All good. Was more noting that even where I know you had nothing but great intentions here, Labour’s been pushing tons of “Since National Took Office” nonsense, as though there weren’t some international recession in the interim and as though we weren’t pretty overheated in the mid 2000s; seems pretty likely they’d pick up this kind of thing and attribute it entirely to government effects.

Hi Eric and Matt, Good point re the cyclical position. In this instance I was specifically interested to see how much of the ‘recession’ was really cyclical factors and how much can be explained by demographic factors. I will have a look at the 2001 data at some stage, it just wasn’t handily available in the ridiculous spreadsheets Stats NZ publish.

I despise attributing economic conditions to government of the day – policy effects are seen over much longer periods.

A comparison to 2001, strictly pre-WFF and the sharp lift in house prices, would also be of interest. Agreed.

It would be way too easy to look at your graph and put a “National’s screwed up the labour market” story on it when the (to me) more plausible alternative is that NZ was running hella-hot 2005-6 relative to historic norms.