There is a two-fold problem this Government has that is driving people nuts.

One is their defence of pretending things aren't what they are. Another is their ideological arrogance based on no real-world experience.

There was an op-ed piece by one of the medical unions calling Andrew Little angry.

"The return of angry Andrew," they said. It was a response to his ongoing denial that hospitals and healthcare in general were coping okay, despite the avalanche of evidence to the contrary.

It's a trait. Given the media these days by-in-large don’t dig or disseminate, they simply reprint responses. The Government has worked out that by simply saying something isn't happening, they will get that headline and hope for the best.

The economy is cooking with gas. Or alternatively, everyone has inflation and it’s the war. Hospitals are coping fine. I reject the premise of that question. That one is applicable to virtually anything.

Then we have the ideology. It began with the fruit picking and lack of labour during lockdown. The line was there was no shortage of workers you just had to pay more.

To be fair to the Government, that, to some limited degree, seems to have worked.

Before the inflation crisis wages were rising. But the irony of that, of course, is eventually it merely added to the inflation crisis. Because the increased of cost of those wages were merely passed onto the consumer. Hence inflation, hence the call for more wage increases, and round and round we are still going.

But what makes these calls particularly egregious is they are made by people like Chris Hipkins, Michael Wood, and Grant Robertson who have never run a business in their lives. They wouldn’t have a clue how to be successful in hospitality or an orchard because they have never owned one. They have never owned anything outside a degree and a union membership.

People who have had their world tipped upside down by Covid rules and regulations that are now quite clearly coming back to haunt us in so many ways, economic and psychological, are being lectured by theorists.

They tell people what to do based on something they read in a library. If that doesn’t work, they deny any of its happening.

That is our New Zealand in 2022 and you wonder why the confidence levels are where they are.