cuts and halts in the expansion of public services<\/a> – which Wellington is most vulnerable to. However, the underlying data on this are mixed – public administration employment figures look broadly resilient and recent data showed Wellington\u2019s unemployment rate actually decreased over the June quarter.<\/p>\n\u201cStill, many things can augment the unemployment rate, and news headlines continue to highlight the hardship the region is going through.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe expect the recovery in Wellington to be the slowest of the hubs. Public servants and policymakers may prefer the broader horizons of Auckland or across the ditch, further weighing on an already fragile housing market recovery.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tuffley said the result was not a surprise for the capital and the outlook generally was for a slow improvement.<\/p>\n
\u201cMore export-focused regions are generally doing fairly well and you\u2019d expect they will continue to do okay. The earnings growth that they\u2019ve been seeing may sort of flatten off.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve had good recovery in dairy, good recovery in meat, fruit\u2019s done pretty well. But some of that\u2019s been higher volumes, a lot of it\u2019s higher prices, which we wouldn\u2019t expect will continue. The main shift in some of those areas, particularly the dairy intensive areas, is at the moment farmers have tended to sit on the cash and not spend it.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo there\u2019s still a bit of scope for some spending to start coming out of the woodwork. With the larger urban areas, what we really have been lacking a lot of so far is just follow through on lower interest rates. So there\u2019s the early signs creeping through that retail spending has started to increase a little bit, but housing markets have remained pretty muted as well.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs we start to see more people be prepared to take some risk in terms of entering the housing market, and just have a bit more confidence to spend as their cash flows improve, we should start to see those more urban-dominated areas lift up a bit. But Wellington is likely to keep underperforming for the near term, whilst you have got the Government needing to try and get the books to better shape. And it\u2019s still mainly going to be doing that by keeping a lid on spending growth and reprioritising spending and just trying to get more efficiency out of the civil service.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said a recovery driven by the rural sector could look different this time than it might have in the 1990s.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re in a different environment to what we used to be in. Higher prices just meant people just rushed out and tried to expand production. Whereas this time it\u2019s more nuanced.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve got more climate change focus coming through and other environmental focus to think about. So a lot of shifts are more going to be about improving efficiency more so than necessarily trying to push production up\u2026 it\u2019s perhaps not the same powerful rural stimulus that we\u2019ve traditionally had, given that there\u2019s a different look at the outlook for some of those industries like dairy and meat.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Central Lakes District was third. Chief economist Nick Tuffley said there was a general theme of South…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":143716,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[97519,64,63,9826,51668,99,15261,164,64407,37848,1787,84800,46677,97520,4031,64406,319,25904],"class_list":["post-143715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-asbs","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-bay","tag-bottom","tag-business","tag-economic","tag-economy","tag-edmunds","tag-falls","tag-of","tag-performer","tag-plenty","tag-scoreboard","tag-star","tag-susan","tag-to","tag-wellington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}