Kerre Woodham: Can you see the light at the end of the tunnel?

The Official Cash Rate has been left unchanged, 2.25%, expected by all the commentators, but perhaps less expected was a dovish view of the future. It was the new Reserve Bank Governor's, well she's not that new I suppose, the newish Reserve Bank Governor's first OCR review, having come on board at the end of '25. She is pretty optimistic about the economy. She said it will continue to recover, but she understands that many households are not feeling it yet. Must be rather annoying being told, no, everything's fine, everything's turning around, everything's great, while you're looking down the back of the couch for coins to get the kids' school lunches.  

But there are great numbers coming out of our primary industry sector and thank God for you. Just take a moment on your tractor, in your shed, on the motorbike, in the fields, just take a little moment to have a big deep breath and consider yourself congratulated and thanked. Kiwifruit, dairy, sheep, beef, yet again that sector, our primary industry sector, is doing the heavy lifting to keep the engine of the economy running. How many times? And we should point out, you were doing it with one hand and one leg tied behind your back for much of the past decade. So thank you again for keeping us going, producing stuff that the rest of the world wants.  

However, we can't depend on you, we shouldn't be as reliant upon you as we all are. Trends change, markets change, you know, all of a sudden, the world will decide that, oh I don't know, refined sugar is the way to go, not protein, and all of a sudden, the world will change. Unlikely to go for refined sugar, but you know what I mean. You're also vulnerable to climate, you know, a good season needs good weather. You're vulnerable to external markets. To a certain extent you are not the author of your own fortune, you are very dependent on outside and external sources. And if you're dependent on that, so too are we. We need to find other strands, other sectors to build up. You know, technology would be ideal and we've made some great marks in that, bioscience, fantastic, but not houses.  

Let's not look at an unproductive sector of the economy to provide us with wealth again. House prices have come back a little in the North Island, Auckland's average asking price is once again over a million dollars, and you should see the tat you get for that. That's up 9% from December. Tale of two islands: Christchurch, Queenstown, Otago, Southland, all seen significant increases in prices. But the “drop in value” has seen a drop in confidence. Reserve Bank's Paul Conway says the reduced prominence of the wealth effect from higher house prices is a risk to the economic recovery. It's a big change, he says, for the New Zealand economy to not have that increase in house prices as a kicker to aggregate demand. He says there may well have been structural changes in the housing market that means an increase in demand for housing no longer equates with higher house prices.  

And it's true, for a couple of decades Kiwi property owners have been living off the wealth of their main asset. There were astronomical rises in the value of homes around the country and people felt wealthy and spent like they were wealthy. A chronic undersupply of homes, high migration, low interest rates saw huge rises in the value of homes around the country and so people spent like they were rich. All of a sudden, a home became far more than a place you lived in, it was an asset with equity which you could use to springboard yourself into wealth, as so many of the ads that we ran on this station told you. People spent like drunken sailors and the economy boomed. Fast track to the post Covid slump and people have seen their house prices drop – in some horrible cases they owe more on their house than they can sell it for. And as Paul Conway says, there may well have been structural changes to the housing market. High prices for the essentials means there's less disposable income in households and if one of you has been made redundant, it has been a tough few years. We've lost our groove. But as Reserve Bank Governor Dr. Anne Bremen told Mike Hosking this morning, there's enormous potential in the New Zealand economy and there are reasons to be optimistic. 

“I think it's a great economy. I think New Zealanders are underestimating actually the potential going forward in the New Zealand economy. We're already seeing some sectors doing really well, agriculture, manufacturing is starting going, and I do expect this to broaden in this year. So I'm very positive. We actually think there's quite a lot of what we call spare capacity in the economy, so we think that the economy can grow at a higher pace without causing so much inflationary pressure because there is still high unemployment, firms can increase, you know, manufacturing without having, they're starting to invest actually, which is also really good to see. So we do think there is spare capacity. And I know people, there is a lot of good potential in this economy. People should be a bit more optimistic.” 

There you go. So many people are telling us to be optimistic. We must be optimistic. We're all going to be optimistic, we're going to stay after class until we're all optimistic. Okay, I mean, a little bit hard when you've got the, you know, the infrastructure plan coming out yesterday which said that pretty much we need so much and we can't afford it. But there is room to grow in the economy as Dr. Bremen said, and as people know. But if you're not feeling it, you're not going to be spending.  

Back in the day when we were using our houses as ATMs, I mean I was one of them, we bought a house in Grey Lynn because it was the only place we could afford. I think it was about $250,000 —might have been closer to $300,000— which seemed a fortune at the time, but then the house price just went up and up and up so you could afford to do the renos. We could take it from an uninsulated place where the floorboards were open to the bare dirt floor underneath, as it had been since 1890. You could do the renos, you could do the landscaping of the garden, you were spending and New Zealand businesses were the ones who benefited from that.  

So if you're not doing that, where are the sustainable businesses going to get their work? If people don't feel confident enough about improving their homes or, you know, using the money that they've built up in their homes, how do you replace that quite significant chunk of money go round? Do you feel confident? Do you feel optimistic? Can you see light at the end of the tunnel? 

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