Trump's War Machine Is Picking Your Pocket

Trump Cheerleader - Greg Swenson

There's a particular kind of audacity required to sit before a global television audience, as the bombs are still falling and the Strait of Hormuz chokes on geopolitical recklessness, and declare that the American economy has never been in better shape.

That audacity belongs to Greg Swenson, founding partner of London-based merchant bank Brigg Macadam, Chairman of Republicans Overseas UK, and reliably one of the most polished purveyors of pro-Trump economic cheerleading available to international broadcasters.

Appearing on Al Jazeera's Counting the Cost, Swenson offered the full bouquet of administration talking points: GDP is growing, jobs are being created, America is a net oil exporter, and therefore the economic consequences of this catastrophic, unprovoked war of aggression against Iran are, essentially, nothing to worry about. Each of these claims deserves scrutiny, because each of them, on examination, is either wrong, misleading, or a deliberate half-truth designed to paper over a steadily worsening reality.

On 18 March, Al Jazeera reported:

Could the Iran war trigger a global recession?

Energy prices are surging as the Iran war disrupts supply, raising risks for the US, China and Europe.

All eyes are on the Strait of Hormuz.

The longer it remains closed, the greater the damage to the global economy.

Iran continues to block tankers from shipping close to 20 percent of the world’s oil supply.

That is roughly twice the disruption the world suffered during the energy shock of the 1970s.

Big oil shocks have historically led to considerable economic turmoil, high inflation, stagnation and recession.

Oil and gas prices are already surging, and economies are expected to slow.

On GDP, Swenson was almost certainly citing the Q3 2025's headline-grabbing 4.4% annualised growth figure, conveniently neglecting to mention that Q4 2025 came in at a feeble 0.7%, the weakest quarter in over a year. That weakness was partly a consequence of the administration's own government shutdown, which the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates subtracted a full percentage point from growth. Full-year 2025 GDP expansion of 2.1% represents a decline from 2.8% in 2024. This is not a story of economic momentum. It is a story of deceleration dressed up as dynamism.

On jobs, the situation is, frankly, scandalous. The Bureau of Labor Statistics initially reported 584,000 jobs added across 2025, already a modest figure. After receiving complete state-level data, that number was revised down to just 181,000 for the entire year. That is the weakest non-recessionary performance since 2003. It represents a collapse from 1.46 million jobs in 2024, and it sits alongside the second-largest negative payroll revision on record.

Federal employment alone has shed 327,000 positions since January 2025, largely due to the administration's own mass redundancy programme. Economists have taken to calling this a "jobless expansion." When a banker on television tells you more jobs are being created, you might reasonably ask: compared to what?

The net oil exporter claim is perhaps the most cynically constructed of the three. PolitiFact rates this assertion "Half True": the US exports more petroleum products than it imports in aggregate, but it remains a net importer of crude oil, taking in 6.2 million barrels a day whilst exporting barely 4 million.

The refinery mismatch, namely US infrastructure built over decades to process heavier Middle Eastern crude, means that regardless of domestic production volumes, American consumers are paying at the pump for the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Gas prices have already risen by nearly a dollar per gallon, reaching a national average of $3.88. Only 27% of Americans approve of Trump's handling of fuel costs. The "net exporter" talking point isn't an economic argument. It is a confidence trick.

Swenson is not alone in this enterprise. Senator Lindsey Graham appeared on Fox News to describe Trump's illegal war as "a good investment," adding that once "this regime goes down, we're gonna make a ton of money." This is the authentic voice of American imperial economics: war as commercial opportunity, body counts as market conditions. It should chill any observer with a functioning moral compass.

And then there is the profiteering. Verified reporting from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Responsible Statecraft confirms that Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are actively investing in Powerus, a Florida drone company positioned to capitalise on the Pentagon's sudden, urgent demand for drone technology, demand created directly by their father's war. In 2025, Trump Jr.-backed companies received hundreds of millions in Defence Department contracts.

On March 10, The New Republic reported:

Trump Sons Back New Drone Company Amid Iran War

Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. have found another avenue to make money off their father’s presidency.

President Trump’s sons are trying to sell drones to the Pentagon.

 ...

Powerus wants to build more than 10,000 drones a month. 

The Trump-backed investment firm American Ventures, the Trump-backed investment bank Dominari Securities, and drone parts maker Unusual Machines, the latter of which Trump Jr. is a shareholder and advisory board member of, are involved in the public merger. Eric Trump is also invested in Israeli drone maker Xtend. 

Jared Kushner's private equity firm Affinity Partners, meanwhile, receives $25 million annually from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, the same Saudi government that, according to the Washington Post, actively lobbied Trump to attack Iran. The conflicts of interest are not subtle. They are structural.

The media's role in all of this deserves its own reckoning. Coverage of the Strait of Hormuz closure in much of the Western press has been framed primarily as an Iranian aggression problem, a crisis to be managed, rather than the foreseeable and widely forecast consequence of an unprovoked military attack launched without congressional authorisation, without an imminent threat to the United States, and without a coherent post-conflict plan.

Multiple Pentagon officials have confirmed to CNN that the administration underestimated Iran's willingness to close the strait. Pete Hegseth's response was not to acknowledge that failure. It was to berate journalists for reporting it, and to speculate openly about the day CNN would fall under the editorial control of a Trump family ally.

On March 14, Rueters reported:

 

Pentagon chief says he's eager for Trump ally to buy CNN as he blasts war coverage

Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth on Friday said he was ​eager to see Trump ally and Paramount Skydance, CEO David Ellison, take over CNN, as he criticized ‌the U.S. news media's coverage of the Iran war.

"The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better," said Hegseth, a former Fox News show host and combat veteran, referring to Paramount's $110 billion deal to acquire CNN-parent Warner Bros.

This determination to suppress inconvenient truth rather than confront it runs as a thread through everything the administration does. Whether it is doctoring economic statistics, dismissing independent analysis, silencing military advisors who question the war's strategic logic, or threatening the institutional independence of broadcasters who report accurately on its consequences, the Trump administration has demonstrated a consistent and deliberate commitment to managing perception over managing reality.

The American public is being asked to trust an administration that punishes honesty, rewards loyalty over competence, and has measurable financial interests in prolonging a conflict it launched without legal authority, without a credible threat to justify it, and without the faintest outline of an exit strategy. That the bombs keep falling while the approval numbers keep sliding appears, to those in the White House, to be just a communications problem.

Then there's the sanctions debacle. Three weeks into the conflict, the Treasury Department quietly lifted sanctions on 140 million barrels of Iranian crude oil at sea, freeing it for purchase by American allies. The United States is now actively generating revenue for the government it is simultaneously bombing. Senator Richard Blumenthal called it "sickeningly, shamefully stupid," and critics across the political spectrum have noted that Trump spent years denouncing Obama for returning $1.7 billion of Iran's frozen funds, and is now handing Tehran up to ten times that amount.

This isn't a strategy. It is the behaviour of an administration stumbling through a war it had no plan to win, launched at least in part to drown out a far more uncomfortable story: the partially released Epstein files, from which the DOJ illegally withheld documents directly implicating Trump in abuse allegations, and which vanished almost entirely from news reports and public discourse the moment the first bombs started to fall.

Trump's overall approval rating tells its own story, though the picture is more nuanced than a single number suggests. Depending on the pollster, his approval sits somewhere between 35% and 42%, with the most comprehensive rolling tracker, Civiqs, recording 39% approval against 57% disapproval across nearly 93,000 registered voters surveyed through to March 19, 2026. Nate Silver's Silver Bulletin aggregator puts his net approval at -15.3, a new second-term low, and three points worse than at the same stage of his first term. The Economist/YouGov survey has 56% of Americans strongly disapproving. Just 27% approve of his handling of fuel costs.

Internationally, the picture is bleaker still. Gallup's survey across 135 countries puts median approval of US leadership at just 33%. Pew Research, polling across 24 nations, found that 62% of people worldwide lack confidence in Trump, with his ratings trailing Joe Biden's by an average of twelve percentage points across those same countries. In Germany, confidence in Trump sits at just 12%. In Mexico, a mere 6%. The man who promised to make America great again has made it, by most global measures, less trusted, less liked, and less respected than it was under the predecessor he never stops attacking. He dismisses all of it: "I don't care about polling. I have to do the right thing."

The "right thing," it seems, has already cost Americans more than $11.3 billion in the first six days, with the conflict now burning through over a billion dollars a day. The Pentagon has subsequently requested a further $200 billion in supplemental funding from Congress, a sum four times larger than originally signalled. When asked to justify the figure, Hegseth's response was, "Obviously, it takes money to kill bad guys." He added that the number might increase, oblivious to the reality that all the United States is currently doing is killing civilians and the world's economy.

At the current rate of spending, that $200 billion would fund the war for just another 100 to 200 days. To put that in perspective, the entire annual US investment in global health, which funds HIV treatment for 25 million people and has saved an estimated 65 million lives since 2002, amounts to $12.4 billion, meaning the $200 billion war chest equals roughly 16 years of US global health spending, all to be consumed in under a year. News agencies are conspicuously silent about what this all means for the United States' already unmanageable $39 trillion of government debt. Meanwhile, tariffs have raised the average American household's costs by $1,500, pushed inflation well above where it would otherwise sit, and handed the Trump family's investment portfolio a timely and lucrative shot in the arm.

Greg Swenson sat before a global audience and called this a success story. It is not. It is a protection racket, and the American public is the one being protected from the truth.

Rocket Lab Fuelled by Broken Promises

There is a particular kind of dishonesty that is dressed up in the language of innovation and national pride. It does not arrive as an outright lie. It arrives as a vision, a story, a community hui at the local marae, a selfie with the Wairoa Lions Club. It arrives as a promise. And then, quietly, expensively, and with considerable personal enrichment, it is broken.

That is the story of Rocket Lab, "Sir" Peter Beck, and the people of Mahia Peninsula.

When Rocket Lab first arrived on the East Coast of the North Island and sought the consent of local Iwi and hapu to launch rockets from their whenua, Beck was unambiguous about what his company would and would not do.

In an early interview, he stated plainly: "Certainly if it involves something that's going to harm people then we're not really interested at all... certainly we don't want to be involved with any kind of missile programmes or anything to do with armaments."

 He added, simply: "No. No weapons."

Sonya Smith of Ngati Rakaipaaka hapu, whose people were among those assured of Rocket Lab's peaceful intentions, has been equally plain about how that promise has played out. "We were sold a bit of a story," she told RNZ. "It talked about satellite launches that supported environmental outcomes and safety outcomes and that's not really how it's played out."

Billboards went up around Mahia: "No military payloads. Haere Atu, Rocket Lab." The company did not respond when RNZ asked whether it had broken its promise to the community. That silence speaks volumes.

It should now be abundantly clear to any New Zealander paying attention that Peter Beck looked concerned Maori in the eye and told them what they needed to hear. A third of all payloads launched by Rocket Lab have since been for the United States military or affiliated agencies. The company now holds over US$1.3 billion in contracts with the US Space Development Agency alone, building missile tracking satellites explicitly designed, in the Pentagon's own words, to "significantly increase the coverage and accuracy needed to close kill chains."

Kill chains. That is the clinical euphemism the American military uses for finding people and killing them.

Which brings us to the present moment. The United States and Israel are conducting military operations against Iran. One of those attacks involved a US strike which destroyed the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in Minab, Hormozgan province, killing between 175 and 180 people, most of them children. Investigations by The New York Times, BBC Verify, and the NPR and CBC concluded the United States was most likely responsible. Amnesty International has called for accountability. The United States has offered none.

 

Last week, The Guardian reported:

 

US responsible for deadly missile strike on Iran school, preliminary inquiry says

Strike that killed at least 175 people, most of them children, reportedly due to targeting mistake by US military planners

A preliminary US military investigation has reportedly determined that Washington was responsible for a deadly Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school in February that killed scores of children.

According to the New York Times, quoting unnamed US officials and others familiar with the initial findings, the investigation has concluded that the strike on 28 February on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school building was the result of a targeting mistake by the US military planners.

Iranian officials had put put death toll from the attack as at least 175 people, the majority of them children, in one of the worst and most shocking American strikes producing civilian fatalities in recent memory. 

 

Rocket Lab is building the targeting and communications architecture of the same military that just bombed a school full of young girls.

When asked directly whether any payloads it had launched were being used in the Iran conflict, Rocket Lab's Vice President of Marketing and Communications, Morgan Connaughton, said responsibility for how satellites are used rests with the satellite owner. This is the statement of a corporation that has laundered its conscience.

New Zealand has no strategic interest in this illegal war. The United States and Israel have struck Iranian oil and gas infrastructure, strikes that will send petrol prices upward here at home, that threaten regional stability, and that put this country in an invidious position as a close intelligence partner of the United States through the Five Eyes arrangement. The United States and Israel's unlawful attacks are putting New Zealanders and our offshore investments at risk.

Rocket Lab's deep integration with the American military-industrial complex isn't a matter of abstract ethics. It is a concrete conflict of interest for this country's foreign policy and our standing in the Pacific.

Peter Beck cannot be trusted. He told Maori communities one thing and did the exact opposite. He built a company on a promise of peaceful science and turned it into a weapons contractor that helps rogue states indiscriminately target innocent civilians. He accepted a knighthood and a Nasdaq listing while the infrastructure he is building helps guide the most powerful military on earth, the same military that bombed a primary school, murdering hundreds of school girls.

The people of Māhia Peninsula deserved better. New Zealand deserves better. And the schoolchildren of Minab deserved to grow up.

The Dumbest War in Living Memory

There are wars fought for survival. There are wars fought for resources. There are wars fought, however misguidedly, for ideology. And then there is Donald Trump's illegal war against Iran, a war so bereft of coherent justification, so naked in its opportunism, and so catastrophic in its execution that future historians will struggle to find a category in which to place it. The dumbest war in living memory has found its author, and he is currently sitting in the most powerful position, explaining that he knows nothing about a bombed school or a destroyed desalination plant, and that Iranians are in any case, according to him, "among the most evil people ever on earth."

Let us dispense, first, with the pretexts.

This is not a war for security. The Arms Control Association has noted plainly that such a war of choice against Iran, without congressional approval, violates the Constitution and the 1973 War Powers Act, as well as Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits the threat or use of force in international relations. Iran was, by all credible accounts, still engaged in diplomatic talks on the very day the US and Israel missiles began to fall on civilian targets.

IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said on 2 March 2026 that the agency had found no evidence of "a structured program to manufacture nuclear weapons" in Iran, and when asked directly whether Iran was "days or weeks away from building a bomb," his response was simply "no." Iran was still engaging in reportedly productive diplomatic talks over its nuclear program the day before the United States unleashed its weaponry. Security was never the point. If it were, you do not blow up the table at which the other party is prepared to sit.

This is not a war for oil, at least not in the way that cynics once imagined. American and Israeli strikes have, for the first time, targeted oil storage and refining facilities in Tehran. You do not secure a resource by incinerating it. What you do achieve, however, is a surge in global oil prices that enriches investors (including Trumps family members) and producers elsewhere, rattles markets, and inflicts immediate pain upon ordinary consumers, including New Zealanders whose import-dependent economy has absolutely no insulation from such shocks.

This is not a war to free the Iranian people either. The liberation narrative has long served as the humanitarian mask of American imperialism, and it fits no better here than it did in Iraq. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed that the United States attacked a freshwater desalination plant on Qeshm Island, with water supply to thirty villages impacted. You do not liberate a population by destroying the infrastructure upon which their survival depends. The Geneva Conventions are unambiguous: targeting facilities indispensable to civilian survival constitutes a war crime.

When Trump was asked about the desalination plant, he offered this remarkably incoherent response: "I know nothing about a desalinisation plant, other than to say, if they're complaining about..." He then trailed off into fresh denunciations of October 7, conflating Iran and Hamas as though the distinction were a bureaucratic inconvenience rather than a basic fact.

Bombing schoolchildren does not liberate them. Bombing desalination plants does not free people. It starves them, and it breeds a generation for whom the word "America" will forever cause resentment and anger across the entire world.

What this war actually is becomes clearer the more one examines the timeline. Whenever new material surfaces connecting Trump to the Epstein files, fresh documents, flight logs, or witness testimony implicating powerful men in the sexual abuse and torture of children, the news cycle conveniently fills with explosions. The pattern has become so reliable that it scarcely requires elaboration. A political war, then, fought as distraction. A racist and religious war, in which an entire nation of 90 million people is reduced by its attackers to a single, dehumanised caricature.

Trump has described Iranians as among "the most evil people ever on earth," a statement of breathtaking historical ignorance and moral vacancy from a man who has spent years cultivating relationships with some of the most genuinely evil figures of modern times.

From the moment Operation Epic Fury was launched, Trump's messaging has oscillated between outright fabrication, dealmaking and the wholesale destruction of Iran. He has called on the IRGC to surrender in exchange for immunity. He has asked Iranian diplomats to switch sides. He has declared that the new Supreme Leader will "not last long" without American approval. These are not the utterances of a statesman prosecuting a considered strategy. They are the improvisations of a man who began a war without a plan to end it, and who is now making his endgame up as the west loses allies and the body count climbs.

OMG a reporter confronts Donald Trump about Iran bombed its own elementary school with an American Tomahawk missile ridiciliously 😂🤣😭 pic.twitter.com/k7ld66Xk9W

— Furkan Gözükara (@FurkanGozukara) March 9, 2026

The war is not supported by the American people, and the Trump administration has done and said little to justify its belligerent actions. The varying and contradictory rationales from Trump's useful idiots have only offered the public simple incoherent jargon, and run contrary to available evidence.

New Zealand cannot afford to observe this catastrophe with the polite detachment of a small nation that prefers not to make a fuss. The economic consequences of a destabilised Middle East, surging oil prices, disrupted shipping lanes, and rattled global markets, land here with the same weight as anywhere. But beyond the economic, there is a moral obligation that this country has historically been willing to honour. We have a tradition of independent foreign policy that this moment demands we exercise again. But sadly our current spineless leadership is so vacuous as to appear like they're in support of Trump and Netanyahu's illegal war of annihilation.

Every missile that falls on a school, every village left without clean water, every use of illegal weapons, every civilian death that Trump waves away with a fresh denunciation of people he knows nothing about, each of these is a brick in the wall of resentment that will define how the world regards complicit Western nations for decades to come. History is not made only by those who pull triggers. It is also made by those who stay silent while the triggers are being pulled.

This is the dumbest kind of war: illegal, unjustified, racist, politically motivated, and conducted by a man who cannot name the school or desalination plant he has just ordered destroyed. New Zealand should oppose this war. Our politicians should say so, clearly and without any apology. 

United States Murders 160 Iranian School Girls

In the rubble of the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, southern Iran, during the morning of 28 February, 2026, lay the bodies of more than 165 young school girls and their teachers. Their deaths, delivered by American and Israeli missiles, are not the unfortunate side-effect of conflict. They are the predictable outcome of a reckless, illegal war launched by the Trump regime with the full-throated support of the war-criminal, Benjamin Netanyahu.

 

The official line from Washington is familiar and repulsive. The strikes, we are told, were necessary to neutralise an Iranian nuclear threat. Yet the evidence for any such threat is entirely absent. International inspectors have found no diversion of nuclear material, no weaponisation programme, no credible signs that Tehran was racing toward a bomb. The claim is a fabrication, recycled from the same playbook that justified the catastrophe in Iraq. It serves only to dress up aggression in the language of self-defence.

 

Yesterday, Al Jazeera reported:

Iran holds mass funeral for girls, staff killed in US-Israel school attack

Thousands gather in Minab for a mass funeral, chanting against the US and Israel after the school bombing.

Iran held a mass funeral ceremony for 165 schoolgirls and staff killed on Saturday in what Iran has described as a United States-Israeli attack on a girls’ school in the southern city of Minab.

The Israeli military has claimed it was not aware of any Israeli or US attacks in that area. Throughout its genocidal war on Gaza, Israel has denied multiple deadly attacks on Palestinian civilians, only to later backtrack when irrefutable evidence emerged, then terming such attacks as “accidental”.

What makes the lie particularly grotesque is the precision with which the same forces operate when it suits them. The United States and Israel can target and murder senior Iranian leaders with clinical accuracy. Drones and missiles found their marks without hesitation. Yet when the target was a school full of seven to twelve-year-old girls attending morning classes, suddenly the technology faltered and the deaths were dismissed as an unfortunate accident. The contrast isn't a failure of intelligence; it is a failure of morality.

This latest outrage fits a now-familiar pattern in Donald Trump’s behaviour. Whenever fresh details surface about his longstanding connections to Jeffrey Epstein’s paedophile network, new documents, flight logs, or witness accounts, Trump reaches for the oldest trick in his book: start a war. Domestic scandal looms, public attention must be diverted, and what better way than to pose as the strongman defending civilisation against a manufactured enemy? It is cynical, it is predictable, and it is drenched in the blood of innocents.

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT:
Iranian state media shows crowds mourning in Minab after a strike on a girls’ school killed 150 students. The UN called the attack ‘absolutely horrific’ and urged an investigation https://t.co/SIiplNUFLo pic.twitter.com/kf0JE1HavA

— Reuters (@Reuters) March 3, 2026

Netanyahu bears equal guilt. Dogged by his own political troubles and accusations of war crimes in Gaza, he has long agitated for confrontation with Iran. The two leaders feed off each other’s belligerence, each using the other to shore up domestic support while the bodies of children pile up. Their warmongering is not about security; it is about survival, political survival purchased at the price of the lives of other people’s children.

The economic consequences are already rippling outward and will reach New Zealand shores soon enough. Oil prices have surged on fears of disrupted supply routes. Global stock markets have plunged, erasing billions in value overnight. For an import-dependent economy like ours, the fallout is straightforward: higher fuel costs, rising inflation, squeezed household budgets, and the real risk of a broader slowdown. This is not abstract market volatility. It is the direct, measurable cost of two leaders choosing missiles over diplomacy, something that our current spineless Prime Minister should be condemning without hesitation.

The UN education agency @UNESCO says that the bombing of a primary school during the US and Israeli military attacks on #Iran on Saturday constitutes a grave violation of humanitarian law. https://t.co/fkXfJck0UM pic.twitter.com/tV98qaCMHS

— United Nations Geneva (@UNGeneva) March 2, 2026

The world has seen this horror movie before, and the ending is never noble. Trump and Netanyahu have once again demonstrated that civilian lives, especially those of Muslim girls in a country they have unjustly demonised, count for nothing when weighed against personal political expediency. Their sanctimonious claims of precision and necessity collapse under the weight of dead children.
 

New Zealanders, like people of goodwill everywhere, should recognise this for what it is: naked imperialism dressed up as defence. The slaughter in Minab is not an accident of war. It is the logical result of warmongers who believe they can bomb their way out of trouble at home. Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have blood on their hands that no amount of spin will wash away. The international community must name this outrage for what it is and refuse to let it pass without consequence.

National Has Failed New Zealand

The coalition government's incompetence is on full display as unemployment soars, costs increase and Kiwis pay the price, all under the unqualified watch of Nicola Willis and the bumbling leadership of Christopher Luxon.

It's been over two years since the National Party-led government slithered into power, promising a solution to the cost of living crisis. 

Remember that old chestnut from their campaign trail? Well, fast forward to 2026, and what we've got is more like a rock bottom fiasco with no solutions in sight.

Last week, RNZ reported:

 

Unemployment rate highest in a decade as it rises to 5.4%

Unemployment rose to its highest level in more than a decade, with more people chasing work than jobs created, while wage growth slowed further.

Stats NZ numbers showed the unemployment rate rising to 5.4 percent in the three months ended December, from 5.3 percent in the previous quarter. It was the highest level since March 2015.

"Over the quarter, we saw higher levels of engagement in the labour market as both employment and unemployment increased," macroeconomic spokesperson Jason Attewell said.

A total of 165,000 people were unemployed, a rise of 4000 on the previous quarter and 10,000 on a year ago.

The signs are clear to see: a prolonged downturn that's squeezing the life out of ordinary New Zealanders, skyrocketing unemployment, stubborn inflation creeping above the Reserve Bank's target, and a surge in homelessness that's as predictable as it is heartbreaking.

If this is what governing looks like, then Christopher Luxon and his crew are woefully out of their depth, unfit for a second term, and frankly, a danger to the nation's wellbeing.

Let's start with the economy, shall we? Since National took the helm, GDP has contracted repeatedly, with the latest figures showing a dismal 0.9% drop in the June 2025 quarter alone. Projections for 2026 aren't much brighter. The OECD forecasts a meagre 1.8% growth, barely enough to crawl out of the hole they've dug for ordinary New Zealander's.

The current government is taking no responsibility for their economic mismanagement. Unemployment has hit 5.4% in the December 2025 quarter, the highest in a decade, leaving 165,000 Kiwis without work. That's not just a statistic; it's families struggling, young people scarred by joblessness, and a generation burdened with an average $26,000 student debt while facing double the national unemployment rate at 12.5% for under-30s.

If you think that National keeping people poor is good for the nation, then be my guest...keep voting for a government that is hellbent on inhibiting our young citizens and our great countries future potential.

Inflation? It's at 3.1%, again edging above the RBNZ's 3% upper limit, fueled by government-administered hikes in fees, rates, and utilities (read taxes) up 10% in 2025 alone. What was it that National promised again?

Wage growth lags at a pitiful 2%, meaning real incomes are shrinking while costs soar. How convenient for a government that blames everything from the previous administration to global tariffs, but never their own slash-and-burn austerity that is driving down wages and forcing people overseas.

At the centre of this mess is Finance Minister Nicola Willis, a woman whose qualifications for the role seem as thin as the excuses she peddles. Economists should be lining up to call for her resignation, but once again the mainstream media is falling in line with the status-quo and not properly reporting.

Even the right wing is getting sick of the incompetence. Former Finance Minister Sir Roger Douglas labeled her "not up to the job," while University of Auckland's Robert MacCulloch accused her of having "no plan" beyond slashing public services. A group of 20 prominent economists penned an open letter in October 2025, slamming her policies as short-sighted and contributory to the recession, but a toothless mainstream media hasn't put any pressure on this complete failure of a Minister.

Under Willis, borrowing has ballooned more than under her predecessor Grant Robertson, despite a lack of any actual economic disasters or worldwide crisis. What exactly is her excuse?

Public debt is on track to hit 100% of GDP in decades, and the bureaucracy she promised to shrink has barely budged. Her response? A flimsy denial: "I don't agree," as if this is enough of a response while New Zealand's economy goes down the drain.

This is the same minister who claimed she was building a "rock solid" economy, while critics, including those on the right side of politics like the Taxpayers' Union accused her of fiscal fudgery. Unqualified? Absolutely. Inept? Undeniably.

And then there's Prime Minister Christopher bloody Luxon, the former airline CEO who can't seem to land a coherent sentence let alone a credible vision for New Zealand.

His popularity has tanked amid economic woes, with hecklers at Waitangi Day 2026 shouting "treason" over Treaty rollbacks and indigenous rights erosion. If tanking New Zealand's economy without any reason isn't treason, what is?

It's the same old chestnut of divide and rule. There is no doubt that the National Party and their coalition partners have used Māori as a bogyman to try and gain support from the racists and white supremacists. But that tactic will hopefully do more damage to their brand in the long-term.

It's not just left-wingers like myself who've noticed. Critics such as political commentator Matthew Hooton have eviscerated the so-called Prime Minister, calling Luxon lacking in intelligence, depth, and connection with Kiwis, reduced to empty slogans while the coalition fractures.

Luxon's response to coalition infighting and an economy in decline is to regurgitate the same old and tired business speak that nobody understands. A complete failure to connect with everyday Kiwi battlers who are just trying to survive.

But how can he manage New Zealand out of recession when he can't even manage his own speech paralysis, incompetent economic Minister or inept government?

Under Luxon, we've seen no real plan for prosperity, just more pain for the vulnerable. The human cost is stark. Homelessness has doubled in Auckland, thanks to National's cuts to emergency housing grants...down 65.5% in applications approved. Funding slashed by $78 million, leaving thousands exposed to the gruelling prospect of living on the streets.

The Cost of living crisis? Groceries, rents, and utilities keep rising, with no relief in sight as the RBNZ holds rates steady into late 2026, with Luxon's big plan for energy security a sunset industry of LNG imports at taxpayers' expense. So much for cheaper power prices.

Meanwhile, poverty surges, with over 410,000 on welfare benefits. Imagine if resources were shared more equitably instead of persecuting vulnerable families by removing benefits just to provide landlords with $2.7 billion in freebies.

Imagine if the government was actually doing what we employ them to do like boost social housing targets, fund preventive homelessness programs such as expanding Housing First beyond its paltry 300 new spots, and invest in public services rather than tax cuts for the wealthy and already bloody sorted.

We could halve rough sleeping, stabilise rents, and lift wages through fair redistribution of the great wealth that New Zealand actually has, creating a society where quality of life improves for all, not just the sorted and elite.

But under National, that's a pipe dream. This government wasn't ready to govern in 2023, it isn't ready to govern now, let alone for another three year term. Kiwis deserve better than Nicola Willis' economic mismanagement and Chris Luxon's weak word salad.