Professor Robert MacCulloch, who holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University, over the past two days has posted two articles on the failure of the news media to challenge the PM when he boasts about New Zealand’s GDP growth. He writes –
- October 11
Where’s our media? Where are the IMF GDP figures out yesterday proving Hipkin’s fabricated NZs rank?
On the front pages of the UK Times today it reports the latest IMF growth figures that came out yesterday, on 10th October. Just a few days ago our PM insisted on Mike Hosking’s Newstalk ZB show that NZ’s GDP growth numbers put us higher then “every country other than Japan”. I couldn’t work out what he was talking about.
In the papers today in NZ I cannot find the IMF figures reported anywhere. So what do they (see link below) say about NZ’s ranking. Are we second in the world after Japan, like the PM told Hosking?
In 2023 the IMF ranks our GDP growth as 157th out of 189 countries, near the bottom. As if that isn’t bad enough, in 2024 it has put us at 180th, almost AT the bottom.
Are the Business Editors at Newshub, Stuff & NZ Herald going to call the PM to account for his false claim on Newstalk ZB that our GDP growth put us ahead of “every country other than Japan”?
It was misinformation on steroids.
Hipkins is the guy who went berserk about misinformation about the Covid vaccine, yet I cannot conceive of a greater piece of misinformation than telling 5 million Kiwis a few days before a General Election our country is ranked top of the world on GDP growth figures when we’re ranked almost bottom.
How is he getting away with it?
Sources:
October 12:
NZ Media spins the IMF GDP figures in Labour’s favor and grossly misleads Kiwis a day before voting
Probably because some reporters receive this Blog, Newshub today picked up on the IMF ‘s latest GDP growth figures. This is how they report it:
NZ’s economy is at 1.1 percent annual GDP growth, which the IMF predicts will drop marginally to 1 percent next year. To see how Aotearoa ranks against other countries for economic growth in 2024, Newshub analyzed GDP growth percentages across 25 different economies & compared them to 2023’s figures (with the change in brackets). Macao came out on top with a whopping 27.2 percent GDP growth prediction for 2024, while Equatorial Guinea was at the bottom of the list, estimated to shrink by 5.5 percent. Aotearoa is near the bottom of the annual GDP growth list. However, so are many advanced economies NZ compares itself to including Germany, Japan, Finland and Australia”.
What a disgraceful biased piece of junk reporting. First, Australia beat us easily on GDP growth in 2023 & 2024. Second, who “compares” NZ to Germany?
Was NZ dependent on Russian gas to run our industrial base, like Germany was, and which Putin turned off, handing them an extraordinary economic shock?
Third, the IMF ranked NZ as 180th out of 189 nations, an appalling ranking. There are only 9 nations in the world worse than NZ.
There’s no reason to justify how Newshub chose their 25 “different economies”. On their weird arbitrary list NZ ranks 19th out of 25. Not amazing but not too bad, voters must think. Here’s Newshub’s bizarrely selected GDP growth table from top to bottom:
Macao; Libya; India; Kenya; Samoa; Ukraine; Nigeria; West Bank-Gaza; South Korea; Switzerland; Chile; Canada; Brazil; US; France; Australia; Japan; Finland; New Zealand; Belgium; Germany; Austria; Italy; UK; Guinea.
Newshub took a tiny subset of 25 countries (representing only 13% of the 189 countries the IMF collected data on) but included on that list nearly all the countries that did worse than NZ (6 out of 9) and yet threw out nearly all the countries placed ahead of us (keeping just 18 out of those 180 countries). Yes, Newshub’s list included nearly every nation worse than us, yet only 10% of nations doing better. Why not simply report our global ranking of 180th out of 189?
The IMF ranking is instead proof the PM & Finance Minister screwed up, squandering Kiwi’s amazing sacrifices during the 2020-21 Covid lockdowns to snatch economic defeat. Hipkins wrecked our economy and the IMF’s economic figures prove he wrecked our economy.
Does the NZ Media Establishment have a political agenda? Is there a plot to swing the election at the last by not reporting the full and fair facts? Are our mainstream media beholden to politicians & business in ways we don’t know about? Why doesn’t Newshub write the headline that when the PM told Mike Hosking two days ago that NZ was growing faster that “every country other than Japan” it was a bald-faced piece of untrue clap-trap.
Sources:
—————————————–
Professor Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. He has previously worked at the Reserve Bank, Oxford University, and the London School of Economics. This article was first published on his blog Down to Earth Kiwi.
Point of Order 