.png)
Yes, the rhetoric was good: ‘we are the Party of the workers’. And this is ‘a clean-up Budget’.
But true to Finance Minister Willis’ previously-reported word, what actually played out in my mind was very much a Budget that ‘charts the middle course’.
A bit of a tax cut there, a bit of re-prioritisation there, some borrowing, some austerity. Nothing game-changing. Nothing to help New Zealand chart a new political or economic course.
Former Business NZ CEO, Phil O’Reilly, told Heather Du Plessis-Allan that Budgets aren’t the place to do that. He may be right.
But other commentators have stated clearly and unequivocally that NZ Inc needs a new course. That maintaining the political and economic status quo is a short road to perdition.
And even I, who greatly disappointed my fifth-form maths teacher, can see that most of the economic and social indicators we judge ourselves on seem to be headed in the wrong direction.
Hence the diaspora of Kiwis to the Gold Coast, à la the late 1970s and early 1980s. A good friend of mine, who’s had a very successful career in insurance, indicated that he, too, would have gone had he been younger.
But irrespective of your political leanings, this year’s Budget process has been fascinating – it’s probably been one of the most anticipated Budgets of recent times, and certainly one of the most watched, listened to and commented on.
The Speaker’s Gallery was almost full yesterday. And Parliament’s grounds were packed with protestors.
Yet, when all the media hoopla dies down and we’ve spent our tax cut, what then? What will have changed for the better? Will the ‘squeezed middle’ be better off? Will the cost-of-living crisis have been ameliorated? Will this Government get another term?
Or are we destined for a potentially more radicalised Labour-led Green Te Pāti Māori coalition?
Either way, it seems that we, like an America awaiting a second Trump ascendency, are set for one of the most turbulent periods in New Zealand’s political history.