Leaders budget chat proves  predictable

Leaders budget chat proves predictable

Bill English promised that this year’s budget would be ‘predictable and boring’. As it turned out, that applied not only to the fiscal announcements, but to the traditional leaders remarks. Andrew Little stayed disciplined on his rhetoric, painting the government as ‘out of touch’ and saying they ‘just don’t care’. He claimed the budget had ‘failed to deliver for middle New Zealanders’. 

In comparison, John Key focused on defusing Labour’s criticisms by painting them as hypocrites who were attacking for the sake of attacking, continuing his party’s line of Labour being incompetent and unready for government. He opened with a few personal attacks by claiming that the Labour caucus was disunified – “Half of them want to leave, and the other half want him to leave”, and continually berated Little’s speech by comparing his government’s agenda to that of the previous Labour government. 

It was fairly standard stuff, and perfectly in line with what we’ve been seeing in the media for the past two years. While John Key has always excelled at mocking his opposition in parliament, the big change we saw this year was Andrew Little’s step up to the big leagues. His delivery was forceful and authoritative, and he didn’t have any major gaffes like he did last year, citing Gene Simmons and calling the budget a ‘fiscal gender reassignment surgery’.  His pointing out that Qatar was the only country with a higher income-to-house price ratio than New Zealand is certainly one of his most effective offensives to date. 

Opposition parties spent far more time discussing housing in their replies than Bill English or John Key, clearly smelling a wedge issue that they can exploit. A recent 3 News/Reid Research poll found that 70 percent of New Zealanders believe the government have not done enough to address the housing crisis, so expect to see the left mention that issue as much as humanly possible over the next few months. 

The rest of the party also stuck to foreseeable rhetoric, James Shaw criticising cut to DoC and claiming that “National’s legacy will be poisoned rivers, and more extinct wildlife”. Te Ururoa Flavell spoke of the gains Maori had made and praised the increased funding for Maori TV, and David Seymour mostly used his speech to defend the government. As per usual, the most entertaining part of the whole process was Winston Peters, who repeatedly titled the budget the “Get Stuffed Budget”, and interrupted his speech twice to go on random rants at individual National MP’s. 

All in all it was a pretty standard day in parliament.  Everyone yelled ‘til they were hoarse, Winston caused some ruckus, and not a lot actually happened. 

This article first appeared in Issue 13, 2016.
Posted 11:08am Sunday 29th May 2016 by Joel MacManus.