Nicola Willis talks to us like we’re twits

Monday, 29 September 2025

Verity Johnson is an Auckland-based writer and business owner.

Opinion: I think Nicola Willis might be the most irritating public figure in New Zealand right now.

Which, considering what David Seymour’s been up to for the past 18 months, is quite an achievement. But whilst Seymour has simply elevated, ‘acting like a prick,’ into a brand strategy, Nicola Willis has done something much more dangerous.

She talks to us like we’re twits.

Last week, Willis came out and blamed our-even-more-dismal-than-expected fall in GDP for the June quarter on international pressures from Trump. That stats are out, we’re not growing. Actually, we’re contracting. But, according to Willis, this isn’t their fault. We’re just a poor little rubber duckie getting thrown out with Trump’s bathwater of global economic chaos.

Now, I’m not an economist. And you’re probably not an economist. But that doesn’t actually matter. Because what you and I lack in the finer understanding of the differences between monetary and fiscal policy, we make up for in common sense.

I.e. we know when someone’s treating us like a mug.

And that right there is us being treated like mugs. She may as well have stood up there and said, “and whilst I’m here, can I interest you in an opportunity to make $100,000 a month whilst working from home and a champagne Mercedes?”

Because, even us laymans at home can immediately see the problem with blame the Americans. Namely, if this is really the fault of “international pressures”, why are we the only country in contraction?

Because we are. According to the JP Morgan global stats, we’re the only one among our global trading partners (including Australia, the EU, the UK and China) shrinking. Everyone else is navigating the same international pressures. And whilst they obviously have their own national economic vulnerabilities, we’re the only ones going backwards.

So what does that suggest, hmm? That maybe, just maybe, this Government has some small part to play in how we ended up in this mess in the first place?

But the thing is, they know that they can keep saying things like “oh it’s international pressures”, or “oh we inherited a mess from Labour”, and we won’t feel confident challenging them. They can blame airy global or historical economic factors because the average person doesn’t know their Keynes from their Keepcup.

(Although regardless, the majority of us now do think this mess is the Government’s fault. 37.6% of us now blaming the government for this mess, and only 30.8% the previous government).

So here’s some things to know.

We already had tight monetary policy when National came to power in 2023 (eg. high interest rates, set by the reserve bank trying to curb Labour era inflation.)

But National chose that moment to introduce super tight fiscal policy too (think tax and the stuff tax pays for). And these two were way tighter than what other countries were doing, despite us having comparatively smaller debt.

There were also huge freezes on spending on big public stuff.

That scared the pants off a lot of people. And then we had a massive round of job cuts to the public sector. That scared the remaining pants off everyone else. (Bearing in mind that cities like Auckland were already on their knees after an eviscerating 2020 - 2024.)

The Government assumed they could step back, and business and households would step in to fill the spending gap. This had worked in 1991 to get us out of a recession.

But, as Bernard Hickey points out, this doesn't work 30 years later. Households carry way more household debt than then. And did I mention everyone having the pants scared off them about job losses? Scared people don’t spend cash. (As evidenced by the 60% drop in retail spending across small businesses and all the landlords banking their tax-cut cash and not spending it.)

Basically, the government stepped back, assumed we’d step forward to cover it, and we didn’t.

And sure, there’s a lot of other stuff you can’t fit into 800 words (low productivity, everyone leaving, the cyclical nature of markets) But one of the biggest reasons we’re here right now is the Government made a bad call on how to get us out of a post-Covid recession.

Now, I’m not surprised that Nicola Willis isn’t owning up to that.

Because to tell the truth at this point would be to say that the Government really doesn’t know how to fix the economy. (And if they don’t know that, then what on earth do they know?)

But the next time they try to talk to you like you’re a garden gnome, at least you know what they’re not telling you.

Correction: This story has been updated to make it clear that the majority of spending has been frozen, not cut.