Friday 12 October 2012

Parker's Stance on QE Bodes Ill for Labour-Green Coalition

Deal Breaker: Labour's finance spokesperson, David Parker's, public re-statement of his party's allegiance to core neoliberal convictions - like the political "independence" of the Reserve Bank - means that any coalition agreement with a weaker Green Party is bound to end in tears.
 
THE MOST DEPRESSING CONTRIBUTION, so far, to the debate over Quantitative Easing (QE) belongs to Labour’s finance spokesperson, David Parker. Responding to the Greens’ call for two billion dollars’ worth of QE, to bring down the value of the Kiwi Dollar, Mr Parker stated: “I’m not in the camp that says the Government should direct the Reserve Bank as to what monetary policy tool it uses, whether it should be lower interest rates, or loan to valuation ratios or some sort of levy on capital inflows or quantitative easing”.
 
This is the old economic orthodoxy speaking, and proof of Labour’s inability to free itself from the neoliberal ideology of the 1980s. It also gives the lie to all those who have taken comfort from Mr Parkers’ much publicised “conversations” with internationally renowned economists like Joseph Stiglitz.
 
Had Mr Parker been genuinely influenced by the likes of Mr Stiglitz and his colleague, Paul Krugman, he would have been willing to challenge the notion that interfering politicians’ hands must be kept away from the big economic levers. But, by pointedly distancing himself from those who are willing to direct the Reserve Bank to use its monetary tools for the public good, Mr Parker has proved that Labour, like Louis XVIII, has “learned nothing and forgotten nothing”.
 
He has also provided an alarming glimpse of what is likely to happen if National’s increasingly inept economic management leads to a change of government in 2014. Should a David Shearer-led Labour Party emerge from that election with the largest share of the Left Vote, and with Mr Parker as its preferred Finance Minister, it’s clear that the Greens’ much more radical, people-first, approach to economic management will be over-ruled.
 
New Zealand will experience again what it was forced to endure between 1996 and 1998: a coalition government at odds with itself; seething with intrigue; and prone to sudden and destabilising political lurches. In this scenario, Russel Norman will play the role of Winston Peters to Mr Shearer’s Jenny Shipley and Mr Parker’s Bill Birch. And, just as the National-NZ First coalition government, riven by ideological differences, fell apart after less than two years, so too will any Labour-Green coalition in which the primacy of politics is not the activating principle of both parties.
 
Presented with Mr Parker’s proof of Labour’s unreconstructed neoliberalism, what should the Greens do? Mr Peters’ experience as New Zealand’s one and only “Treasurer” should warn them that the smaller party in a coalition government cannot expect to exercise more than a token amount of economic influence. Treasury, as the most powerful ministry, will always end up in the hands of the most powerful coalition partner.
 
But denied effective control of the next government’s overall economic direction, what hope have the Greens of avoiding the fate of every other small party which has nailed its colours to the mast of a much larger vessel? While Labour remains a neoliberal party what chance has it of effectively addressing problems caused by neoliberal policies? And what chance have the Greens of avoiding being cast as part of the problem, instead of what they have always claimed to be: the beginning of the solution?
 
Mr Norman’s advocacy of QE and his championing of New Zealand’s exporters and manufacturers is not only politically courageous – but very shrewd. By promising to take the QE lever of economic power into their own hand the Greens have forced Labour to reveal its own.
 
Mr Parker, backed by his leader, has signalled Labour’s unwillingness to abandon that creaking foundation of neoliberal statecraft, the “independent” (i.e. subservient to the financial sector) Central Bank. In doing so, he has confirmed Labour’s unwillingness to do any more than administer New Zealand’s economic decline.
 
The Greens’ path forward is as challenging as it is clear. Mr Norman should announce that a coalition with the Labour Party will only be contemplated from a position of strength. Only if the Greens are the Left’s largest party.
 
This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 12 October 2012.

33 comments:

Brendan McNeill said...

Chris

You are a student of history both recent and past. What was Zimbabwe's experience with Quantitative Easing (QE)? Did it benefit or harm the people?

What was the Weimar republic's experience with QE, did it benefit or harm the people?

Unless we truly live in a world of voodoo economics, printing money increases the supply and devalues the currency, this is outcome I believe you are arguing for in your article. Who does the devaluation hurt most? Those with savings (the prudent) and those on fixed incomes (beneficiaries), those who have loaned New Zealand money (our creditors) those who are dependent to any extent upon imports like oil (everyone).

Most of all our credibility as a responsible player in the world of global economics is diminished, making it more expensive for us to borrow money abroad. I understand we still need to borrow about a billion dollars a month to keep delivering the Government services upon which so many Kiwis now depend.

Yes, a high dollar is hurting our exporters margins, and potentially impacting upon employment, but I put it to you that should we engage in QE, the negative impact upon our economy and our reputation would far exceed the cost to New Zealand of our present exchange rate.

I'm surprised that no one has explained this to the Greens.

mark said...

Off topic but Chris well done on challenging the supercilious Leslie Max on her wrong headed remarks about social workers.

Nick said...

Labour was the party of my adolescence: as a newly adult I was a party member. Rogers ideological back flip drove me away.

Since then Labour has been a stranger to me: it represents what I regard as a coalition of economic and social liberals, plus "identity" groups. These coexist within a broad libertarian umbrella, tolerant consequently of libertarian economics. My perception is that these groups represent their interests in a primary sense and expect allegiance from the other groups on a broad "fuzzy" so called "socialist" front. It is of course not anymore socialist than it is capitalist.

From a once Labour voter viewpoint I cannot see that Labour is going to do anymore than represent issues that I see as secondary, and ignore the primary ones (i.e. Labour will merely wrench concessions from capital for specific interest groups, instead of setting a socialist agenda for the whole left). My vote goes elsewhere.



newsworthy said...

Hi Chris

Not one of your great article. Russell Norman is talking bollocks. Since when do our dairy farmers and aluminium smelters need assistance from the greens? They are doing OK. Some countries (e.g) like the USA feel the need to indulge in quantitative easing (money printing) because they have stuffed their economies through inept and corrupt banking practices. NZ has no such problem. David Parker is on the money as far as I am concerned.

Anonymous said...

Is this the same David Parker who wrote, in his Red Alert blog of September 12:

"He [Stiglitz] said inflation targeting always suffered from fundamental limitations... He said these limitations were and are fundamental, and 'still have not been unambiguously owned up to'."

With this and other comments, Stiglitz has nailed the whole neoliberal mindset, and it seems Parker can report it without irony, not even realising who Stiglitz was talking about.

It really is about time Parker and others on the right of the Labour Party unambiguously own up to the fact that the neoliberal economic policy they still inexplicably adhere to is largely responsible for the growing inequalities this country faces.

Like you, Chris, I hope the Greens don't lose their nerve in the face of the baubles of office.

Chris Trotter said...

The phenomenon you allude to in your references to Zimbabwe and Weimar Germany, Brendan, is hyper-inflation - and arises when governments issue vast amounts of paper currency in which the citizenry simply refuses to believe, thereby setting-off a devastating inflationary spiral.

This is not what QE - in spite of the media's insistence that it involves "printing money" - is all about.

The USA, Japan and the UK have all applied QE over the course of the past four years. Has it forced them to issue trillion-dollar Pound, Yen or Dollar notes? Of course not.

Mild inflation was the policy of most post-war governments. Not only did it allow the US to retire its wartime debt, but it permitted the US "middle class" (and what the rest of the world calls the working-class) to pay off their mortgages and other debts with gradually depreciating currency.

At the same time, as inflation lifted people into higher tax brackets, "fiscal drag" allowed the government to collect more revenue in the form of income tax.

These mildly inflationary policies facilitated the greatest expansion in the economic and social well-being among ordinary human-beings in recorded history.

What undermined it all was LBJ's foolhardy attempt to build the Great Society, wage the War on Poverty and keep half-a-million GIs on the ground in Vietnam without substantially raising most Americans' taxes.

Keynesianism works - but only if you apply it at both ends of the cycle. Spending dollars you don't have when times are hard, taxing the excess of dollars in citizens' hands when times are good.

Your solutions are bad at all points of the cycle because their only objective is to starve the state of resources.

During times of recession fiscal austerity and tax-cuts for the wealthy reduce the state's capacity to off-set the worst aspects of economic contraction.

In boom times monetary looseness and even bigger tax-cuts simply send too many dollars in pursuit of too few goods - the classic definition of inflation.

The Right's solution to this sort of inflation is, of course, to smash the trade unions (and with them the wage-price spiral) and then to sit back and watch the fall-off in consumer spending generate a recession which can only be fought by - you guessed it - more fiscal austerity.

Basically, Brendan, you believe in building your comfortable middle-class world on the backs of the poor and the very poor. Such policies are immoral, economically destructive and, in almost all cases, ineffective.

Anonymous said...

Does anyone have any idea what a small level of QE would do?

Personally it seems like a short term fix, one which may be needed for a while perhaps.

We have a housing crisis where NZers are living in damp, poorly built, small and expensive dwellings.

As the Seddon government noted in the early 1900's, rent was eating up a massive disproportionate segment of workers wages. It was a third then. Now it's often much more.

Conservatives like to talk about government housing slums, they forget to mention the private housing slums. Which are worse these days because they're built on the cheap. You should see the tiny garretts in Auckland CBD. They're bloody horrible.

Printing money to build houses for low income kiwis may be one case where QE is worth it.

One problem is, once the taboo on this is broken, governments in the Muldoon tradition could really go to town on it.

The one saving grace is that we have elections every 3 years so if the experiment fails, we can kick them out.

Personally I think the big barrier to the things we definitely need (like improved public transport, diversification of industry, significant investment in public housing and state employer of last resort policy to end intergenerational and long term unemployment) is because of the antipathy to Chinese investment.

We have a racist distrustful attitudes to the Chinese. This is unfortunate because the Chinese were and still are a bit, incredibly well disposed to us.

Helen Clark's decision not to get involved in the Iraq war increased our standing with countries like China who love the idea of a nonaligned NZ.

We should get over our ignorant and distrustful attitude I reckon.

Another problem is our lack of far sightedness and seizing of opportunities among some of our eminent business people.

Recently for example, our wool industry was close to collapsing despite the fact that NZ wool is the highest quality in the world and could benefit from value added approaches.

Also as Gareth Morgan is fond of explaining, the super rich in NZ get away with paying very little tax.

I actually agree with the conservatives in that you can't keep increasing taxes on the wealthy. But the super rich should pay a big chunk and the average rich should pay a good slice as well.

Jigsaw said...

Economics aside I am amazed that anyone could consider that Labour and the Greens will ever be able to work together. Mostly it's the Greens who don't consider any compromise on anything at all. They are the purists and politics is not for them-they are above all of that. If such a coalition ever does come to past we will be in for not only policies that will beat the country about but will be unmatched for backstabbing and infighting on a scale not seen before.

OneTrack said...

andremahon123 - I would say the super rich and the average rich (pretty ill-defined terms) already pay a hell of a lot of tax in NZ ie more than a big chunk or a good slice. Push them too hard and/or throw that money away on wasteful follys, and they might just say see you later (and take their factories and jobs and skills with them)

wayne said...

Well Chris, you have given the voters a choice on the left: a Labour left coalition or a Green left coalition. If that is the option I go with the Labour led coalition. Your article explains precisely why that is the better outcome! No doubt Russell Norman would have something useful to contribute as a Minister, but as Prime Minister (which in effect you are proposing), well watch the flood of people to Aus.

Sparky said...

Parker and Cunliffe are Roger accolites so it's not surprising they would make such comments.
QE in a form paid for the State houses built throughout the late 40's, 50's and 60's. It paid for the passes Lewis and Haast etc. If it is done rightly, it can ease the exchange rate as well as create work in our depressed economy. We need to get people into work and in turn, the Govt. gets more revenue from taxes. Its a winner in both directions. Relying on Private Enterprise to cure un-employment is a serious mistake, it is in the best interests of business to keep people out of work all the time; keeps wages down and profits up.

guerilla surgeon said...

"might just say see you later "

If we're all going to throw around while generations perhaps I could insinuate one or two of my own. For one thing, there are already doing that. As soon as a business get big enough, the headquarters shift to Australia and the manufacturing shifts to China. If it's not just purchased outright by a large multinational. Secondly, this seems to be a lot of crap being spoken lately about international competition for people with skills. Which seems to operate mostly on the level of bosses. I get a bit sick of their wages being compared to the US and mine being compared to India. I think we could probably import a lot of administrators and business people from various countries who might be willing to work for a lot less than what people are paid here. Japanese don't pay their chief executives as much as we do necessarily, the difference between the worker's wages and their wages isn't nearly as great as it is almost anywhere else. The Germans similar. There must be plenty of entrepreneurial people in poorer countries that will be happy to come here and work for less. So let the buggers go, and import some managerial slave labour for a change.

Patricia said...

Well Parker's comments are, for me, the last straw. I will cancel my membership. As far as I can see Labour is now just National Lite. It probably has been since 1984 but I had hope. The World is in an impossible financial situation caused by the very same financial ideology Parker says he will not change. Oh yes he will tinker at the edges which will have no effect but he wants to continue allowing an unelected civil servant to run the Country. Why have a central Government? We could go back to provincial governments except Christchurch's building is is somewhat disarray at the moment.

guerilla surgeon said...

Damn that dictation software. Should be wild generalisations. Damn my editing too :-).

Kat said...

Patricia, may I remind you that the govt controls you are seeking are what nearly bankrupted this country by the PM Robert Muldoon. What David Parker is suggesting is that the Reserve Bank is given a fresh mandate and a new set of targets.

KjT said...

http://kjt-kt.blogspot.co.nz/2012/10/printing-money-banking-part-two.html

Borrowing money, "printed money" from foreign banks, and paying 14 billion extra a year for the privilege, is sensible?

http://kjt-kt.blogspot.co.nz/2...
Do I detect a bit of self interest here?


In fact "printing money" worked very effectively for NZ in the 30's. So well it was copied by other countries.
All the howls about Zimbabwe and the Weimer
republic forget that their productive sectors were first destroyed,
before they started printing money, When there was nothing to buy with
it.

Not a lot different from Nationals present efforts!

A lot different from lending to ourselves to invest in paying our
under-utilised and capable construction industry to rebuild
Christchurch.
Vital infrastructure which will return the investment many times in future.

Also we did exactly the same thing from 1935 until the 60?s. Called the
Development finance corporation for a long time.
Worked well for us. Got us out of the depression before the US and UK for a start.
We are still using a lot of those assets. Apart from the ones our idiot
Governments sold, so someone else could profit from them.

peterpeasant said...

Labour has completely lost the plot.
It will not even engage in debate.

Parker, English. and Treasury are united (fruitcakes).

Chris Trotter said...

No, Kat, what nearly bankrupted the country was Roger Douglas's "accidental" release of Labour's plans to devalue the currency by 20 percent.

Those holding US Dollars, UK Pounds and Japanese Yen held off exchanging them for NZ Dollars until the devaluation was complete and netted themselves approximately $NZ700 million in windfall profits.

That's how Labour began in 1984 - and that is how it went on.

The neoliberal ideology which underpinned the Fourth Labour Government must be thrown overboard, but it looks as though it will not be Mr Parker who does it.

Kat said...

Yes, Chris, there was a 'media' rumour that Labour may devalue if they won the election however, my recollection of the events were that the Reserve Bank had advised Muldoon to devalue, which Muldoon refused to do, and that was prior to the snap election announcement. The run on the dollar then ensued driven by currency speculators gambling on a devaluation. Nothing Mr Key was involved in of course.

I may be wrong, time can test the memory, at times.

Chris Trotter said...

No, Kat, there was no "rumour". Roger Douglas "inadvertently" left a strategy paper behind at an election meeting in which the 20 percent devaluation was clearly signaled.

The Reserve Bank advised a devaluation only at the point where the corporate sector's deliberate with-holding of overseas currency in anticipation of devaluation, coupled with a run on the NZ dollar, had thrown the NZ economy into a severe (albeit temporary) crisis.

Muldoon pleaded with Lange not to give in to the speculators - to no avail.

Labour's first act was to give these "patriots" a $NZ700 million windfall.

When Parliament's Finance Select Committee, chaired by Jim Anderton, launched an investigation into the devaluation crisis, Lange and Douglas ordered it shut down.

Learn your history, Kat, or you'll end up repeating it.

Jigsaw said...

I continue to be amazed that the left still blames Roger Douglas the guy with (at least some of) the solutions and not the man who caused the problems Robert Muldoon-were you not around at the time?
Don't you recall how reluctant Muldoon was to hand over power? Re touching history is one thing-rewriting it, quite another.

Chris Trotter said...

Of course I do, Jigsaw. He was reluctant to carry out Lange's stated preference for a 20 percent devaluation - urging him to save the taxpayers of NZ nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars in the form of an utterly undeserved gift to currency speculators.

He was over-ruled and that was that. He didn't alert the troops stationed at Trentham or send Skyhawks to bomb Lange's Wellington flat.

The myth-making is all on the Right. You cling to the creation myth of a Muldoonist gotterdammerung out of which Lange and Douglas bore us to safety.

The reality is very different. Muldoon's wage and price freeze had brought inflation down to 4 percent. Under Douglas it would soar to 14 percent and more. The unemployed had PEP schemes at award wages. Lange's Government abolished them. New Zealand still owned over half of its own financial sector. Douglas & Richardson sold us to the Aussies.

The list could be extended for some time - but you get the idea.

Brendon said...

Quantative easing may seem risky and unnecessary now but the global financal crisis may be hitting us later than others. Our biggest export markets in Australia and China have had a pretty good crisis so far. But they do not look so rosy now.

If they go down then we go down. Then we will be looking at every possible support.

I like the Greens idea of directly supporting the economy using monetary policy rather than the UK/ USA style quantative easing which has helped the financial industry more than the rest of the economy.

I agree with all the criticism about neoliberalism, it is a simplistic fairy tale of the good private sector overcoming evil governments. But not all fairy tales are true. The mess we are in globally certainly proves it.

P.S I like Steve Keen analysis of the causes of the financial crisis and it is the finance sector 'printing money' not the government that is the root cause. He is worth a google for anyone interested.

Kat said...

Ok, Chris. We will have to agree to disagree. I just don't believe you can hold Lange or Douglas to account for the National govt mismanagement and Muldoon's erratic macroeconomic policies up until 1984. What happened after that with the Labour govt, sure, and I have some credit to Muldoon for his later public opposition to Ruth Richardson's policies and the elite of the round table.

One other point, it may just be a case of semantics, however 'learning' ones history is quite different to 'knowing' ones history.

Victor said...

Kat

Thanks for making pedantry respectable on this thread.

You've emboldened me to point out to Chris that it was not the moderate and sensible Louis XVIII who was said to have "learned nothing and forgotten nothing" from the French Revolution, but his brother/successor, Charles X (formerly the Count of Artois), and his "Ultra" supporters.

In all other respects, Chris, you are on the nail with this one.

Your follow up post of October 12, 2012 3:59 PM is a masterpiece of economic history condensed.

Where, as a country, do we go from here?

Anonymous said...

Q.E. is not mildly inflationary Keynsianism, Chris.

Q.E. is the last resort of orthodox reserve banks when they have run out of other orthodox solutions to a credit crisis.

Money from Q.E. will go straight onto the stock market, it will not create any jobs, it will not create any domestic demand and it will not produce any growth.

It is just short term stock market gain for a longer level of debt repayment.

An inflationary Keynsian solution would use inflation to reduce the debt repayments.
Q.E. just lengthens the repayment term in order to stimulate short term market profits.

not at all the same thing.

Chris Trotter said...

To: Anonymous@12:20AM

No. The QE that the Greens are proposing involves purchasing Christchurch Recovery Bonds and acquiring overseas assets for the Disaster Relief Fund - up to $2 billion.

This expansion of the money supply should result in a lower exchange rate which, in turn, should boost exports and preserve jobs.

Explain to us where the NZ sharemarket comes into this picture?

Chris Trotter said...

Nice try, Victor. But the quote attributed to Talleyrand castigates the Bourbons as a dynasty and so includes the first of the restored Bourbons, Louis XVIII, as well as his even more reactionary successor, Charles X.

This is readily confirmed by the quotation itself, which uses the plural rather than the singular pronoun to describe the intransigence of Bourbon monarchs.

"THEY have learned nothing and forgotten nothing."

Victor said...

"Nice try"!!!!!

'THEY', Chris, refers to Artois, to all the Counts, Marquises etc. who flocked back to France in 1814 and 1815 and to other members of the Ultra-Royalist group, who dominated the parliamentary life of the restored Bourbon monarchy and were famously (or infamously)'plus royalistes que le roi'.

Amongst their chief objects of hatred were those they viewed as class traitors (e.g. Talleyrand) and the arriviste warrior aristocracy created by Napoleon, whose services Louis (quite sensibly) wished to retain. For his part, Talleyrand cordially hated them back. Hence his celebrated epithet.

Poor old Louis seems to have ascended the throne with a plethora of good intentions about binding up the wounds of France. One of his earliest acts was to grant his people a Charter which enshrined many of the great reforms of 1789-91, albeit as the gift of the king and not as achievements of the sovereign people.

However, a severely restricted franchise produced an unexpected Ultra majority in the Chamber. Louis and his chief minster , the Duc de Richelieu, therefore ruled without the Chamber for about five years before succumbing to the reactionary tide.

Actually, in a sense, even the Ultras had learned something since 1789. However, the value of what they had learned is debatable.

They didn't wholly want to restore the autocratic, bureaucratised, centralising, modernising, Gallican monarchy of the eighteenth century.

Instead, many of them were influenced by the culturally prevalent tides of Romantic Medievalism. They yearned for a more prominent role for the aristocracy and back country gentry than they had normally enjoyed under the Bourbon crown. And they wanted an Ultramontane church, at war with the perceived apostasy of the age.

In other words, they'd learned a load of sonorous, a-historical rubbish whilst trailing round as impecunious guests of their fellow aristos, elswhere in Europe.

All of this, of course, only increased the disdain with which Talleyrand, that quintessential child of the Age or Reason, viewed them.

Meanwhile, you're quite right about the Green's proposals re: Christchurch.

Both Keynesians and Friedmanites believe in QE in certain circumstances. But, as Joe Stiglitz keeps pointing out, it's who the money goes to that makes the difference.

Shovelling it into banks when they are, quite sensibly, reluctant to lend, achieves very little apart from the prevention of total collapse.

In contrast, shovelling it into banks that are too willing to lend takes you rapidly back to the brink of disaster.

You need to find a mechanism for channeling dosh to people who will use it for purposes that are productive, socially benign and stimulative.

Whilst not perfect, Dr Norman's proposal is a very worthwhile contribution to the debate over our economy.

Increasingly, the Greens seem to show more genuine "bottom" than any other party. No wonder the jibes of "funny money" have been coming so thick and fast. Is this the sound of cages being rattled?

Victor said...

Memory is fallible and my previous post was wrong in suggesting Louis XVIII ruled without the Chamber for about five years. He and Richelieu managed to clobber together a more moderate majority in 1816, albeit that the Ultras were still a force to be reckoned with and, of course, became dominant when Charles X came to the throne.

At stake were real material interests, including the security of titles to property acquired during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods.

As to Talleyrand, he, more than any other single individual, was responsible for Louis mounting the throne of his ancestors in 1814 and then remounting it in 1815.
Metternich and the Tsar had other plans.

Chris Trotter said...

Enough, Victor! I surrender!

Who knew we had an expert in 19th Century French history in our midst?

Louis XVIII is duly acquitted of being the target of Talleyrand's disdainful wit.

Victor said...

I should hope so

Draco TB said...

I understand we still need to borrow about a billion dollars a month…

A government never needs to borrow money as it can print it. Does this devalue the currency? Nope, as long as taxes are increased to cover it. Also, our currency is high because of our, comparatively, high interest rates and not because of good money management or a strong economy.

BTW, the private banks print money all the time and that doesn't seem to be causing a decrease in the value of money nor destroying our reputation.

Keynesianism works - but only if you apply it at both ends of the cycle. Spending dollars you don't have when times are hard, taxing the excess of dollars in citizens' hands when times are good.
No, actually, it doesn't. This is due to the Keynesian propensity of borrowing the money from capitalists at interest and often from the private banks which printed it. The money the government uses the government should print with no interest and it should be used to do what the society requires. In other words, the money the government prints should be backed by the resources of the country and that includes the skills of it's people.

Printing money to build houses for low income kiwis may be one case where QE is worth it.

One problem is, once the taboo on this is broken, governments in the Muldoon tradition could really go to town on it.

Just so long as there's strict rules the government has to keep to then it shouldn't be a problem.

Personally I think the big barrier to the things we definitely need (like improved public transport, diversification of industry, significant investment in public housing and state employer of last resort policy to end intergenerational and long term unemployment) is because of the antipathy to Chinese investment.
Foreign investment (ownership) is bad for both the economy and the society as it sets up a permanent unending payment for a single purchase.

already pay a hell of a lot of tax in NZ ie more than a big chunk or a good slice. Push them too hard and/or throw that money away on wasteful follys, and they might just say see you later (and take their factories and jobs and skills with them)
That'd be great. Get rid of the greedy arseholes. We have more than enough skills to replace them.

We need to get people into work and in turn, the Govt. gets more revenue from taxes.
We look at taxes the wrong way as we look at them as a means for the government to raise revenue forgetting that the government commands the entire resource base. As such, it doesn't need to raise revenue and taxes are there to constrain inflation.

Money from Q.E. will go straight onto the stock market, it will not create any jobs, it will not create any domestic demand and it will not produce any growth.
That depends entirely upon how the QE is done.