Author: zittrexstore

Gareth Kiernan is chief forecaster at Infometrics.

OPINION: A lot of business questions in the election lead-up focus on the possible pause in economic activity due to uncertainty before the polls. The common logic is that firms will wait to see how their operating environment might change post-election before committing to big investment or other spending decisions.

A lot of central government work also grinds to a halt because there’s no point starting a project that will be consigned to the scrapheap in three months’ time. But now that we’ve all been out and voted – with a by-election to go in Port Waikato – we can all get on with things again, right?

Not so fast! Although Saturday night’s result suggests that coalition negotiations between National and ACT will be a lot simpler than if NZ First was involved as well, special votes mean that Winston Peters is not entirely out of the equation. We won’t get certainty about the future direction of government until the final counts are in on November 3, and if NZ First needs to be a late addition to the coalition mix, expect the process of policy compromise and culling to be extended into the second half of next month.

Once the negotiations are done and dusted, the new administration will want to hurry things along, with a likely “100-day plan” and mini-Budget before Christmas so that key tax and spending changes can be implemented by April next year. National’s campaign has also emphasised its desire to fast-track key infrastructure projects and improve on Labour’s perceived lack of delivery throughout the last few years.

But even for projects that are reasonably advanced in terms of planning and design, National is likely to find that hurrying these projects into the construction phase is easier said than done, especially given that resources in the infrastructure sector are still highly stretched. More broadly, implementing significant changes to government departmental priorities is like turning around an oil tanker – it’s a big ship, and it takes time for the effects of changes to become apparent.

What does the data tell us?

We’ve looked through GDP data around election time over the last 30 years to see whether there are any discernible trends in different parts of the economy. Our chart shows the quarterly growth rates for each variable from one quarter before the election to two quarters after. We’ve limited our analysis to elections since 1996, on the basis that MMP provides more post-election uncertainty than first past the post. We’ve also excluded 2020 because the pandemic had such a massive effect on many of the economic outcomes that year.

Government consumption shows the most consistent quarterly differences, with strong spending growth during the election quarter followed by a lack of growth the following quarter. Rather than a cynical last-ditch attempt by the incumbent administration to boost economic activity at election time, this pattern is more likely to reflect genuine spending associated with the election. For example, this year’s estimated election cost of $180 million could add as much as 0.9% to government consumption in a three-month period.

Weakness in household spending around and immediately following election time is perhaps more pronounced than might have been expected, and it suggests that consumers go into their shells around polling time. Government investment spending looks to be weaker after an election, although these quarter-to-quarter figures are notoriously volatile, so it’s difficult to draw a particularly firm conclusion from the data. Business investment also tends to be quite noisy, but the data doesn’t seem to support the orthodox thinking that firms pause their capex spending around election time.

Maybe it’s just a Wellington thing

Sometimes in Wellington, we probably overstate the short-term effects of government on the broader economy. This viewpoint reflects central government’s outsized role in Wellington, with the sector’s share of the region’s economy almost three times the size of its share nationwide.

If there’s one indicator that demonstrates the government-centric nature of Wellington, it’s house prices. In our chart, ignore the fact that house prices have risen faster around the times Labour has been elected, compared to National, because that gap will largely be due to other influences on the housing market. Instead, look at Wellington’s performance compared to the rest of the country for the year around polling time.

Across the last 11 elections, house prices in the Wellington urban area have outperformed the nationwide average by 3.3 percentage points when a Labour-led government has been elected, but they have fallen behind the nationwide average by 4.4 percentage points when a National-led government has been elected. There are clear effects on confidence in the region’s housing market, and presumably its job market as well, depending on which party is calling the shots.

Things are unlikely to be any different after the 2023 election result. National’s aim to reduce departmental spending suggests that Wellington’s property market and, by extension, its economy will struggle to keep up with the rest of the country in coming months.

With the election now over, any pause in activity around the rest of the country while the make-up of the next government is confirmed is likely to be more short-lived than in Wellington. Nevertheless, it will still take time for political leaders to truly stamp their mark on economic outcomes during the next three years.

CNN  —  Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been fleeing south through the battered streets of Gaza after the Israeli military told them to leave northern areas of the densely populated strip.

Parts of the south are becoming even more crowded and overstretched, Gazans say, as waves of Palestinians abandon their homes in the wake of Israel’s statement, which came ahead of an anticipated ground assault by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

More than half of Gaza’s 2 million residents live in the northern section that Israel said should evacuate. Many families, some of whom were already internally displaced, are now crammed into an even smaller portion of the 140-square-mile territory.

The IDF said Saturday it would allow safe movement on specified streets between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. local time (3 – 9 a.m. ET). Residents were advised to use this window to move from the northern Beit Hanoun to Khan Yunis in the south – a roughly 20-mile distance of rubble-strewn streets.

The evacuation statement has been described by rights groups as well as some neighboring countries as a breach of international humanitarian law. Jordan’s foreign minister described it as a “war crime.”

The UN’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which was forced to move its central operations from Gaza City to a location in southern Gaza following the Israeli statement, on Saturday described the evacuation as an “exodus,” and said that “nearly 1 million people have been displaced in one week alone.”

The evacuation advisory came after Israel imposed a complete siege on Gaza in response to a brutal attack launched a week ago by Hamas, which left at least 1,300 dead in Israel.

At least 2,215 civilians, including 724 children and 458 women, have been killed in Gaza, according to the Palestinian health ministry, as the Israeli military continues to pound the territory.

Palestinians who fled south, and those who are still north, are rapidly running out of food and water. There is no more electricity, and those with fuel-powered generators will soon live in complete blackout. Internet access, through which residents communicate their plight to the world, is also shrinking.

Mohamed Hamed, a 36-year-old resident of Gaza City, moved southward to Nuseirat, a refugee camp some five kilometers north-east of Deir al-Balah – which he was told was safe.

Hamed fled the north with 30 family members, including his extended relatives, four children and his wife, who is over eight months pregnant.

“In this situation, we’re afraid that she goes into labor, and we wouldn’t know where to go,” he told CNN.

The family has no access to medical care and are crammed into a single apartment with no electricity, and quickly depleting food and water.

“There is no electricity, there is no water. Bakeries are working but these are their final hours, as the fuel they need is running out,” he said, adding that “the food we have may last us a day or two.”

Speaking to CNN by phone, Hamed said that Nuseirat is a small area yet has received large crowds of displaced Palestinians from the north. Drinking water is only available in mineral water bottles, he said, which are dwindling as crowds rush to stock up.

“Everything in supermarkets and shops was used up,” he said.

Shelling in Nuseirat is intense, but not as bad as it was in Gaza City, where neighborhoods were “entirely wiped out,” he said.

Hamed said that the time provided by the IDF for “safe passage” southward may not be enough for vast number of Palestinians that need to flee, and that some Gazans in the north refuse to leave fearing forceful displacement into Egypt.

For many, that would mean displacement for the second time. The majority of Gaza’s residents today are already refugees from areas that fell under Israeli control in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

“People are afraid of this, of being pushed to Egypt,” he said, adding that the airstrikes have been “horrifying,” with some areas being targeted for the first time despite the years of conflict between Hamas and Israel.

But not everyone in Gaza’s north has heeded the IDF’s call to move southwards. Palestinian journalist Hashem Al-Saudi and his family have only moved from east to west of Gaza City, which is among areas the IDF told civilians to evacuate.

Residents are forced to leave their homes to fill up water tanks, the 33-year-old told CNN by phone, which puts them at risk of being struck by Israeli missiles.

Food is scarce, he said, and may not last his 11-member family more than three or four days.

“I say this jokingly, but those who are on a diet are eating more than us.”

Al-Saudi says that not only do they have nowhere to stay if they moved south, but that the route itself is unsafe. “Even those who moved south were hit by airstrikes,” he told CNN.

“Nowhere is safe in the Gaza Strip, from Rafah (south) to Beit Hanoun in the north,” Al-Saudi said, adding that everywhere is targeted, including “homes, shelters hospitals and places of worship.”

“Everyone on this piece of land is targeted by the Israeli military, which from the start did not differentiate between civilian and soldier.”

CNN has geolocated and authenticated five videos from the scene of a large explosion Friday along a route for civilians south of Gaza City that Israel said the following day would be safe.

The videos show many dead bodies amid a scene of extensive destruction. Some of those bodies are on a flatbed trailer that appears to have been used to carry people away from Gaza City. They include at least several children. There are also many badly burned and damaged cars.

It’s unclear what caused the widespread devastation; the explosion occurred on Salah Al-Deen street on Friday afternoon. CNN has reached out to IDF for comment on any airstrikes in the same location.

“The situation is much worse than what you see on television,” he said. Many bodies remain unidentified, and corpses are being stored in refrigerators not made for storing human remains, Al-Saudi said.

“Streets are filled with rubble and reek of blood.”

The Israeli government launched a complete blockade on essential goods entering Gaza earlier this week, prompting warnings from human rights groups who say the siege is in violation of international law.

Israel, which administers most of the electricity, water, fuel and some of the food inside the Palestinian enclave, already imposes a stringent land, sea and air blockade, but used to permit some trade and humanitarian aid through two crossings that it controls.

Refaat Alareer, 44, a literature professor in Gaza City, said Thursday – before Israel told Gazans to evacuate – the shelves in his local supermarket are emptying every day. He has been able to buy cans of tinned tuna, adding that he avoided purchasing perishable goods because the lack of electricity means refrigerated food “will rot.”

Alareer, who lives with his wife and their six children, said his neighbors insist on leaving milk powder on the shelves – so that other parents can feed their own families.

“I’ve never seen people this disciplined,” he said. “I didn’t buy a single thing that is more expensive than it was last week.

“(What is) so beautiful about, you know, being in Gaza, being in Palestine, the solidarity.”

More than half of the residents in Gaza are food insecure and live under the poverty line, according to UNRWA. Alareer warned that blue collar workers, farmers and street vendors “will suffer the most,” from the blockade.

“We’re bracing for the worst. What happened is extremely genocidal in every sense of the word,” he added.

Aseel Mousa, a 25-year-old freelance journalist in Gaza, said she is unable to communicate with loved ones in other parts of the enclave, as electricity supplies diminish.

“We cannot connect with the world,” she told CNN on Thursday. “We hear the bombings, the air strikes and we don’t know where they are exactly.

“We cannot check up on our relatives who live in different areas of the Gaza Strip, we cannot reach them as there is no internet and there is no electricity.” She said on Friday that she relocated with her family from western Gaza to the south.

On Friday, Alareer told CNN he and his family see no choice but to remain in the north – despite Israel’s evacuation advisory – because they had “nowhere else to go.”

“Israel bombs (are) everywhere,” he said.

Gaza has already been under blockade since Hamas took control of the territory in 2007.

Egypt imposes a land blockade, while Israel imposes an air, sea and land blockade. The siege was completely tightened after Hamas’ attack on Israel a week ago, and the only remaining route into or outside of the Gaza Strip is the Rafah Crossing, which connects Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai.

While some aid has arrived in Egypt, it is yet to cross the border, which earlier this week was struck by Israel on the Palestinian side, according to Palestinian and Egyptian officials.

Egypt on Thursday stressed that its Rafah Crossing was however open, a claim CNN could not independently verify.

A Palestinian border official told CNN on Saturday morning that concrete slabs were being placed at the Rafah border crossing into Egypt, blocking all gates. The slabs were being placed by a winch visible on the Egyptian side of the crossing, the official said.

The official added that hundreds of Palestinians with foreign passports have been sat in the streets for hours, waiting to cross. “The gates are closed, and no one is being let through,” he told CNN.

CNN has reached out to Egyptian officials for comment.

Tokyo, Japan CNN  —  Japan’s government on Friday asked a court to order the dissolution of the Unification Church branch in Japan following the assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe in July 2022.

The government’s move comes after a months-long probe into the church, formally known in Japan as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification.

The investigation followed claims by the suspected shooter, Tetsuya Yamagami, that he fatally shot Abe because he believed the leader was associated with the church, which Yamagami blamed for bankrupting his family through the excessive donations of his mother, a member.

Earlier in January, Japanese prosecutors indicted Yamagami on murder and firearm charges.

The government’s investigation concluded that the group’s practices – including fund-raising activities that allegedly pressured followers to make exorbitant donations – violated the 1951 Religious Corporations Act.

That law allows Japanese courts to order the dissolution of a religious group if it has committed an act “clearly found to harm public welfare substantially.”

The Tokyo District Court will now make a judgment based on the evidence submitted by the government, according to Japan’s public broadcaster NHK.

This is the third time the Japanese government has sought a dissolution order for a religious group accused of violating the act.

It also sought to dissolve the Aum Shinrikyo cult, after some of its members carried out a deadly 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, which left dozens dead and thousands injured, and Myokaku-ji Temple, whose priests defrauded people by charging them for exorcisms. The courts ruled with the government on both orders.

The Unification Church in Japan has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, pledging reform and labeling the news coverage against it as “biased” and “fake.”

On Thursday, it issued a statement, saying it was “very regrettable” that the government was seeking the dissolution order, particularly as it had been “working on reforming the church” since 2009. It added that it would make legal counterarguments against the order in court.

If disbanded, the Unification Church, founded by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon in South Korea in 1954, would lose its status as a religious corporation in Japan and be deprived of tax benefits. However, it could still operate as a corporate entity.

Experts argue that an order to disband the group completely could take years to process and could even risk pushing the entity’s activities underground.

The Unification Church became known worldwide for mass weddings, in which thousands of couples get married simultaneously, with some brides and grooms meeting their betrothed for the first time on their wedding day.

Public scrutiny of the church in Japan increased after Abe was fatally shot during an election campaign speech last July.

Abe’s alleged assailant told police that his family had been ruined because of the huge donations his mother made to a religious group, which he alleged had close ties to the late former prime minister, according to NHK.

A spokesperson for the Unification Church confirmed to reporters in Tokyo that the suspect’s mother was a member, Reuters reported, but said neither Abe nor the suspected killer were members.

Following Abe’s death local media carried a series of reports claiming various other lawmakers of the country’s ruling party had links to the church, prompting Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to order an investigation.

Kishida told reporters Thursday that ruling party lawmakers had cut ties with the religious group, amid concerns that the Unification Church had been trying to wield political influence.

Since last November, Japan’s Ministry of Cultural Affairs has questioned and sought to obtain documents from the Unification Church while also collecting testimonies from around 170 people who say they were pressured into making massive donations known in Japan as “spiritual sales.”

The practice involves asking followers to buy objects like urns and amulets on the grounds that doing so will appease their ancestors and save future generations, according to Sakurai Yoshihid, a religious studies expert at Hokkaido University.

CNN has contacted the Unification Church for an official comment but has not yet heard back.

This is not the first time the Unification Church has been at the center of a controversy.

Naomi Honma, a former Unification Church member, told CNN that between 1991 and 2003, she worked on a legal case called “Give Us Back Our Youth,” a lawsuit that alleged the Unification Church had used deceptive and manipulative techniques to recruit unsuspecting members of the public.

This, they argued, had the potential to violate the freedom of thought and conscience upheld by Article 20 of Japan’s constitution.

After a 14-year trial, multiple plaintiff testimonies and a 999-page report outlining the “mind control” process of the group, the trial had its moment.

The Sapporo District Court made a landmark ruling in favor of 20 former Unification Church members who had sued the group as part of the case. It ordered the Unification Church to pay roughly 29.5 million yen ($200,000) in damages for recruiting and indoctrinating people “while hiding the church’s true identity” and for “coercing some former members into purchasing expensive items and donating large amounts of money.”

In a separate controversy, between 1987 and 2021, the Unification Church in Japan incurred claims for damages over the sale of amulets and urns that totaled around $1 billion, according to the National Lawyers Network against Spiritual Sales – a group established in 1987 specifically to oppose the Unification Church.

Nobutaka Inoue, an expert on contemporary Japanese religion at Kokugakuin University, is critical of the techniques used by the church to recruit and raise funds. However, he also notes that some of its members felt happy and at peace after making donations to the Unification Church.

Some critics of the Unification Church say the government’s actions don’t go far enough as it could still operate as a non-religious group. One option for the government would be to seek a court order stripping the church of its corporate status, too, but experts say that could take up to two years to process.

Sakurai, the religious studies expert, cautioned that if the Unification Church loses its status as a religious corporation, it would no longer be under the control of Japan’s Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs, making it harder to regulate its activities.

Sakurai pointed to the case of Aum, noting that after the sarin gas attack the Japanese government revoked recognition of the group as a religious organization but continued to regulate it through a new law passed in 1999 that authorized continued police surveillance of its activities.

But making a new law that would allow the government to continue to watch over the Unification Church’s activities – even if one could be passed – would not work as well, Sakurai warned.

“(Aum) only numbers over 1,200 members or so; however, the Unification Church has penetrated many layers of Japan’s society – some members are housewives, some work in factories, others are teachers, so the police cannot watch all the movements or activities of the Unification Church,” Sakurai said.

Some experts say Japan needs to do more to educate the public about non-traditional religions, which some see as having a rising influence in society.

Kimiaki Nishida, a social psychologist and chairman of the Japan Society for Cult Prevention and Recovery (JSCPR), pointed out that state and religion were separated in Japan following World War II, and the new constitution forbade teaching religious studies at school.

This made religion essentially a taboo topic, Nishida said, and to this day, religious education is not provided at elementary, junior, or high schools in Japan, unlike in most EU member states.

This, according to Toshiyuki Tachikake, a professor at Osaka University specializing in cult countermeasures since 2009, has left students – particularly at university campuses – vulnerable to being pressured into recruitment.

He and other experts say more should be done to educate young Japanese about religion.

“We need religious education in schools. Giving someone a broad understanding of different religions and their teachings allows them to make an informed decision on whether they want to join a certain group if a recruiter ever approached them,” said Tachikake.