"We do not have a cost-of-living crisis because the fall in our living standards is not a temporary condition"

"We do not have a cost-of-living crisis because the fall in our living standards is not a temporary condition....
    "As recently as the early 1990s, New Zealand, Australia and Singapore had a similar average income. Based in US dollars, we are now at $49,000 per capita in income, compared to $60,000 for those living across the Tasman and $72,000 for the island state.
    "Long-term trends matter and we are now falling not only in relative terms, but in absolute ones...
    

    "We have had three decades of consistently poor economic policies implemented by weak finance ministers, and prime ministers who rule by focus group rather than policy....
    

    "We believe that we are entitled to a high standard of living for reasons that we are unable to articulate, that are self-evidently obvious to ourselves but not, sadly, to the rest of the world.
    "And while we slide down both the relative and now the absolute rankings, we magnificently refuse to confront the reality of our economic situation. Our national discourse is consumed with petty disputes on the most crushingly banal of matters.
    "We are not in a cost-of-living crisis. We are just poor."

~ Damien Grant, from his column 'We aren't in a cost of living crisis, we're just poor'