NZ's handbrake
OPINION: Your old mate gets the sinking feeling that no matter who we vote into power in the hope they will reverse the terminal slide the country is in, there will always be a cohort of naysayers determined to hold us back.
It's now calling on the NZ Government to follow its Dutch counterpart and cull our country's livestock numbers by one third.
Greenpeace claims it would 'only' cost $12 billion to buy out what it describes as 'industrial' dairy farms.
This comes hot on the heels of a recent MPI report showing that the dairy and sheep & beef sectors alone will earn NZ well in excess of $30 billion next year.
So, going by this old mutt's back of the envelope calculation, Greenpeace's dream of killing 33% of NZ's livestock would cost a mere $22 billion in year 1 - in actual costs plus the lost export earnings - and at least $10 billion (and growing) every year after that!
How do these masterminds expect the country to pay its $100 billion of debt without every possible dollar of export revenue coming from our farming sector?
