June 10, 2013 7:00am by David Farrar

The strengthening economy

Matthew Hooton writes in the NBR on why John Key should call a snap election. Despite my commercial self-interest in having elections occur as frequently as possible, I don’t think there is any probability or reason for an early election. The Government needs 61 votes to govern and has 64.

I don’t believe PMs should do what Helen Clark did and call an early election of a flimsy premise.

What I wanted to focus on though was the reasons Matthew gave for going early, in terms of the economy:

National’s budget was overwhelmingly successful and it now luxuriates in superb economic data. Just this week, there have been announcements of thelargest increase in residential building activity in 10 years and that wholesale trade continues to grow.

These follow other official Statistics New Zealand announcements in recent weeks of improving trade data, the best ever April visitor numbers, building consents hitting a five-year high and of course the big fall in both unemployment and youth unemployment.

For its part, the Treasury reported on Tuesday that the tax take continued to track above forecast in April, with gross company tax revenue up over 40% ahead of forecast.

After the extraordinarily strong GDP growth in the December quarter – the fourth highest in the world among OECD-monitored countries, behind only China, Russia and Luxembourg – all the recent data suggests the government can expect highly positive news when March quarter GDP data is released on June 20.