Ryan Bridge: A billion-dollar Gamble on oil

New Zealand First wants to spend a billion bucks looking for oil and gas fields to make our country rich again.

Well, richer.

A bit more like the place our kids go to earn a living, Australia, who've pulled in $430 billion in mining royalties over the past decade alone.

A bit more like Norway, where per person GDP is $153,000, one of the highest in the world, ours is only about $85,000.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
New Zealand first wants to spend a billion bucks looking
for oil and gas fields to make our country rich again,
well richer bit more like the place that our kids
are going to earn a living at the moment Australia,
who've pulled in a whopping four hundred and thirty billion
dollars in mining royalties billion over the past decade alone.
That's a half a trillion dollars in ten years justin royalties,

(00:23):
not including tax. They want to be a bit more
like Norway, where per person GDP is one hundred and
fifty thousand dollars per person, one of the highest in
the world. Ours is eighty five thousand per person. The Norwegians,
of course, got a big boost from oil in the
sixties and beyond. They've got a two trillion dollar wealth
fund which pays for the stuff the Greens and labor
here could only dream of. And herein lies one of

(00:45):
the two big problems we have in this country. The
first one is not that we don't want more children
out of poverty, or a generous welfare state or universal pensions.
The problem is how you pay for them. Debt is
a downward spiral, but it's how we've been operating here
since twenty nineteen. That's the last time the books were
actually balanced in New Zealand. So there is logic in

(01:07):
dragging oil and gas up out of the ocean to
pay for stuff, especially as the rest of the world,
including the US, is doing this anyway, Which brings us
to the second problem with this issue and Winston's plans
for it, And that's the opposition. Of course, what's the
point in US spending a billion bucks to look for
the oil if the next government won't let anybody drill
for it. The only way this makes sense is if

(01:29):
you get big parties to agree with each other. We
actually need this stuff, We need another feather in our
bow economically speaking. Right now, Andy Burnham apparently is having
this very debate with his top advisors, including Mike Munro,
who worked for Disinder Adern. The British press there reporting
that Burnham is about to announce plans for new oil
and gas drilling in the North Sea. Remember labor, they're bandit.

(01:53):
Burnham's a union guy, a worker guy, a more common
sense guy, so they say, and therefore is about to
turn the black tap back on Chris Hipkins in New
Zealand is not that guy for the New Zealand Labor Party,
and until the opposition puts down its giant no sign,
then spending a billion bucks looking for oil is pretty

(02:14):
much throwing money down the duney at this point. For
more from Early Edition with Ryan Bridge, listen live to
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