A must read for a reality check is the ABC, as in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and their exploration of the New Zealand vs Australian economy.

Normally the ABC, like a lot of public broadcasters, tease you with a headline and end up concluding nothing so they can claim to be balanced.

Not so in this case. Gareth Hutchens is your author, and the headline is "Inflation has fallen in NZ and Aus - but which is faring better?"

It's always instructive to read specific comparisons, look at the wider picture, and crunch the numbers, and this piece does that.

Boy does it do that.

It starts with a clue - "New Zealand's economy is in recession. Australia's economy is not in recession."

He then involves the Reserve Bank. Our cash rate peaked at 5.5% while Australia's peaked at 4.35%.

In unemployment, New Zealand's got to 5.1% and is probably still climbing. Australia's is under 4%.

New Zealand's labour force hasn’t grown in the past 12 months. Australia's labour force has been consistently growing for the past 12 months.

In the past three years Australia's economy hasn’t recorded a single quarter of negative growth.

New Zealand's economy has three quarters of zero growth and three quarters of negative growth. We've just experienced six consecutive months of negative growth.

When it comes to the Reserve Bank the article points out the respective RB's pursued different approaches to employment, as regards their approach to inflation.

The approach, according to the Australian Reserve Bank, was to preserve as many of the jobs that have been created in recent years as they could.

Here's the last line in the article; "and thousands of Kiwis have revealed which strategy they prefer by buying a plane ticket to Australia".

I think most of us could have guessed all of this.

But put it in words, with stats and graphs and lay it bare and a more depressing, debilitating, deflating and anger-inducing set of numbers would be hard to find.

And those of us left have, and are, living through it.

Talk about stark.

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