mixed layer were culprits. [Down here] in the Southwest Pacific, the heat was attributed to reduced cloud cover and increased advection. The Tropical Eastern Pacific was influenced by oceanic advection.
Notice anything? These aren’t unified, global changes due to increased CO2. They are local, meteorological, and oceanographic phenomena—exactly the kinds of natural variability we should expect in a dynamic system. The fact that these local causes are acknowledged undercuts the paper’s own argument for a singular, global cause rooted in greenhouse gas emissions.
Bad science and an unjustified extrapolation is the gist of this study and press release. Perhaps the most egregious leap comes in the suggestion that the 2023 marine heatwaves might represent a “tipping point” in the Earth’s climate system. The term “tipping point” implies a sudden, irreversible shift—a planetary point of no return. But what evidence is there for this? The authors provide none beyond the temperature anomalies themselves and vague references to mixed-layer dynamics.
No historical precedent is given. No paleoclimatic comparisons are offered. No quantitative thresholds are defined. It’s all speculation dressed up in technical language.
The highest frequency of global-scale extreme rainfall events occurred from 1960-1980 − when there were concerns about cooling.
Since then, the frequency and intensity of rainfall events have “decreased remarkably” (Koutsoyiannis, 2020).
ALSO DECREASING—AND DECREASING REMARKABLY—is the world's s number of climate-related deaths.
One reason it's worth remarking is that severe weather events globally are themselves generally either decreasing or showing no particular trend. And that's not just me and climate scientists like Roger Pielke Jr saying that. It's the IPCC, who find no trends in flooding globally; no long-term trends in meteorological or hydrological drought; no upward trend either in so-called atmospheric rivers, and no upward trend in landfalling hurricanes or tornadoes either in the US or globally.
None.
And the US Govt, whose official metric records a general decrease in heatwaves since the 1930s -- or the international insurance industry, who record a decline in both US and European disaster-related losses. And the World Bank agrees.
Meanwhile, even as alarmists talk about sea level rise inundating coastlines in the near future, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) records that ongoing sea level rise since 1880 amounts to only 240mm, i.e., just 17mm per decade -- measurable, but steady, and not accelerating -- and recent research shows many coastlines worldwide to be prograding rather than retrograding (i.e., shifting seaward) and at a globally-averaged rate of 260mm per year, reducing even this slow but steady threat. And the Department of Atmospheric Science at CSU records that cyclone frequency in the South Pacific (the very reason we're here talking about this stuff) has, since 1980, been declining. (Which is welcoming considering so many more people are living and building in these otherwise threatening places, in part because governments have foolishly absorbed so much of the financial risk.)
But the other main reason for climate-related deaths to fall so remarkably is the very thing warmists decry so loudly and so monotonously, i.e.,human industry, which is the very thing that keeps folk safer from the dangerous weather events that do occur.
It was the Netherlands' rising wealth, for example, that allowed them to build the dikes and dams that protected their sub-sea level provinces from flooding. And mortality from extreme heat in the US for example, as heat waves have recently kicked up and more and more people have moved to live in desert regions, has fallen pretty much all over the country over the past 50 years. In this case, it's because of things like air conditioning and better medicine that more and more people can afford.
And in the general case, as Bjorn Lomborg explains is succinctly, it's "because richer and more resilient societies are much better able to protect their citizens."
The climate catastrophists don’t want you to know this [points out energy advocate Alex Epstein] because it reveals how fundamentally flawed their viewpoint is. They treat the global climate system as a stable and safe place that we make volatile and dangerous. In fact, the global climate system is naturally volatile and dangerous—we make it liveablethrough development and technology—development and technology powered by the only form of cheap, reliable, scalable reliable energy that can make climate liveable for 7 billion people. As the climate-related death data show, there are some major benefits—namely, the power of fossil-fuelled machines to build a durable civilisation highly resilient to extreme heat, extreme cold, floods, storms, and so on.
It's not just that GDP is correlated with fewer climate-related deaths and disasters, although it is; it's that the whole relationship between economic progress and human flourishing itself is actually causal. The richer and wealthier a society is, the better able it is to train the engineers and to raise the capital and to devise and build the infrastructure that allows human beings in all the many places on this fragile planet to master all the many things that nature is ready to throw at us.
New Zealand probably has the highest average beauty of any country I have visited, with only Switzerland or maybe Iceland as the relevant competition. ...
I had not yet realised that all stores, including grocery stores, in the smaller towns, would be closing early. And that many people did not have the habit of eating out in restaurants. ...
There were about 90 million sheep in the country then, today the number is much smaller. Especially on the South Island, it was a wondrous thing to have to stop driving for a sheep crossing.
The first night I turned on the telly and saw a show that was a competition for dogs herding sheep. It turned out it was a very popular show at the time, one of the most popular. Literally at first I thought it was some kind of Monty Python skit.
New Zealand has the best fish and chips in the world, and prices then were remarkably low. ...
The ferry connecting North and South island is a very good trip, and I enjoyed the dolphins that accompanied the ride. ...
Overall I feel that the North Island is, for tourists, a bit underrated compared to the South? ...
Invercargill ... was not worth the trip. I expected something strange and exotic, end-of-the-earth feeling, but mainly it was a dump ...
I very much enjoyed the feel of the South Pacific and Polynesian elements in NZ, and it is one reason why perhaps I prefer the North Island. Where else can you see that in developed country form?
Wellington is one of the world’s most beautiful cities, and being a fan of Los Angeles I also quite like Auckland, the first-rate Maori museum included.
The main problem with driving in New Zealand is having you stop every few miles to admire the views. ...
Speaking of driving, the drive to Milford Sound has to be one of the top 10 most beautiful drives in the world. The drive up the glacial valley to Aoraki (Mount Cook) is up there too. ...
It reminded me of old California. Nice climate, access to sea, good food, vineyards, hills, lots of room. Especially on South Island. Auckland is crowded. ...
They can have lunatic politics also. As an island, they tried to cut the world off to keep COVID away. That was not feasible. So they got COVID and economic collapse. ...
In the US, there is a lot of Second World War history, not much First World War history. The opposite is true in NZ. The bloodbath in Turkey is still vivid to them. You don't see Churchill statues in NZ. ...
New Zealanders were the least status-conscious people I've ever seen anywhere. The particular combination of British manners with a total lack of the British class system is underratedly charming. It's not just the interactions with people, btw, that bespeak the lack of status consciousness: you can see it in the modesty of the built environment as well. People's 'stuff' is there to function, not to show off, and until you go there it's hard to understand what the difference is because most of us are fishes in the water of status-consciousness, so we just take the show-offiness of stuff around us for granted. ...
Restaurant choices were a bit basic outside of the major cities but meat and produce at almost any grocery store are excellent, far better than home. ...
"Welcome and here's your milk." I found the perfunctory hotel milk to be odd, too. I asked my kiwi friends about it. "It is assumed if you are a person in a place you will obviously require some milk." ...
Kiwis are literate, I am happy to say. I wish we were.
Locals will know more how sincere that is, but Aotearoa/ NZ seemed like a country that genuinely wants to acknowledge the past and the people who lived there before the West showed up.
Unlike Australia, they didn't live there very long before the West showed up. Human habitation of New Zealand, whether by Maori or by Europeans, is younger than Oxford University. ...
If you're looking for that 90s low-key vibe, it's moved to Tasmania. ...
With all the talk this week of how the cheap credit of a a dirt-cheap OCR announcement filtering through to the economy, as if some wand had been waved we should all celebrate, I couldn't help thinking of NZ economist JB Condliffe's sage observation on the New Zealander's enthusiasm for cheap money:
"Still belief persisted in the magic of credit to achieve all economic objectives. ... This pathetic and muddled belief in the power of credit to cure all economic ills is perennial in New Zealand ... "
He wrote that in 1959 in his book The Welfare State in New Zealand.
"After nearly ninety years of social security it would be reasonable to conclude that the state cannot solve 'poverty.' Indeed, the more the state does, the more the state is expected to do."
"Prime Minister Christopher Luxon specifically reference[s] Ireland and Singapore as 'two economies we often look to for inspiration on investment and technology.'
"This kind of comparison has been a familiar refrain in New Zealand politics. ...
"But ... such comparisons are simplistic and misleading.
"Unlike Ireland, New Zealand does not sit at the junction of the European Union and the United States. And it is not a logistics-finance hub strategically perched on global shipping routes like Singapore.
"Rather, New Zealand is a distant, mid-sized economy whose digital sector has largely grown by meeting domestic demand rather than exporting at scale. ...
"The Ireland and Singapore analogies obscure more than they reveal. New Zealand is not an anchor point in global trade and data flows ... Neither represents a path that can ... be easily transplanted elsewhere."
"People who live in New Zealand by choice as distinct from an accident of birth, and who are committed to this land and its people and steeped in their knowledge of both, are no less 'indigenous' than Māori."
* Yep, construction is an outlier. I'm not sure how productivity is measured here, but I imagine that's a reflection of how many more townhouses and apartments have been built in recent years, as opposed to stand-alone dwellings.
"Our dairy farmers are constantly heckled for all manner of environmental ills despite a record unsurpassed anywhere in the world. We focus on minutiae of little consequence instead of extolling the amazing, rich environmental and social value that exists in rural New Zealand. Our total carbon footprint, despite food-miles, is away ahead of the nearest rival.
"Our farmers have set aside and now manage diligently 190,000 hectares of covenanted land under the Queen Elizabeth ll National Trust. That’s an area far bigger than most of our national parks. Riparian planting, steep slope planting, protection of waterways, enhanced wetlands, boosts to diversity increase each year at a surprising rate. Farmers are spending huge numbers of hours working in catchment groups, river care groups, land care groups.
"We need to gather this knowledge, these commitments, this mass of stewardship, this admiration of the family farm, this enhancement of the fabric of our rural communities, and “sell” it to the world’s consumers who have a growing love affair with such noble developments. It is not just empty PR from the Comms team – it's potentially high value marketing that captures hearts and minds as well as wallets.
"We are missing the exciting opportunity to tell the world what a uniquely beautiful and environmentally sound place our food and fibre comes from. We have an amazing story to tell."
"In no other Western democracy does the ordinary citizen so enthusiastically offer themselves as a sacrificial vessel for the errors of their rulers. In no other civil society are people so eager to drape themselves in guilt not their own, speak in a borrowed tongue they do not understand, and recite protocols they do not believe—just to win the favour of cultural gatekeepers they neither elected nor dared challenge. In modern New Zealand, this is not called confusion. It is called reconciliation. And it is strangling the 'republic of reason.' ...
"The average New Zealander believes they are good, fair-minded, and kind. And yet, they are told constantly that they live on stolen land, speak a colonial language, and benefit daily from the suppression of an indigenous people. This contradiction is unbearable. It creates a psychic tension that must be resolved—not with critical thinking, but with compensatory behaviour.
"So, they compensate. They sprinkle their speech with Māori words, not out of fluency but as offerings. They attend pōwhiri and pretend to understand its form. They sit on plastic chairs in air-conditioned government buildings and bow their heads solemnly as karakia are recited before reports on bus routes and waste disposal. The absurdity of the context is ignored, because the ritual is not about meaning—it is about atonement. Every mispronounced 'kia or'” is an apology. Every silent moment of reverence at a public hui is a plea: Please don’t judge me for history. I am one of the good ones. ...
"It is tempting to see this as mere virtue signalling. But that phrase, while accurate, is too casual. This is something more pervasive: a psychological restructuring of identity around perpetual apology. ... In New Zealand, citizens protect the ideological system that burdens them with cultural obligations not their own, because the alternative—standing up and saying 'this is not my guilt to carry'—would isolate them from polite society. They would be called racist. Or coloniser. Or worse: ignorant.
"And so, they consent. They normalise. They absorb the new rites with grim enthusiasm. ...
"The cost is not only borne by those who dissent. It is borne by the entire citizenry, who are denied the right to speak as equals—not because someone silences them, but because they silence themselves. ...
"This [cost] is not metaphorical. It is embedded in local government planning, where iwi consultation must be undertaken not by the Crown, but by the ratepayer. It is found in education, where Māori epistemology is presented not as one knowledge system among many, but as sacred truth. It is found in law and medicine, where cultural considerations override evidence, and where failure to understand tribal expectations becomes a professional liability. These are not expressions of biculturalism. They are acts of bureaucratic displacement—where the Crown shrugs off its historic responsibilities and says to the public: you carry this now. ...
"But the cruelty of this pact is that it can never be fulfilled. The shame does not diminish. The obligations do not reduce. The expectations only grow. Because the more one proves loyalty, the more one must keep proving it. The performative must become perpetual....
"What is needed now is not defiance, but clarity. Citizens must recover the ability to distinguish between respect and self-erasure. Between cultural inclusion and ideological submission. Between historical accountability and personal guilt. The Treaty may impose duties upon the Crown—but it does not impose them upon every individual who happens to be born here. One can honour history without inheriting its sins. One can affirm Māori dignity without abandoning civic equality. ...
"[T]he modern trend of cultural self-flagellation is not justice—it is neurosis. It is the psychological aftershock of a nation that has lost confidence in itself."
UNFORTUNATELY CHRIS TROTTER, WHO OFTEN writes so well, can be found peddling another dangerous historic myth. This one, this time, about the Great Depression. (about which there are many, many myths, most of which would be destructive if believed.)
If were to be believed — if his recommendations were to be followed, on the back of his myth-making — it may well cause another.
Writing to advocate that the Luxon government be more spendthrift, Trotter says
When the 1929 Wall Street Crash sent the economy of the United States into a tailspin, the experts of the day called upon the administration of Herbert Hoover to apply the accepted remedies. Accordingly, Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon, responded with his now infamous instruction to:
“Liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system.”
In following this advice, however, the Hoover Administration inflicted extreme hardship on millions of Americans, and in so-doing not only liquidated itself, but also came alarmingly close to liquidating the whole capitalist system. It took an American aristocrat, Franklin Roosevelt, with more intelligence and a bigger heart than Hoover and his conventional wisdom, to rescue American capitalism from itself.
Mutatis mutandis, the response of successive New Zealand governments to the Great Depression mirrored the conventional economic thinking of Mellon and his advisers. Saddled with obligations it could no longer afford, the Reform and United Parties cut, cut, cut, and cut again – unleashing massive deprivation and misery across the country. This time it was Labour that came to capitalism’s rescue.
He could not be more wrong.
And wrong in virtually every sentence.
LET'S START WITH MELLON'S alleged "instruction" to "liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate" —liquidate all monetary assets in summary, at whatever price may be gotten for them, in order to "purge the rottenness out of the system."
Fact is, it would have, if that programme were followed — as it had been following the much greater crash in 1921. (Sometimes called "the forgotten depression," or "the crash that cured itself.") But the “quote” was not Mellon's but Hoover’s, his president, and it was him contrasting the “liquidationist” programme of the type successfully followed in 1920 with the “interventionist programme” he intended to follow instead.
It didn't work.
The more Hoover tried to carry out his interventionist programme from 1929 to 1932— inflating wages, trying to raise falling prices, spending like a drunken merchant-man, adding enormous debt to a government all but crippled by the inability to pay it down — the more things spiralled down into the mire.
We might have done nothing [said Hoover]. That would have been utter ruin. Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put it into action.... No government in Washington has hitherto considered that it held so broad a responsibility for leadership in such times.... For the first time in the history of depression, dividends, profits, and the cost of living, have been reduced before wages have suffered.... They were maintained until the cost of living had decreased and the profits had practically vanished. They are now the highest real wages in the world. Creating new jobs and giving to the whole system a new breath of life; nothing has ever been devised in our history which has done more for ... "the common run of men and women." Some of the reactionary economists urged that we should allow the liquidation to take its course until we had found bottom.... We determined that we would not follow the advice of the bitter-end liquidationists and see the whole body of debtors of the United States brought to bankruptcy and the savings of our people brought to destruction.
Featured in Hoover's plan were increased taxes, lowered interest rates, huge deficits, public dams, public works, restrictions on immigration and trade, and government regulation of banking, finance, industry and labour markets.
Hoover's heavily interventionist programme — doing everything to raise prices when demand had already collapsed — failed miserably. Unlike the solution found in 1921 (to lower prices to meet lower demand), which saw things turn around within eighteen months, things were still dire four years after the 1929 crash when Trotter's hero Franklin Roosevelt took over.
And then, with even less intelligence and much less honesty, Roosevelt doubled down.
In the 1932 election campaign, Franklin Roosevelt accused Hoover (accurately) of “reckless and extravagant” spending, of thinking “that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible,” and of presiding over “the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history.”
And that was all true.All of it—all the spending, all the alleged “stimulus”—all an attempt to keep up wages and prices and keep the engine ticking over in the manner to which Trotter et al suggest we do today with far less reason, and much less room to manoeuvre. .
And it had failed. It had failed spectacularly.
it failed just as monumentally when Roosevelt tried it.
By 1933, when Roosevelt took over in the States, nearly 13 million Americans were unemployed. Yet when the Second World War began, after eight years of further intervention by Mr Roosevelt (whose advisers conceded their New Deal was based on the “Hoover New Deal”), nearly 12 million were still unemployed (unemployment had never dropped below 20% for the whole of the decade) and Roosevelt was to embrace a world war as a way to get the unemployed out of his hair.
We do NOT want any sort of repetition of that!
BUT WHAT ABOUT TROTTER'S argument that the Reform and United Parties here had followed the liquidationist programme and failed, and had to be rescued in 1932 by Michael Savage's Labour.
Well, Trotter has finally hit on the one fact in his screed in which he's right. Gordon Coates's and George Forbes's Reform and United Parties did inadvertently follow a semi-liquidationist programme. Despite their own interventions, and despite the US's disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariffs, they did allow prices to fall, which (along with Australia and the UK adopting similar programmes) did eventually allow green shoots to appear here by 1932. So that by 1935 when Savage's Labour was elected ... well, things were already on the upswing.
It wasn't at all that "Labour that came to capitalism’s rescue," as Trotter alleges.
It was, instead, that capitalism, even in the muted form allowed to it, allowed Labour to take the credit for a job already done, and to spend up heavily — helping poorly-informed writers like Trotter to confuse effect for cause.
Fat is: the First Labour Government simply reaped the benefits of the recovery that was already under way. As economic historian John Gould outlines:
From 1934 overseas prices were recovering and the country [New Zealand] could not help but be better off. The [Labour] Government benefited, too, from a balanced budget, a buoyant public revenue, and a healthy reserve in London, inherited from its predecessor. It made good use of these propitious circumstances. Its initial step was simply a Christmas bonus for the unemployed – a symbolic if small pledge of humanitarian readiness to cut corners.
It went on, in the busy session of 1936, to restore wage and pension cuts, to bring in a basic wage, a 40-hour week, and a major programme of public works; it built up the unions by bringing back compulsory arbitration and adding to it compulsory membership of unions; it embarked upon a great housing construction programme; it brought in a price scheme for dairy products which guaranteed the farmer a reasonable income; it tried, without notable success, to encourage secondary industry so that there would be more jobs for wage earners.
The Government's opponents never tired of inquiring, “Where will the money come from?”; the Government's answers were never explicit, but in fact a good deal of the money came from State credit created by the Reserve Bank. This institution, by an Act of 1936, had become a fully governmental body; where these expensive programmes could not be financed out of current revenue or overseas funds, the Government simply borrowed from its own bank. Neither the housing programme nor the guaranteed price could have been financed without such credit. Labour had collected most of the Social Crediter's votes in 1935, and this, which was far from their desires, was their reward, a policy a good deal more Keynesian than Douglasite, however.
The cornerstone was set in the arch in 1938. Already the government had shown its concern with public health and welfare; in 1938 the two were integrated into a “social security” system by which the State guaranteed medical advice, medicines, hospital services to all whatever their means, and a wide range of pensions to all likely to suffer hardship. In part the scheme was financed by special taxation, in part from general revenue. It was, among other things, a ready vote winner in 1938; its attractiveness, together with the Government's energetic record and the National opposition's general nervelessness, proved irresistible.
But the spending, while just as irresistible, proved too much. The Labour boom ended in another bust, confusing later writers who were less than careful at their economics. Because the Labour victory in 1938 came just in time ...
Hard on the heels of the victory came tribulation. Thanks in part to public works construction ... draining overseas reserves, in part to a flight of private capital from the country, scared by a government that still seemed “socialistic”, in part to a sag in prices for exports jeopardising the guaranteed price system, and in part to the unsympathetic attitude shown by London financiers to some £16 million of debt shortly falling due, things looked ominous in 1939. The debt was converted on rather stringent terms; exchange and import controls were applied.
But the real saviour [for Labour] was the war that broke out in September. Once again farm exports were at a priority and the mobilisation of resources for the war effort permitted the introduction of more thorough controls than would have been tolerable in peacetime.[1]
From 1929 to 1935 the United/Reform programme was semi-liquidationist, and it semi-succeeded.
It succeeded to such an extent that from 1935 to 1938, Labour could take the credit, apportion blame elsewhere, and deliver profligacy as from a horn of plenty.
And then, as Margaret Thatcher observed so sagely many years later, like all socialists they began to run out of money.
What saved Labour however was price controls, rationing, and war.
I do trust that Mr Trotter does not want any of that either.
[1]John Gould, ‘1935-49: The Labour Regime,’ in An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, ed. A.H McLintock, 1966
"The struggle of well-fed pressure groups for larger shares in the national booty is not a battle which engages the highest faculties of the human heart or mind. It is the consequence of our material health as well as of our spiritual sickness that from the exaggerated structure of the state there emerges something less than the human voice."
~ Hubert Witheford, from his prose article 'Background to a Magazine,' Arachne No. 2, Feb. 1951 (p. 20)
