Phil Goff said in his speech in reply to yesterdays budget that it was a ‘standard but poor National party budget’. I couldn’t agree more.
Bill English did not write this budget for hard working New Zealanders, instead he wrote this budget for Standard and Poor’s.
He did not use this opportunity to protect the jobs of average New Zealanders, instead he used it to please Standard and Poor’s – the people who have helped the world get into the mess we are in right now.
With treasury predicting 1000 job losses a week into next year what New Zealand needed from the government was leadership, someone with the balls to make the hard decisions and to pull our country through the recession. We did not get it.
What most people would have seen was the backtrack on the unfair tax cuts that John Key promised were affordable during the election campaign – even though he knew they weren’t. He was dishonest then, and he’s being dishonest now. The tax cuts have not been “deferred” – they’ve been cancelled.
Over at No Right Turn, Idiot/Savant has a graph showing how the ten year “suspension” of payments into the Cullen Fund will kill superannuation. The Nats have only been in power for six months and already they’ve fucked over KiwiSaver and trashed the Superannuation Fund. Great!
They’ve made a good move politically, however, with the home insulation policy. After the massive balls up that was the cancellation of the Labour-Green policy for home insulation, the Nats have introduced a similar policy and named it their own!
Whilst they are trumpeting their own horn for increases in Health funding, and especially for elective surgery, they aren’t nearly as public about the slashing of primary healthcare funding! What they’ve done here is nothing short of moronic. You DO NOT shift funding for barriers at the top of the cliff to the ambulances at the bottom of a cliff!
Thank god we had Labour and Michael Cullen at the helm for the last 9 years. New Zealand is in a better position for it, and we will weather the global recession better because of it. But things are going to be harder for the average, hard working New Zealander because the National Government has wasted the last 6 months and has come up with nothing but the cycleway to protect jobs.
