Liam Dann asks the question in the Herald on Sunday last weekend. Photo: Herald on Sunday
"The economy is slowly showing signs of life," TVNZ's Simon Dallow told 1News viewers across the country on Wednesday last week.
"Gross domestic product (GDP) figures from the last three months of 2024 show the country emerging out of recession and starting to grow - just - at 0.7 percent."
"The GDP number's out on the day our biggest company Fonterra posted a whopping profit. Dairy among the bright sparks in a still gloomy economy," he said.
Great news.
Straight after that, TVNZ's business correspondent Katie Bradford found signs of growth in an Auckland cake shop.
"The popularity of these cinnamon rolls is rising almost as fast as the dough," she said over images of people queuing at the door. A staffer told her they would be hiring two more people to meet demand.
More good news as unemployment continues to rise.
But even with all the housing and infrastructure that we need, construction output was down in the latest official economic stats. Tourism and dairy mostly fuelled the GDP bump.
"Are you worried that we're back to being too reliant on a couple of sectors to keep the economy going?" Bradford asked the Minister of Finance and Economic Development, Nicola Willis.
"I have confidence that the New Zealand economy has many green shoots across a number of sectors," she replied.
Does it?
"I think the only person super-excited about these figures today is Nicola Willis," Katie Bradford said on 1News.
"Of course, it is good to see that sign of growth. We're also seeing some good numbers in exports and from Fonterra today - but some other areas are still really hurting."
"We're seeing companies restructure, redundancies, companies collapsing - and that's expected to keep going up. And of course, there's the global economic uncertainty now on jobs too," she added.
(Katie Bradford is coming to the end of her job herself at TVNZ in its latest round of redundancies and cuts. She's heading to a new one at Infrastructure New Zealand.)
And not everyone was convinced the GDP bump was proof of progress.
"If I have to hear we're getting some green shoots again in the media or in an op-ed, I'm gonna actually cry," said co-host Esther Robinson on the podcast Three Gals, One Beehive, pitched as "three Kiwi women on a mission to make politics interesting, sexy and even fun".
"This was the quarter ending January 2025 so most of the 0.7 percent was tourism in the peak summer season," she argued.
"Just take the good news," countered Brigitte Morton, formerly an advisor to a National led-government and a National Party member who volunteered for Nicola Willis.
"Eleven of the 16 industries that they measure grew that quarter. So when you're like: 'Oh it's just the people coming in this summer' - it's not. GDP per capita per person also rose by 0.4 percent. This is the first time that's gone up in two years."
But one thing the Three Gals seemed to agree on was that the surprise uptick in GDP won't mean much to ordinary Kiwis.
At least not yet.
And there was other data in the news this past week that wasn't positive.
The latest IPSOS Issues Monitor, which tracks and ranks issues important to New Zealanders, found approval of this government at the lowest level recorded since 2018.
The latest Westpac McDermott Miller consumer confidence survey had consumer confidence at 89.2 percent. Anything below 100 is considered negative and in the previous quarter it was at 97.5 percent.
BNZ economist Stephen Toplis called it a "simply awful" result at a level last seen in the deep recession of 1991.
But on Friday ANZ's chief economist insisted the economy was improving despite Stats NZ employment data from February, Seek job ads, Westpac's employment confidence survey and ANZ's own consumer confidence research all at post-Covid lows.
Newsroom's Rebecca Howard reckoned all the dire data added to the view that growth will "likely remain sluggish even if New Zealand did come out of recession in late 2024."
On top of that, some politicians were making news by talking up the depth of the economic problems this week - even one near the top in the government.
Winston Peters made a lot of the bad state of our economy in his State of the Nation speech last weekend.
Last Monday on Newstalk ZB he told Mike Hosking we are in "desperate need of an economic turnaround".
He said the previous Labour-led government had harmed the economy - and he accused the news media of simply standing by while they did it.
Hosking could have mentioned that for most of the past seven years, Winston Peters himself has been the deputy prime minister with other people from his party around the Cabinet table. But that didn't come up.
Are the news media unpacking the mixed messages on the economy - or adding to them?
Under the Herald on Sunday headline: 'If this is a recovery, why does it feel so bad?' the Herald's business editor-at-large Liam Dann reckoned "the gap between the data and how we feel about the economy is growing".
"As an economic commentator, I try to be upbeat. I can see plenty of green shoots on the economic outlook," he said.
But he also said those Westpac and Ipsos surveys suggest "the discontent is very real".
"That is a worry because it suggests people don't think things are getting better. They're still mired in the kind of gloom that would have made more sense in the middle of last year when we were in a recession that rivalled 1991.
"If people don't think things are going to get better, then they might not."
A grim thought, especially if the media reports shape public perception.
The Herald's Liam Dann reckoned the agricultural earnings and the return of tourists underpinned the GDP boost was a good thing. But record farmgate prices for farmers and Fonterra means record shop-shelf prices for milk, butter and cheese for the rest of us.
In the Herald on Sunday, Liam Dann said people in the cities "still feel like we are still in recession".
"Things like construction ... really affect a place like Auckland. You'd be forgiven for being more surprised if you were in the cities. Wellington is doing it very tough," he said on Newstalk ZB.
Westpac's chief economist Michael Gordon pointed out that the employment confidence survey results for the March quarter - released last week - also had a big city skew.
Only four of 11 regions recorded a fall in confidence, but one was Auckland, which dominated the national average.
The gloomiest regions - Wellington and Auckland - are also the hubs of our national media. Does that colour the coverage of our economy?
"Wellington is the worst culprit, I've got to say, though it is a very small part of the economy," Dan Brunskill told Mediawatch.
"In Auckland, you also have that urban/rural problem, but in Auckland, you're sampling almost a third of the economy. So if something's happening in Auckland, it's probably happening in most of the economy.
"But certainly the South Island and agricultural regions are performing much better than urban regions right now. So farming publications and people in touch with the regions are telling that story - but perhaps journalists that are more focused on services, high street, urban environments - they might be telling that story less.
"A news hook will form - and a narrative will form around that. A great example is hospitality closing in Wellington.
"So you regularly see stories about places closing and it feels like some great recession. But for most of the cafes and restaurants that have closed, a new one has opened up in the same location.
"I think the media sometimes lose sight of that because you just see a string of stories about things closing and you don't follow up to see what has come in behind it," Dan Brunskill told Mediawatch.
Sometimes they do.
This weekend The Post reported one restaurant that closed after struggling in a construction-site CBD street last year "is back and bigger than ever" at the former premises of another Asian restaurant.
Gap between the economic data - and how we feel
"I think, economists and business people and commentators like myself, we tend to live in the future. We look at forecasts all day, we think about what's going to happen next.
"We're constantly thinking and talking about how good or how bad things will be soon.
"Whereas normal people live in the past - and think about how good or bad their life has been over the past year. They, simplistically but usefully, predict that that will continue.
"So I think journalists could be a little bit better at living in the moment and not living in forecasts which may or may not come to pass.
"I'm sceptical about how much the media controls people's views of the economy or politics though. People think that it does and get very worked up about it.
"But when I write a story about an economic forecast, if you scroll down to our comments section, most of them [say they've] seen these forecasts before."
Dan Brunskill also reckons politicians' amped-up takes on the economy are not influential.
"If people in the financial markets believed what Winston Peters said [this past week about the economy] we would be having a financial crisis right now.
"He's not being serious and people are not taking him seriously because you would see a huge reaction in the global markets to the price of our bonds to investors. We just had a bunch of investors here in New Zealand looking to join up with the government to do PPPs.
"None of them would be here if they thought our fiscal accounts were faked."
Whether the green shoots are about to sprout or not, chaotic US policy is a factor no journalist or forecaster can predict.
Does that make reporting on the economy a frustrating guessing game?
"Businesses hate uncertainty. Journalists love it. You don't know what's going to happen next. That's much more fun than knowing. But for businesses and the economy, it's really hard," Brunskill said.
"Confidence remains low because people don't know what Trump's going to do. Trump's going to impose some tariffs next week, but no one knows what.
"But that's always the case really. We write a lot about forecasts but we never say that economic forecasts are assuming nothing else changes, and everything goes to plan. And there are always surprises. The forecast that you are looking at will almost never happen.
"A forecast is just a scenario saying that if nothing changes from here, this is what things will look like. Forecasts are useful but they're never truly representing the future. And that's just more true at the moment than usual."
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