Metaphor for today

Protecting your economy from vulnerabilities is like protecting you computer.  The more you reduce how vulnerable your computer is, the worse your computer’s performance is.

In the same way, the more we introduce policies to try and reduce New Zealand’s vulnerability to shocks, the more we lower the average performance of the New Zealand economy in the future.

This is a trade-off, and we need to make sure we have a clear idea of what the trade-off is, and that society is willing to accept the costs associated with it, before we introduce any policies to reduce “vulnerabilities”.