David Seymour on Housing, KiwiSaver & Fixing NZ's Future

Housing Affordability and Market Outlook

Daniel: Welcome to the Blueprint Finance Podcast. We're here to talk to David Seymour. We're very grateful to have him here as our local Epsom MP. David's got really great insights on the future of the country, which is really important to all of our clients and our business partners to really get a grip on where we're heading as a unit and what's important to us. So, David, thank you so much for coming on.

David: No, thank you. And, look, I admire what you're doing. You're young people starting a business, not complaining, serving your customers, building it up. That's a really positive thing and we don't celebrate it enough.

Rory: Thanks, David. We appreciate that, eh?

Daniel: Yeah, definitely. There is some complaining, but it happens inside the walls of this room. But yeah, look, we want to start with the big questions our clients have when we talk to them. A lot of them are micro, which we can address, but a lot are more probably poised towards yourself and where you think we're heading as a nation.

Obviously, the biggest thing we talk about is what's the market doing? The property market, right? Over the past three years from the peak of the market, we're at a point where we have the highest DTI (debt to income ratio) in the world, comparable with the likes of Canada. We're at the top, and now with the correction that's happened, markets on average have dropped 30% and it seems that things have stabilised.

Now we're seeing the OCR peeling back and property prices starting to come back up. Is it too soon for something like that to happen? Do you think it's stable where we're at right now with the market?

David: Well, if you're asking for advice about the market this year, I'm not that close to it. What I do know is that over the past 30 years, property prices have gone up at an unsustainable rate. If you look at a section in Auckland, from about 1990 to 2018, they went up 900%. And then we still had another boost through the Covid period, and then that came back, but we're still probably ahead of where we were then.

So, you think about that for a moment and then you say, is this sustainable in the widest sense? I think one of the big problems New Zealand has is there's now a whole generation of people who have priced themselves out of property ownership. Now you look at people protesting, people upset, people mentally distressed—there's a lot of mental distress out there, according to the Ministry of Health. I put a lot of that back to people not having a clear pathway to having their own place in the country.

You just have to look at somebody who is young in this country, who goes to school, listens to their teacher, does their homework, does well in their exams, gets a qualification, comes out with $30K or $40K of student debt (I think the average is $36K), spends three or four years of their life, and they're now earning $55K, $60K, $65K maybe. And they say, "Gee, anything that looks remotely like the house my parents had within 10 kilometres of here is a million plus." At least. And you say, "This game's rigged." So that's why I believe that there's a lot of political unrest around the world. Fundamentally, we can't keep going this way.

Then, what's the government doing about it? Because they're not just complaining. So, Resource Management Act reform, building material reform—so you can get, you know, if it works in Japan, it'll probably work here. They have rain and earthquakes too, but they build houses much cheaper. There's also infrastructure funding and financing reform, all of which is designed to produce more homes, cheaper. I recognise that from an investor's point of view, people will say, "Well, that doesn't help. I'd rather just go up 10% every year so I can keep, you know, every time I refresh the mortgage or take a wee trip to Fiji at the same time." I can understand that, but it's not sustainable. In the long-term future of the country, the last 30 years has not been sustainable anyway.

Daniel: That's probably more than you bargained for, but that's the—

Rory: No, that's perfect. That's good.

KiwiSaver and Saving Priorities

Daniel: Awesome. Okay, the next thing we want to talk about is KiwiSaver. Now, a lot of the times that we're talking to clients and we're on the phone to them, the first question is, "What's going on? What can we help with?" Most of the time, recently, let's say one out of every six calls, they'll say, "We're going to Australia." We say, "Why are you doing that?" Obviously, they're saying they're going to earn a higher income, but recently what we've found is that a lot of people, specifically young professionals, tend to go to Australia because their super scheme outdoes what we have as KiwiSaver in New Zealand. Do you think we have a robust system in the KiwiSaver space? Because it's, what is it, $88 to about $100 billion that's available there?

David: Let me take the sort of contrarian view on this, which I nonetheless think is right. I don't believe that compulsory saving schemes or even sort of semi-compulsory "nudge you in there" saving schemes actually increase people's saving. There are people who have studied this around the world, and there's pretty good evidence. People will look at their Australian Supers and say, "Oh, we've got so much money," or people will look at their KiwiSaver and say, "Actually, this is a really valuable thing." I get that, and I don't deny it. I don't take that away from people. I think they should keep it, and good on them.

But I also think what's missed is that KiwiSaver contributions are not free. You've got about $500 a year coming from the taxpayer. That is money the government is borrowing that we all have to pay back. Second, people that have KiwiSaver contributions on the employer side—you're kidding yourself if you don't think that that 3% or however much you're drawing down has limited what your employer is prepared to pay you in cash. They're factoring it in. Let's not kid ourselves. Then there's your own contribution, which together with reduced take-home pay from your employer's contribution being lower, reduces your ability for other savings options.

The number one saving option most people have is paying off debt. So if you're putting 3% or even more into your KiwiSaver, that's awesome. But if you've got $10K on the credit card, then you're very silly. The same argument can be made with a mortgage. Most people are still paying 6 points on their mortgage right now. If you pay off your mortgage, that is the same as getting a 6% zero-risk return. No one is offering 6% with zero risk out there right now.

So, I just make the argument that actually, people can talk all they like about, "Well, you should force people to save more and look at what the Aussies have got," and all that. But then once you dig down into it, you'll find that they've got less mortgage repayments, more debt on other things, consumer finance or whatever, less saving in other schemes because they're compelled to do all their saving in one area.

Daniel: That's interesting, eh?

Rory: Yeah, I think that's really focusing on day-to-day, right? For anyone local that has a property and obviously got a personal loan or a car loan and you're umming and ahhing about KiwiSaver, you've got bigger things to get rid of first before you're putting your money away. Now, what are your thoughts on the whole KiwiSaver thing? There is potential there, there's money there, and obviously we attract foreign investments and foreign capital all the time. Do you see anything that could be created using KiwiSaver for long-term infrastructure investing or on the realms of just making the country a bit better off with the funds that we've got and how they operate?

David: Well, maybe, but I think it's always really important to know what your objective is. If you have two, chances are at some point they're going to compete. The objective of KiwiSaver is to get your maximum return so that you can retire as well as possible. The objective of infrastructure projects is to borrow for the minimum possible return so that the infrastructure is affordable. Now, if you say that you are going to put your KiwiSaver into infrastructure, well, it might be a good idea, but if you are forced to do it, then chances are that's going to force you to do it using investments that wouldn't have been your first choice. On the other hand, if we're going to build infrastructure funds with KiwiSaver and make sure that there's a really good return for people's retirement, we might find that we're paying more for our bridges and roads, or we build fewer bridges and roads and pipes, and then the whole economy is less productive.

So, just be real careful about mixing up these two objectives. One needs a high interest rate, the other one needs a low interest rate. If you try and mash them up, someone's going to end up very unhappy. Possibly both.

Daniel: It's a bit forceful, eh?

Rory: Definitely.

Small Business and Cutting Red Tape

Daniel: Okay, cool. Well, if we can talk about what ACT's plan is about small businesses—you guys are very vocal about helping small businesses, especially in the employment law side of things, which I think is really, really good, especially for people in this current economy who have to take a lot of risk in order to get things off the ground. With those changes that you're making, do you think those are things we'll see immediately implemented and straight away making an impact, or are those foundational things that are going to take 10 years, 15 years for us to have New Zealand as a place where it's actually globally easy to start a new business?

David: Well, every law has a process. It sounds pretty naff and boring, but it's true. Some of the stuff is already done. This is mostly what Brooke van Velden has done, and she's a great champion of business. She grew up in a household where both her parents had their own business. She would basically say to you, "Look, I've done the so-called Fair Pay Agreements—they're gone. I've done the 90-day trial for all businesses, not just those under 20 workers. That's done, it's in place." The minimum wage, she's actually pulled back to pretty much the smallest minimum wage policy that really was politically acceptable, because frankly it's gone up so much, so massive pressure on, and not relativity is of course mean it's right through the wage scale. That's led to a lot of inflation, made it harder to take people on, made it harder to take on apprentices, for example. So, she's delivered on a minimum wage that is a bit more sane after five, six years of crazy inflation there.

Then she's doing other things, like making it easier to dismiss someone if there's a personal grievance. There are cases where nobody disputes that one employee was sexually harassing the other one, but because the employer didn't do all the right interviews and tick the boxes and dot the i's and cross the t's, the offender ends up getting compensated by the employer who never wanted the whole headache. So she said, "Look, if you've got a personal grievance (PG), you can't get compensated if you were factually found to be at fault." That's crazy. Changes like that are going to come in relatively soon, and you'll see soon she's been doing a big project on health and safety law, and I think she's really going to turn that upside down—and it needs to be turned upside down because it's so corrosive of our culture. When people are just living in fear, they don't do more health and safety, they don't make things safer. Our records show that unfortunately, if you use fear, you get compliance. You don't necessarily get safety, and Brooke is really going to turn that upside down.

Daniel: Oh, brilliant.

Rory: Yeah, that's awesome.

Daniel: All right, David. We know that New Zealand's economy has a lot of small business operators, right? Either you've got an owner-operator sort of model, or you've got a company such as ours that has three or four staff now. It's not hard to see that if you look at the amount of companies that have lasted over a hundred years in New Zealand—some solid names—there's not many, or it's just a monopoly. How do you see us scaling in New Zealand from being SMEs to having more bigger companies that employ people in the local economy?

David: Well, I think part of it is about attitude and culture. For too long, we've sort of felt like entrepreneurs are something a bit sinister and business is kind of bad. A lot of countries, particularly the US and to some extent Australia, don't really have that attitude. We need to look at business as being a beautiful thing where four different types of people come together to solve problems they can't solve alone. Those are entrepreneurs with their ideas, investors with their capital, workers with their time and talent, and customers with their needs. This is a form of voluntary human cooperation that solves problems for four different types of people all at once, without anyone needing to be forced to do anything they don't want to do. I think that's a beautiful thing, and we should really celebrate it.

If you want to see our whole economy change, aside from changing the attitude and culture towards business, changing the regulation certainly helps. Like being able to get overseas capital, being able to get migrant workers—people say, "Oh, you've got to keep it in New Zealand, you've got to make jobs for Kiwis." And I just say, "Well, hang on a second. You're competing against a firm in Colorado." I visited a firm that's making orthopaedic instruments out of titanium—one little thing that goes in your leg is worth like $20,000. Their main competitor in Colorado can get foreign investment from 49 other American states, or from anywhere else in the world, because the United States is really open to investment from outside. They also have a pool of labour—basically anyone from half a billion people on the North American continent. You've got nearly 40 million Canadians, 350 million Americans, and 120 million Mexicans that are available for their labour market.

Now, if our guys have to accept investment from New Zealand, maybe Australia, workers from New Zealand or Australia, and anyone else that can jump through a million immigration hoops, it's going to be hard for them to grow. The orthopaedic surgeons are going to go to the guys in Colorado. Other things being equal—we kneecap ourselves by being closed to the rest of the world. And then we kneecap ourselves with too much red tape and regulation. I talked about health and safety, haven't talked about the Resource Management Act really, but oftentimes people say it takes longer to get permission for a project than to actually do the project. We need to fix our red tape and regulation, and if we do that, there's no reason that we can't build world-beating companies in spite of our geographic isolation.

Rory: That's a great point, because like you say, we don't have access to foreign investment, but even with that, the geographical limitations of us being here, paired with that, makes it so challenging for us to be world-leading, eh?

David: Yeah, but there are things you can change and things you can't change, right? One of the reasons I do what I do is that I know we can't change our geography. We can't quickly change our population. But we can change our policies. And we can change them relatively rapidly—we're quite nimble as a country. What I like to do is try to win people's votes without bribing anyone with someone else's money or without promising to make rules restricting anyone else's freedom. That's pretty challenging, because if you listen to most politicians, most of the time they're either promising you other people's money or to make rules restricting other people from doing something you don't like. I refuse to do that because a free society is a creative society. Creative societies are prosperous and happy societies. Humans are born to be creative. We love being creative. If you look at the way small children play, and then we suppress that. I think we should try our best to always make ourselves a freer society.

Daniel: Tell us a little bit more about the RMA. It's just a topic that has been chanted on about for a while now. I guess we lack action as a nation quite a bit, right? So where is the RMA going and where do we see it in action in the next 6 to 12 months?

David: It's going in the bin and it's going to be replaced by two new laws. One will be urban planning law, the other will be an environmental protection law. What this means in practice is we are putting property rights at the centre of resource management in New Zealand. That means two things. Number one, if it's your property, then the presumption is you can do what you like on it. Number two, if you want to object to someone else using their property as they see fit, then your objection better be based on an impairment of your own property, because everything comes back to property rights in this law. I think that's a massive, massive shift. So often I hear people being restricted from doing things on their own property, and I say, "Hang on a minute. Who else was being harmed?" I talked to one couple—they said they had objections against the drawers they were using in their kitchen. I thought, how could that possibly harm anyone? It's bizarre. This was a single-family freestanding structure, so there's no possible way that could affect another person, but it was still subject to regulation. Getting resource management to a property rights basis is going to be massive for this country. I don't think people have quite realised how massive, but you think about New Zealand—it's a great piece of real estate, great climate, great people. There's a lot of good stuff here except it's almost impossible to develop and use it and make a place for yourself to live, which is why you've got a whole disillusioned generation.

Now we change that, this place is going to be on fire, 100%. And it's going to be awesome. So, when does it change? You're right, there's a lot of chatter about it. I remember when I was first elected in 2014 and the Nats had 60 seats and I had one, and I said, "Look, that's a majority. Let's deal with the RMA." They didn't want to do it. Still got the emails—the National Party had the opportunity and did not want to do it. We've come back nine years later, we're in government and we're doing it with them. We're doing it really based on ACT's principles of a property rights-based RMA. So it is very exciting stuff.

Rory: Absolutely reminds me of your shower tray. You know, the shower tray in your house—it was too big. All that red tape you had to go through just to—

David: Seriously? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He had a shower tray in his house. I had to get an exemption from the council for my shower tray.

Daniel: They were making me spend 10 grand first.

Rory: It's lucky that they were onto that. I mean, imagine what could've happened.

Daniel: Yeah, someone could've died.

David: Well, this is what I mean by regulation, right? People spend too much time caught up doing things that won't actually make the boat go faster.

Rory: That's right. That's the core of our issue.

David: Well said. And that's something that as you get big and develop, it's going to happen and you've got to push back on that. You have to push back on that and know where you're steering the ship, because the same thing happens in business. As you get bigger, your regulation requirements increase and you have to still find a way to be focused on good client outcomes.

Retaining Talent and Building Prosperity

Daniel: Dave, we just want to talk about one of the bigger things our clients are always asking. We're talking about refixes, rates coming up. Obviously it's been a couple of years of pain. We're glad to give some relief now with rates coming down. But, comparatively, us and the UK host the most profitable banks in the world. Our banks do really, really well. It's obviously because we've got high-earning individuals and good infrastructure, but perhaps they're doing a bit too well and there should be some more competition. Now, obviously a big driver from this current government is trying to prop up Kiwibank and get a more competitive edge. Do you see that becoming something that's a bit more forefront in the future for the current government?

David: Look, it's always good politics to beat up on bankers, right? Because basically these guys manage risk, which is intangible. If you're a potato grower, everyone knows what you do, but if you're a banker, you manage risk and it seems like you're taking money out of thin air, because risk management is not really a visible thing. So you can understand why it's good politics to beat up on banks. And you're right, if you compare the Australian banks with their subsidiary companies here in New Zealand, the returns are different. New Zealand is doing a bit better. All of that is true.

But I would just point to, well, why is that? Have we done everything we can to make it easy for new entrants in the market? Like Payments NZ—having a payment system that's basically owned by a closed shop with some of the banks, you should be able to access the payment system, that would be a good start. But then we do a whole lot of things that just make it more expensive to be in business in New Zealand and make it less likely competitors will want to enter the market. So, there are people who say, "Oh, we're going to put more rules on the banks to make them more competitive." I would say, ask yourself how many rules need to be removed. If you remove the rules, then suddenly you find yourself in a much better place.

Rory: Absolutely. I think that's the biggest thing—being able to open it up for new entrants, because if you compare, obviously we're a much smaller population, but the amount of lenders we have here compared to Australia, it's just not even comparable. A lot of my friends who own property over there, they've got their mortgages with boutique banks you've never heard of, every niche requirement.

David: In fairness, if you go on interest.co.nz and see how many mortgage lenders there are, there's not just four banks in New Zealand. There's 20. There's at least 20 with a licence. There's at least a dozen that you can get a mortgage from. I just look at Kiwibank—they've been trying to disrupt the market now for 20 years, and the thought is that if they get some more capital, they'll be able to do that finally. I just suspect with a lot of this stuff, people love to beat up on the industry. But it's the same with the supermarkets.

Rory: Yeah, for sure.

David: Beat up on people doing it well—we need less of that attitude in New Zealand. Actually, not to change topics, but you look at supermarkets—basically anywhere you live in New Zealand, in half an hour's drive or less, you can go from usually 7am to 9pm and get fresh produce at a price that you can afford to feed yourself on the minimum wage.

Now, how much should that cost? This is a mountainous country with enough people to populate a medium-sized city. It's 1,500 km—it's the size of the US Eastern seaboard. People say, "Oh, there should be an extra competitor." Should there? I don't know, maybe. What's your comparison country that's a 1,500 kilometre long mountain range with 5 million people? How many competitors should they have?

Daniel: Exactly. Just want to make a quick disclaimer—we absolutely love the banks. We're big fans of the banks. In no way are we bashing the banks in that question I asked David. Continue.

Rory: No, that was really good. I think competition is really healthy. But you have to understand competition at scale as well and what sort of scale we're playing at with a country like New Zealand.

David: Well, this is the issue, right? How many wide-body jet makers are there? There's two. Maybe they should be broken up into four and then you'd have four half-size wide-body jet makers. That would actually scare me. Some businesses, you actually want them to be bigger because they're more efficient.

Daniel: I guess the next question we've got for you, David, is: we've always relied on farming, tourism, even immigration. As a business, we're seeing a lot of superstars coming from the tech scene in New Zealand, right? I'm sure you've met or seen a few of them. New Zealand is very much a country that's basing its business interest on trust. We're a very trustable source of business for anyone foreign looking at us. Do you think that we need to do more in the space of technology as well as natural gas and energy than we have been doing over the past 20 years?

David: Yeah, well, look, energy is a great tragedy because when Jacinda Ardern just announced she was going to ban a whole industry, the damage that has done, not only to that industry but to trust in New Zealand generally, is really difficult to fix. We can say, "We don't believe in that and we wouldn't do that to you," and foreign investors say, "Yeah, but that's not the point. We're not worried about you, we're worried about what the other guys are going to do." The damage that they have done to New Zealand's reputation is impossible to value, but it's actually criminal in my view.

The other thing is, there's a huge opportunity with tech, but I don't know what the opportunities are. If I did, I wouldn't be doing this job, I'd be rich. I just think our job as a government should be low taxes, light regulations, good education. You'd be amazed what people will do.

Daniel: The fundamentals.

David: Yep. But there's always some politician who wants to go out and get their picture taken with someone doing something cool. So then they start splashing cash at them. The truth is, most of the time you don't know what the next big success is. You look at a company like Kami—very cool stuff. I know one of the guys that started that. Who thought that making effectively PDF viewers for American educators could be turned into a $330 million exit? Well, turns out that's exactly what they did. How many politicians spotted that? Basically none, except for a few people from a "Something Growth Fund" team where they're trying to claim all the credit when they sold out. But hey, that's just politics, I guess.

Rory: For sure, David. It's very clear, seeing you speak, that you've got something in common with all the team here at Blueprint—that you love this country.

David: Yeah, I do.

Daniel: And something we want to talk about is the idea that the young talented folk, after they get educated, after they get their base work experience, tend to go overseas. Some of them, we're lucky enough to have them come back with that overseas experience, but some, they never return. For me, obviously being a New Zealander, Madhav shares the same point of view, and just seeing that happen, we're not aware if that's just a global trend, if it's happening across all countries, or if it's a New Zealand-specific thing because of a smaller market, right? So our question is really: keeping talent long-term to make sure we're having a really good thirties and forties in the future—is that just a feeling or is that something that political involvement could help with? What's your view on that?

David: Well, I'm going to sound old saying this, but when I was your age, I was in my late twenties. Basically everyone I knew, including me, lived outside New Zealand. But if I think about my closest dozen school friends that we used to do New Year's camping and so on, today at one point it would have been 9 out of 12 would have been away. Now it's 3 out of 12 who are permanently settled overseas. So there's a couple of things in that story.

One thing is, when you're in your twenties, it feels like everyone's left—last one out, turn off the lights. Second, when you're in your thirties, you're supposed to have moved back. But thirdly, if you look at my little example of a dozen close friends for New Year's and camping and so on, 25% of them live in Australia now.

So all these things are true at once. Yes, a lot of people go away. Yes, most of them come back. Yes, we still have one of the biggest diasporas or exporters of people in the world. I think it's fatal to us because basically educating a citizen to 22 years old with a university degree is expensive. Life education expenditure is about $330,000 per citizen. If they get a university degree, it's probably more like half a million bucks. Then you've got 18, 20 years of doctor's visits and use of infrastructure and so on. So it's probably like a million bucks to get someone to that exportable stage. We're losing 60,000 a year. That's $60 billion worth of human capital out the door. So, yeah, it's a pretty serious problem.

Now, of course, a lot of people from around the world want to come and join us and we welcome them, and that's really fantastic. That's the only reason we're still afloat, really. But there is something about the country keeping the promise that it makes to its own citizens. The people who grow up with first world expectations in New Zealand often discover that they can satisfy those expectations better in other countries, and that's a real shame.

What do you do about it? I bring it back to housing. If you look at places where young people are moving and having lots of kids and are happy, you look at places like the southern states of the US. You buy a house for $300,000 and it's five times bigger than my little place, which costs four times that much and has two bedrooms. So you imagine how different your outlook is there. It's the same with business and employment, right? Because part of this massive transfer of wealth into housing over the last 30 years—in some ways that's a tax that is paid by the businesses, because if you want to employ someone, one of the things you have to do is pay them enough to live, obviously. But if you're in a country with very high housing costs, then you've got to pay people more to get the same work done, and that makes our economy less competitive.

So there's a whole lot of reasons why, at the end of the day, what is this country about? Best lifestyle in the world. What's the problem? Can't build a place to live here. What's the solution? Make it easier to build a place. That will be good for New Zealand. From your investors' point of view, one of two things will happen. Either I'm right and the government's going to make it easier to build homes, fund infrastructure, use different materials, get consent, so it's all going to happen a lot faster and prices will be kind of low, but New Zealand will prosper. Or I'm wrong and it'll still be impossible to build a home for some reason and incumbent owners will do quite well for a while, but the country's long-term sustainability will be imperilled. In which case, you'll find that actually, a moderation of house prices over the next couple of decades is the best scenario for everyone.

Daniel: A hundred percent. I mean, interest rates have dropped so much over the last nine months, and lending's become a lot easier to get from the banks. The test rates have dropped and all that's all fair and well. But when we talk to first home buyers or property investors, I think everyone's a bit more cautious now and it's kind of a lesson learned after leveraging up to your eyeballs in Covid when you see a 2% rate, and then getting humbled by the fact that the property value drops by $200K.

David: That actually happened to Grant Robertson too. He borrowed at 2% during Covid and then got kicked out of government 18 months later. Unfortunately, we've now got the same problem—$200 billion of debt, $10 billion of interest. Welcome to the New Zealand government.

Rory: I thought for a second you were talking about his residential home, but you're talking about the—

David: No, he screwed the pooch at a monumental scale, I'm afraid.

Daniel: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, you can imagine, when I'm getting on the phone with a client, I talk to them, we ask them for the address, search the system to see what the value is. We look at the value and see when they bought it—bought it for $800K, value $620K, saying, "Oh, my loan is $635K and I'm renewing on the mortgage." It's really awesome that the banks have dialled back on the interest rates and the RBNZ so that makes it a little bit more manageable because that client's been used to a certain level of repayment and refreshing that mortgage across, now it's not going to be at that same rate. There's some relief, I guess, with what you said about making things easier to build—a lot easier in the sense of consents and all the red tape that you get, development contributions, all that sort of stuff. If you dial that back and you have oversupply, it will be good for New Zealand to have that stable growth, because you're not scrambling to buy a house anymore. There's 15 to pick from and they get built in about six months.

David: Yeah, and it means ultimately you can start working on other things. Life. You can live your life. Your house can be a base rather than a summit.

Rory: That's right.

Daniel: Because it's gotten to the point now where so much of your energy, your income and your time has to go towards housing yourself. Whereas, like you're talking about in America, the states where housing is such a low percentage of your income, now you can focus on being productive and that flows into our economy, right?

David: Oh yeah.

Daniel: Well, David, thank you so much for joining us today. Seriously, it's been a real treat to have you on. We're just really pleased to see some positive things happening in the economy.

Rory: Yeah, a lot of action, which is what we appreciate.

David: No, that's awesome. Well, thanks for having me on the show and may your business continue to grow.

Daniel: Thank you, legend. Cheers, David.

Rory: Cheers. Thanks very much, mate.