Ryan Bridge: The economic freeze has no end in sight

It’s about that time of year when it feels like winter really starts to drag.... and it must be feeling that way for Christopher Luxon, too. It‘a cold and dark and we just want to be at the beach like our poser friends in Bali or Europe.  But we endure this gloomy season safe in the knowledge that one day, in a month or so, springtime will come, the days will get longer and everything about life will just feel easier. Easy, breezy and warm. Contrast that to the economic winter we’re simultaneously enduring and you can see there’s an immediate problem. Unlike winter, which we know will end soon, this economic funk has graced us longer than the GFC's. Inflation is back on its way up.  We may have bounced out of recession for a few quarters but there’s also a good chance we’re currently back in negative growth territory. That’s after now three years of unaffordable food, mortgages, well, pretty much everything.  Politicians are arguing  - again at the weekend - about who's to blame.  The answer of course is a party and a reserve bank that went too far responding to a virus, and then continued down spending like a drunken sailor. Trump hasn't helped, just recently.  The problem for National is that voters don't seem to care much who started a fire, they just want the thing put out.  And they need to feel the numbers. Not the OCR announcement, but the mortgage re-fix on a lower rate.  Food price inflation's still going up. So things might be getting more expensive less quickly, but they're still going up in price.  Only once people feel different will the polls respond.  The biggest problem for the Coalition on waiting for that to happen, is not that some might convert to Labour voters in the meantime, but that they might jump ship altogether and move to Brisbane. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.