70k Expected to Lose Their Job as a Result of Reserve Bank Engineered Recession

December 22, 2022

Seventy thousand people, roughly equivalent to the population of Rotorua, are forecast to lose their jobs as the Reserve Bank plunges the economy into recession in a bid to control inflation.

The Council of Trade Unions thinks this is unacceptable and has proposed the Government pass an Inflation and Incomes Act, to tackle the most pernicious parts of the inflation crisis and avoid the need for the Reserve Bank to bludgeon the economy by hiking its blunt Official Cash Rate.

CTU economist Craig Renney thinks the Government could do a better job by fighting inflation where it hurts most: food, rent, electricity, tax and transport costs, among other things.

He has proposed a suite of measures to bring these down, including bringing the partly-privatised power generators back into full public ownership so they could better invest in the transition to cheap, green energy rather than paying out dividends; reducing student loan repayments for some borrowers; and giving first-home buyers 25-year fixed mortgage rates for some properties.

Renney also proposed including a tax-free threshold so that the first part of someone’s income was not taxed at all. New Zealand income earners are taxed on every dollar they earn, unlike workers in Australia who are not taxed on their first AU$18,200 (NZ$19,240) of earnings.