ADVANCE New Zealand
A non political design for our economic future

MEDIA RELEASE

Date: Thursday, 16 October 2008

Advance New Zealand calls for end to debt wildfire.

Labour’s 08 election promise to ‘borrow and spend New Zealand out of a depression’ can only result in growing the debt base of the NZ economy.

Although this promise reflects the first Labour government’s actions during the Great Depression, it must be noted the 1935 government utilised the facilities of the Reserve Bank to make the funding available for specific infrastructure projects, which lifted New Zealand out of those dark years.

However, the 2008 proposal is to borrow the money on the international markets in the form of interest-bearing debt. Servicing that debt will be a burden on tax-payers well into the future. What are the ethics or morality of expecting tomorrow’s tax-payers to service yesterday’s stuff-ups?

Using more interest bearing debt to get through a problem caused by too much interest bearing debt is real dumb when all it does is feed what Bill English refers to as “the fat wallets of Wall Street”.

Advance NZ proposes a uniquely Kiwi mechanism to provide infrastructure funding interest free. The process of injecting such funding into infrastructure is not inflationary because once a specific project is completed and paid for the funding stream is cancelled, just as an overdraft to a bank is cancelled when it is repaid.

All banks create credit as interest bearing debt. But while the private banks employ a mechanism which creates money as interest-bearing debt, our publicly owned Reserve Bank is able to provide a funding stream interest free.

The interest-free funding option offers the best pathway through the money jungle for all New Zealanders. Borrowing to spend simply pours fuel on an already raging wild fire.

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