Bill English

Not being shy at coming forward I am starting to wonder if there is anyone in the beehive that knows what they are doing.

Sure, 2011 is going to largely mirror 2010 and that was evident last year.

The economy had been flat throughout 2010 as people saved harder and paid off debt rather than spend. Apparently, this was happening a lot quicker than government had expected even though they had been advocating for it for some time.

Customers paying down debt doesn’t result in better cash flow but simply increases their equity. This is good, however it is only paper money as equity is worthless unless sold or leveraged against. Something the government is not keen for people to do.

So now we have a stalemate largely created by the government scare mongering.

People are now brain washed into thinking debt reduction rather than investment is the key.

But is it?

Appearing before Parliament's Finance and Expenditure Committee, English said the recovery would continue to have some challenges over 2011, and the onus was on the tradable sector of the economy to grow jobs in order to get unemployment down.

Personally I think the government should share some reasonability maybe by supporting a sustainable housing project rather than the growing number of schemes that are nothing more than smoke screens to make it appear they are actually doing something.

"They’re not rushing back to the shops and are not rushing into the housing market. And the big export prices haven’t started feeding through yet…" he said.

English appears to be fluttering like a fish out of water with no answers, content on finger pointing and unable to give any clear direction.

Sitting back hoping the export market will bail us out when the Australian economy is slowing fast isn’t going to cut it either.

So do we batten down the hatches and weather the storm that could last as long as three years or do we take the bull by the horns and make better use of what is at our disposal?

Over the last few months there has been disaster after disaster throughout the world and even here in New Zealand and each of those places require buildings.

We have the material and labour in abundance so let’s stop doodling on paper and pick up a hammer and starting building ourselves a better future.

It is insane to expect things to change when all we are doing is what we have always done.

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Brian Dalley is a leading Property Consultant | former NZMBA Mortgage Broker, and Real Estate Agent. You can read more of his views and opinions on his website www.propertyprofit.co.nz.