The Weekly Hoon: Rate cut to Govt & economy's rescue?; Trump's capitulation; Helicopters instead homes

The podcast above of the weekly ‘Hoon’ webinar for paying subscribers on Thursday night features co-hosts Bernard Hickey and Peter Bale talking with regular guests Cathrine Dyer and Robert Patman about the global economy, local and international politics, climate change and the future of trade. This week’s special guest is Ganesh R Ahirao.

This week’s Hoon featured:

* A discussion between Peter and Bernard about homelessness and helicopters, along with RNZ’s pivot to focusing on older listeners and the SIS’s annual security report. We referred to an analysis by Sanjana Hattotuwa via BlueSky and his own wordpress post about how 10,000 public sector job cuts threaten New Zealand’s national and human security.

* A discussion with Cathrine about new evidence of ice loss in the Arctic and Antarctic, gas shortages in Aotearoa and the Government’s decision announced yesterday to further loosen emissions standards for vehicle imports.

* A discussion with Robert about Donald Trump’s ‘Alaska Catastrophe’ summit with Vladimir Putin, New Zealand’s purchase of helicopters and jets announced yesterday, and Israel’s imminent invasion of Gaza.

* A discussion with Ganesh about the Reserve Bank’s decision this week to cut rates and promise more, the Government’s economic (non) strategy of relying on rate cuts and Treasury’s ‘Back to the Future’ Long Term Fiscal strategy document published last week that focused utterly on debt reduction. We referred to Ganesh R Ahirao’s substack post on the Government’s dismemberment of the public sector.

The Hoon’s podcast version above was recorded on Thursday night during a live webinar for over 200 paying subscribers and was produced and edited by Simon Josey.

The Hoon won the silver award for best current affairs podcast in this year’s New Zealand Podcast awards.

(This is a sampler for all free subscribers and anyone else who stumbles on it. Thanks to the support of paying subscribers here, we’re able to spread my public interest journalism here about housing affordability, climate change and poverty reduction other public venues. Join the community supporting and contributing to this work with your ideas, feedback and comments, and by subscribing in full. Remember, all students and teachers who sign up for the free version with their .ac.nz and .school.nz email accounts are automatically upgraded to the paid version for free. Also, here’s a couple of special offers: $3/month or $30/year for under 30s & $6.50/month or $65/year for over 65s who rent.)

Ngā mihi nui.

Bernard

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