Finance Minister Grant Robertson’s claim that any new pay offer to nurses “would have to be made using funds already allocated, as there's no more” is nonsense, according to new Social Credit Party Leader, Chris Leitch.

Mr Robertson’s understanding of how the money system works is patently paper thin, and he’s relying on what advisers in Treasury, who have been sourced from the private banking industry, are telling him.

Just like his predecessor Bill English, he puts paying $4,500,000,000 dollars every year unnecessarily to the private banks the government has borrowed from, ahead of decent pay for doctors and nurses and decent health care for Kiwis.

He could solve the nurses strike overnight if he understood anything about Labour Party history, and took a leaf out of Michael Joseph Savage’s book.

Labour’s first Prime Minister used the Reserve Bank to create the credit necessary to rebuild the nation.

5,000 houses were built by 1939, and 30,000 by 1949, financed by Reserve Bank credit.

The European Central Bank is creating credit at the rate of $35 billion Euros per month, through its quantitative easing programme, without any sign of inflation, so there’s no reason the Reserve Bank here couldn’t fund our government in a similar way.

That would give him $4.5 billion dollars every year to spend on New Zealanders instead.

Putting bankers ahead of doctors and nurses shows that Labour’s economic policies are no different from National’s.

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