Its because people get rewarded for “knowing what’s going on” – when it’s never that easy 🙂

This is why we can never read one piece of data in isolation – we need the other data, and a set of hypotheses. And this leads to fun issues of methodology, I love those ….

It doesn’t help that journalists don’t realise the limitations of these statistics when they’re reporting and sub-editors certainly don’t when they make up their misleading headlines!

Labour productivity has been doing strange things in aggregate over this period – but I buy your point, we really can’t make a definitive conclusion about what is going on at present.

Pulling everything together all we know is that rebuilding work is picking up, and at least in the residential space higher house prices is starting to drive a planned supply response in Auckland. Putting magnitudes on any of this is a big call.

Yar don’t get me wrong – I tried to make the exclusion of self-employment pretty explicit to show just how little we really know!

The hard thing for people trying to build a narrative around it is that we have different surveys saying different things, and both of them have significant issues at present.

When LEED is out, we’ll have a nice idea. Until then, the WPIP figures will give us the best idea probably :/

As does the fact that the HLFS includes self-employed workers – because of the nature of being a survey it will significantly under-estimate self employment numbers.

The construction sector both for private housing and commercial construction revolves around sub-contracting arrangements that are basically employment relationships but “technically” not, temporary and casual labour by way of recruitment firms and the reality that a lot of construction work at the margins will be “off the books”.