Why it doesn’t make sense to buy New Zealand Made

about 10 per cent of the emissions from food production. It’s vastly more important to grow food efficiently, which means leaving it to producers with the most suitable climates and economies of scale.

The concept of ‘‘food miles’’ is dumb. If you care about the environment, the best thing you can do is let price be your guide, and fill your basket with cheap imported tomatoes.

Of course, maybe those tomatoes were picked by underpaid workers. This a strong argument in favour of buying from countries with decent labour laws (like New Zealand).

But even this isn’t as straightforward as it seems: outside of literal slavery or trafficking, people flock to work in factories and sweatshops because it’s better than the alternative (typically, brutal subsistence farming).

Low-end manufacturing jobs have been disappearing from New Zealand for decades, as developing countries undercut us. When the one factory that employs half the town shuts down, it causes real damage. Trying to hold back the tides is not the answer.

Instead, we have to move toward more innovative, value-added products, high-skilled jobs, and services.

Xero, the company which ran the survey mentioned earlier, is the perfect example. It’s an amazing Kiwi success story, used by small businesses in more than 180 countries.

Xero is conquering the world not because it’s ‘‘NZ Made’’, but because it’s extremely good at making cloud accounting software.

‘‘NZ Made’’ is a brand, in the same way that Nike is a brand. That’s OK. Paying a premium for a brand is a useful way of signalling something about your personality: in this case, ‘‘economically illiterate’’.

The takeaway is to buy the highestquality product for the price you’re willing to pay, regardless of country of origin.

In some cases, that product might just so happen to be made in New Zealand.

I’m typing this sentence on a foreign computer, drinking foreign coffee. But I’m also wearing merino undies, wrapping my junk in a constant patriotic embrace: woolly, a little snug, but breathable.

Got a burning money question? Email Budget Buster at richard. meadows@thedeepdish.org, or hit him up on Facebook.