Parity parties are pathetic. Those who are thinking of holding them are ignoring the reality of what it means for our dollar to be on an equal footing with Australia's.

It's only a couple of cents shy of it at the moment and there's an expectation that parity's only a matter of time.

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The only good thing to come out of Rob Muldoon's economic stewardship was the Closer Economic Relationship, or CER, with the Aussies. The Poms had essentially turned their back on what they used to call us, the bread basket and the Aussies were our saving grace.

Two way trade between us is around twenty four billion bucks a year and leans in favour of us by a couple of billion. But the closer our buck becomes to theirs the smaller the margins.

Three years ago when the Kiwi was trading at 77 cents to the Aussie in the three months to February our exports were worth 2.4 billion bucks, this year during the same three months, when we were trading at around 95 cents, the dosh earned from exports had fallen to just over 1.7 billion, a loss of six hundred million to our exporters because of our strengthening dollar.

The tighter the squeeze on our exporters the tougher it is for them to turn a profits and the downstream effect of that is job losses and all that goes with that.

It might be cheaper to go for a holiday across the ditch, providing you're not dependent on the export sector, which in a wider sense most of us are.

So parity with the Australian dollar is no reason to pop the champagne corks.

There's one common factor for both the Aussies and Kiwis in all of this and it's the Chinese.

The New Zealand economy may be doing better than Australia's at the moment, essentially because we had an earthquake in Christchurch and the housing market's gone crazy in Auckland.

But outside of those centres, in the dairy dependent hinterland, things are slowing down because the heat's going out of the Chinese dragon's breath when it comes to buying our dairy products.

And across the ditch they're also feeling the lack of fire in the dragon's belly when it comes to buying their iron ore.

Perhaps we should remind the Chinese then that this is after all the Year of the Sheep, although that could be part of the problem. The Chinese tell us the sheep tends to run away from a problem instead of facing and fixing it!