Day: February 12, 2019

Challenges and complexities

Michael Reddell China, NZ politics, Uncategorized

Interviewed on Radio New Zealand this morning, the Prime Minister conceded that there were “challenges and complexities” in the government’s relationship with the People’s Republic of China.    Fearful, and seemingly out of her depth, she wouldn’t or couldn’t identify any of those “challenges and complexities”.   And yet she is criticised for not doing enough to keep in Beijing’s good graces by the person in New Zealand politics with an even worse record on PRC issues –  Simon Bridges, leader of the National Party.

I don’t have anything much to say about the Air New Zealand story, or any particular reason to doubt the slowly-emerging explanation (which itself seems to have a PRC-coercion dimension, dating back to last year’s PRC insistence that airlines not suggest that Taiwan –  an independent democratic country –  was in fact or in any way not part of the PRC).  It is just that were the true story to have been more worrying, it isn’t clear that Air New Zealand would have much incentive to be straight with customers or the public: they have an ongoing business to run and Beijing relations to keep smooth (and, of course, the chief executive is the chair of the PM’s Business Advisory Council).    But perhaps leaks from within Air New Zealand would mean the truth still got out?

What of the two Barry Soper stories (this one from the front page of the Herald, and this opinion piece)?   The first is introduced this way

Diplomatic links with China appear to have plummeted to a new low as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is given the cold shoulder by Beijing and a major tourism promotion is postponed by the superpower.

Of the visit to Beijing, we learned this yesterday

Ardern confirmed she had an invitation from the Chinese administration to meet President Xi Jinping, but the problem was finding a suitable date. She was meant to meet with the President at the end of last year.

She wouldn’t say whether or not she was confident the meeting would take place this year.

In other words, she isn’t confident it will happen at all.   What is hard to understand is why any self-respecting person would put themselves through this rigmarole?   Abasement before the emperor, and all for the sake of a few New Zealand businesses (often taxpayer subsidised ones) that have got themselves too exposed to a country with a noxious regime.   She keeps telling us we are an independent sovereign state, not some tributary regime.  Why can’t she just politely walk away (and get some aide to make her a note of how constructive and useful  –  enhancing to their reputations –  foreign leaders meetings with Adolf Hitler were).    Perhaps late last year the “scheduling” excuse –  “we all have busy calendars” –  might have washed with some.  It clearly doesn’t now.  And that shouldn’t worry New Zealanders.  It shouldn’t be a cause for reproach from an Opposition leader who (a) has never distanced himself from his foreign affairs spokesperson’s defence of the PRC concentration camps in Xinjiang, and (b) who retains in his caucus, and expresses support for, a Chinese Communist Party member and former PLA intelligence official, and who (c) is understood to rely on that member as one of his largest party fundraisers.  That is where the focus should be, not on selling our souls for a meeting with Xi Jinping.

And then there is the year of the Chinese tourist,

The 2019 China-New Zealand Year of Tourism was meant to be launched with great fanfare at Wellington’s Te Papa museum next week, but that has been postponed by China.

Industry people and regime-sycophants had been very keen on this exercise.  The Contemporary China Research Centre –  funded partly MFAT, chaired by a New Zealander with a significant role in the global Confucius Institute movement – was even hosting a conference on it late last year.   But this isn’t some sort of normal country.  What Beijing giveth, Beijing can also take away.  We are told

Richard Davies, manager of tourism policy at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, said: “China has advised that this event has had to be postponed due to changes of schedule on the Chinese side.”

Officials are now working with China to reschedule the opening.

Believe all that and you’ll believe anything.  But the Prime Minister claimed to believe it, telling her RNZ interviewer that she could only go on what she’d been told, and she’d been told there was a scheduling problem.  I’m sure she doesn’t really believe it, but why can’t she come straight with the New Zealand public?   She is supposed to serve us, not a small group of business interests.    Better to take explicit credit for a slightly more distant relationship with one of the most appalling regimes on the planet.  Especially if all that talk about kindness and empathy means anything at all.  But she won’t do that –  won’t square with the public about the nature of the regime she (and his predecessors) have been pandering too, all no doubt on official advice.

You got a sense of the sort of business sector pressure she seems to be under in how she responded to the interviewer’s questions about Huawei.  Much as the China-oriented bits of the business community – and the China Council –  must hate it, almost everything that has emerged on Huawei in the last couple of months only confirms how unwise any decent and self-respecting country would be to allow Hauwei equipment to play a key role in 5G networks.   And yet the Prime Minister seemed to interpret the question as a suggestion that we should back down and just let Hauwei –  and the PRC state –  do its thing.  ‘If we did that could we really say we had an independent foreign policy?” was the gist of her response.

Barry Soper seems to be championing some of that sort of “never mind national security, never mind self-respect, never mind the advice of longstanding friends and allies, lets never ever upset Beijing” line.  It was clear in his selection of people to quote from in his article.  There was this, apparently on Huawei

Asset management and corporate adviser David Mahon, based in Beijing, said governments needed to get over thwarting Chinese economic aims in a way reminiscent of the Cold War struggle between capitalism and communism. “It’s unhelpful for politicians and a few anti-Chinese professors to feed uncorroborated McCarthyite conspiracies about Chinese spy networks in their countries and targeting anyone who doesn’t share their view,” Mahon said.

Just lie back and let Beijing have its way seems to be Mahon’s perspective.  That isn’t how self-respecting people, or nations, act.  But perhaps if you are just desperate for the next deal none of that stuff matters?

And then there was more melodramatic stuff from Philip Burdon, until recently chair of the taxpayer-funded PR outfit the Asia New Zealand Foundation, and of course a longserving senior National Party figure.

Philip Burdon,….said New Zealand couldn’t afford to take sides.

“We clearly need to commit ourselves to the cause of trade liberalisation and the integration of the global economy while respectfully and realistically acknowledging China’s entitlement to a comprehensive and responsible strategic and economic engagement in the region,” he said.

Sources in Beijing say China plans trade retaliation…..

Two-way trade with China trebled over the past decade to $27 billion. “The implications for New Zealand are dangerous at every level,” Burdon said.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the PRC seriously committed itself to the practice of liberalisation?  Doesn’t seem likely.  And “respectfully acknowledge their entitlement”?  Like true vassals?

But what’s with this “can’t afford to take sides” business?  It has been a convenient framing for some time, as if we are asked to choose between the US and the PRC.  Even if that were the choice, the United States (for all its faults) remains much more in tune with the values and attitudes of New Zealanders than the lawless regime in Beijing does.  But, of course, the choice isn’t really between the US and the PRC, but between the PRC and New Zealand, or even (charitably) the interests of a small number of New Zealand businesses (and parties reliant on donations) and New Zealand as a whole.   Given that choice, we can’t afford our governments not to take sides, not to back New Zealand and its values and long-term interests.   That includes defending the integrity of our political system, defending the freedoms of ethnic Chinese New Zealanders (whose media and community associations seem to have been largely taken over by Beijing-affiliated groups), and being the sort of nation that stands up internationally for the sort of behaviour –  treatment of other people –  we expect.

There is more from Philip Burdon in Barry Soper’s op-ed

We can’t afford to let this diplomatic tightrope slacken and that’s most certainly the view of a Peters confidante, former Trade Minister in the Bolger Government and recently the chair of Asia 2000 Phillip Burdon.

The mushroom magnate says China has constructively sought to engage with New Zealand for which we should be grateful.

It’s utterly ridiculous, Burdon contends, that China has sinister plans to subvert and interfere in our society or in our democratic institutions.

Ah, it is a debt of gratitude –  perhaps serviced with periodic offerings of tribute –  that we owe to Beijing, at least according to Burdon, for all that “constructive engagement”.     What exactly was that?

As for Burdon’s final sentence, one presumes he is so far down the track of abandoning all sense of self-respect that the presence of a former PLA intelligence official, who hob-nobs with the embassy and never ever says anything critical of Beijing just doesn’t bother Philip Burdon.  There are deals I guess, and never mind the integrity of our system.  Perhaps it doesn’t bother him that Parliament’s justice committee is chaired by someone with close ties to various United Front institutions?  It should.       It isn’t necessarily that Beijing “has” sinister plans –  as if this is something in the future. The very fact that Jian Yang in particular still sits in Parliament, challenged by no one in the entire political spectrum tells you that, by accident or design, those visions have already been coming to pass.  Or when neither the Prime Minister nor the Opposition leader will make a clear stand in defence of Anne-Marie Brady and her work.

I’m sure Beijing has no interest in toppling our formal institutions.  Why would they when those institutions have rotted from the inside.  I guess he too wants us to believe that only a “few anti-Chinese professors” are at all bothered.

All of which brings us back to the opening line of Barry Soper’s op-ed

New Zealand is feeling the heat of the Chinese dragon’s breath and if we’re not careful it could incinerate us.

Which is simply nonsense.    As an economy, we have much more to worry about from a sharp Chinese economic slowdown –  which may be underway already –  than from any sorts of specific attempts at economic coercion of New Zealand.  The PRC is a big country, and in a world with few buffers a recession there could matter a lot everywhere.   As for New Zealand, the PRC certainly has some capacity to harm some specific sectors, perhaps even quite severely.  I wouldn’t want to be a university vice-chancellor if the PRC decides to attempt to bring the government to heel. Then again, I don’t have any sympathy with those people, who have put themselves at the mercy of a known thug, all backed by dodgy immigration provisions, rather than looking to manage their exposures (as prudent businesses, unable to twist governments to their purposes, would).  I have some more sympathy for tourism operators –  who mostly are operating in an open market.  As for commodity exporters, well they are selling commodities and (to a first approximation) what isn’t sold in the PRC will be sold somewhere else.   Sometimes values and interests cost – in many ways, the only true measure of what is valuable is the price one is willing to pay to defend it.  Too many of these Beijing defenders don’t seem to have any particular interest in defending our system, our people –  let alone standing against the sheer awfulness of the PRC regime at home and abroad.

We can’t fix the PRC gross human rights abuses.  I’m not even suggesting we should be at the forefront of moves on those issues. But when other countries speak and our governments don’t, they shame us.   Neither our Prime Minister nor our Opposition leader will utter a word about (for example) Xinjiang, or about the abducted Canadians, even when other countries have –  otherwise reprehensible Turkey only this week in a strong statement on Xinjiang. Life – politics –  has to be more than just deals and donations if it is to have any meaning, command any respect.   Frankly, it is hard to tell at present which side of politics is worse on this issue, but on balance I’d have to give it to National –  whose only interest in all of this, in anything they say in public, seems to be placating Beijing.  In office there are hard choices and calls to make –  even if that is still no excuse for not openly engaging on the “challenges and complexities”.  In Opposition one might have hoped, just occasionally, for a slightly more principled position. But I guess their actions, their people, their words reveal what their “principles” really are in this area.

 

 

1984 and all that

Michael Reddell New Zealand economic history, New Zealand economic performance

Eric Crampton of the New Zealand Initiative yesterday sent out a couple of tweets drawn from some pages a reader had sent him from Wellington’s evening newspaper of 18 July 1984.    The general election had taken place on the 14th and the foreign exchange market had been officially closed for a couple of days as everyone awaited resolution of the political disputes around who would take responsibility for the by-now-inevitable devaluation.  The outgoing (but still caretaker) Prime Minister finally buckled and a 20 per cent devaluation was announced on the 18th.   It marked the beginning of almost ten years of pretty thoroughgoing economic reforms, the legacy of which (good and ill) is still with us today.

Anyway, here were Eric’s tweets

(Click on the right-hand side of the first page and you can read a “fake news” story from 1984, how the Evening Post fell for a Michael Cullen hoax press release.)

Eric’s tweets sent me down to the garage and my box of old newspapers from (in)auspicious days.  I didn’t have that particular one, but I did find one from a couple of days earlier.  In that paper there was an advert for a competition offering as a prize a microwave with a retail value of $1495 –  $4800 in today’s money.   Whether you run with Eric’s microwave advert or mine, there is no doubt some things are dramatically cheaper (in real terms) than they were then.  Of course, for many technology items that will be true everywhere; it isn’t primarily a New Zealand story. Actually, flicking through that old paper it was the car prices that surprised me more: a two-year old Ford Cortina advertised for $18995 ($61000 in today’s money).   The New Zealand car assembly industry then really was very heavily protected.

Eric notes “we forget too quickly what a mess the place was in”, which reads a little oddly when he did not, I gather, come to New Zealand for another 20 years.  But setting that quibble to one side, and taking on board my own youthful enthusiasm for most or all of the reforms being done at the time (most of which still seem right and/or necessary), I think that with the benefit of hindsight the picture is rather more mixed than perhaps Eric suggests.

On the macro side, the problems were all-too-evident.  Fiscal imbalances were large and the balance of payments current account deficit was large.  If debt levels (government and external) weren’t that high by the standards which too much of the advanced world has since become used to, they were a huge departure from New Zealand’s post-war experience.  Inflation was partially suppressed by a series of freezes –  although Muldoon had lifted the price freeze a few months earlier –  supported by a series of interest rate controls, which were undoing the partial financial liberalisation of the 1970s.   Outside the control of any government, the terms of trade had been trending down for 20 years, and New Zealand material living standards and productivity had been falling behind those nearer the upper ranks of the OECD group.   We were still in the construction phase of that disastrous set of wealth-destroying government sponsored energy projects known as “Think Big”.  And if protective barriers were slowly being removed –  for example, CER was inaugurated the previous year –  it was a slow and halting journey at best. High protective barriers not only made many goods unnecessarily expensive to New Zealand consumers, but acted as a heavy tax on actual and potential New Zealand exporters.  Much about the tax system was in a mess.

And yet, and yet.

The unemployment rate in June 1984 (from Simon Chapple’s work backdating the HLFS) is estimated to have been 4.4 per cent.  Right now it is 4.3 per cent –   and 4.3 per cent is well below the average for the last 20 years, while the 1984 was well above the comparable average.

Or house prices.  I started looking to buy a first house a few months later, in early 1985.   Single 22 year olds could do that sort of thing in those days.  Yes, concessional Reserve Bank staff mortgages would have helped, but I recall looking at various houses in Island Bay and Newtown for about $80000.  That’s less than $250000 in today’s money.   The same houses now look to be perhaps $750000.    That mess was created by some of the post-1984 reforms.

Or productivity.  In that old newspaper I dug out of the garage I found a post-election op-ed written by Len Bayliss, then a leading New Zealand economist.  Among the five major economic challenges he identified for the new government was this

Fifth –  extremely poor productivity growth, and more recently GDP growth, have been the subject of a series of economic reports since 1962.  As a consequence of this poor performance, other countries’ living standards have risen more than New Zealand’s.

The worst single period for productivity growth in New Zealand history was in late 1970s, but even 35 years ago people knew that the problems were much more deep-seated.   Unfortunately, of course, the productivity gaps are now larger than they were in 1984. On OECD estimates of real GDP per hour worked, in 1984 we were close to the levels in Iceland, Ireland, and Finland.  These days, we are far behind each of them.   We were only about 10 per cent behind the UK in those days, and now they are about 30 per cent ahead of us.    Things might not be in such a “mess” nowadays –  disorderly macro imbalances and weird interventions –  but the economic bottom line still makes sorry reading.   No champion of change in 1984, told all the policies that would be adopted and the huge measure of macro stability achieved, would have predicted that we’d have drifted further behind by 2019.

Perhaps especially if they’d been given the additional information of what would happen to New Zealand’s terms of trade over the subsequent decades – the turnaround (outside any government’s control) starting just a couple of years after the reform period got underway.

TOT annual

The devaluation in July 1984 was a huge part of the economic narrative at the time.  There was a strongly-held consensus, among local officials, local commentators (it is explicit in that Len Bayliss article) and international agencies, that the New Zealand real exchange rate had become persistently out of line with fundamentals, and that a substantial and sustained depreciation would have to be a significant part of putting the economy on a better-footing.   It was, among other things, a repeated and urgent theme of the numerous meetings I attended, as a junior note-taking official, in late 1984.

And here are the two OECD measures of New Zealand’s real exchange rate.

RER 84

I’ve marked the 1984 devaluation.  In real terms, it proved very temporary indeed.    It would be great if really strong and sustained productivity growth had supported a structural increase in the real exchange rate.  But that, of course, hasn’t been the story.  Once we got through the disinflation period –  when it was reasonable to expect some temporary periods with a high real exchange rate –  it seems to reflect the same sort of domestic demand pressures that have given us persistently among the very highest real interest rates in the advanced world.

And then there is foreign trade.  A narrative at the time was the heavy protection had resulted in New Zealand’s foreign trade shares of GDP falling, or failing to grow.  The overvalued exchange rate (see above) further impeded the prospects of potential export industries, probably only partly offset by the various (highly questionable) export incentives and subsidies.

And yet

trade shares feb 19

I’ve circled the data for the years to March 1984 (latest actuals when the devaluation happened) and for the year to March 1985.  There was, as you would expect, a short-term boost to the nominal trade shares on account of the devaluation, but of course that didn’t last.  But if we take the subsequent 33 years together, there is just no sign of foreign trade having become more important to the New Zealand economy  (as it happens, exports as share of GDP in the year to March 2018 were almost identical to those in the year to March 1984).  Only one other OECD country has not seen the export share of GDP increase over that time.

I don’t want to kick off a futile debate about whether the reforms should have been done.  I’m still squarely in the camp that most should have been.  But, equally, nothing is gained by pretending to a degree of economic success we haven’t achieved.   We’ve shared –  with every market economy (and probably the non-market ones too) –  the rapid declines in the cost of various technology goods and services.  All of our own doing, we’ve managed to bring about, and sustain, an impressive level of macroeconomic stability.   But, equally all of our own doing, we’ve managed to rig the housing market against the current (and next) young generation, and despite reducing or removing all manner of protective barriers (and even getting other countries to do something similar for stuff New Zealand firms exports), foreign trade shares are no higher now than they were on that momentous day in 1984.  And, as for productivity, poor –  and rightly alarming –  as it was then, all indications are that it is worse now, and there are no signs of  those gaps beginning to close.

The New Zealand economy isn’t in some disorderly mess at present.  But if it is perhaps more orderly, it is failing nonetheless.