One of the eternal truths about Aotearoa's economy is that we are "capital poor": there's not enough money sloshing around here to fund the expansion of local businesses, or to build the things we want to. Which gets used as an excuse for all sorts of things, like setting up kiwisaver (good!), not taxing rich people properly, or selling the country to foreigners. For example, here's Chris Luxon doing the latter at his "investment summit" last week:
Low capital intensity has been identified as one of the major causes of that low productivity.Meanwhile, here's another story from last week: NZ bank profits hit $7.2 billion: KPMG. By way of comparison, that's more than the amount kiwi employees pay into kiwisaver each year. But unlike kiwisaver, it goes straight overseas into the pockets of those banks foreign owners.In order to increase our productivity, we need more capital investment. And David Seymour has been changing the rules to ensure we can.
Maybe we wouldn't be so "capital poor" if we hadn't allowed our wealth to be siphoned overseas for decades by a rapacious foreign oligopolies?
