New Zealand Is Hitting Real Economic Headwinds And There’s No Relief In Sight For Kiwi Families

New Zealand is hitting real economic headwinds and there’s no relief in sight for Kiwi families, with total debt forecast to pass $200 billion by 2025. That is Federated Farmers President Wayne Langford reacting to the PREFU release yesterday. He says the $11 billion deficit forecast this year is our biggest deficit on record outside of the Covid 19 disaster years and Christchurch Earthquake and farmers are feeling the squeeze too with farm incomes falling sharply, high input costs, and increasing interest rates. Wayne Langford says if we want to dig our country out of this hole, we are going to need to really commit to growing the economy – and that means more farming, not less. Wayne Langford says the focus has been too much on constraining our farmers by wrapping them up in red tape and heaping on nothing but cost, complexity, and compliance. But the end result is record low farmer confidence and a slumping New Zealand economy. Farming accounts for more than 60% of New Zealand’s exports, but there is so much more potential for that to grow if farmers were supported with the right policy settings.