Island Life by David Slack

There's a curious historical backdrop to this business of low-flying cars with Prime Ministers in them. Let me take you back to September 1974. In Diary of the Kirk Years, Margaret Hayward describes the unseemly scramble that marked the Prime Minister's very last journey in a Prime Ministerial motorcade.

After a memorial service at the Christchurch Town Hall, the funeral cortege was scheduled to fly to Timaru and then make the hour's drive from Timaru airport through to Waimate for a burial service at 3.15 pm.

By 3.30 it would be all over. But no one had taken the weather into account. Conditions at Timaru airport were impossible, and, after two attempts at landing, the aircraft headed back to Christchurch where a fleet of 15 cars waited to drive everyone the 126 miles by road.

It was an undignified, distressing race against time because by law no burials can take place after sundown. Darkness was closing in as they reached Waimate…

I've heard various descriptions of this episode over the years. The common theme has been that thanks to plane flight trouble, the cars were fairly belting along to make it in time. Sound familiar?

One of the most scintillating analyses I've heard of the whole Al Qaeda business came from that well-known observer of geopolitics, Billy Connelly. He pointed out the common syllable to the pertinent place names - AfghaniSTAN, TurkmeniSTAN, UzbekiSTAN, and so on. And then he drew our attention to the weapon of choice of the 9/11 hijackers - box cutters, or as we know them better, STANley knives. Clearly this bin Laden was just some stooge. The name of the real brains behind the outfit was Stan.

Flimsy, I'll grant you, but joining the dots, what do we see with Drivergate? A common name: Waimate. Cars with Prime Ministers in them invariably exceed the speed limit, it seems, when they come within range of the place.

I suspect we need someone like Bob Harvey to draw all the threads together for us. After all, he famously blew the whistle on the CIA and their evil designs on Norman Kirk. He knows what the spooks are capable of. And when you look at our relationship with America in that light, all possible kinds of fresh perspectives present themselves.

For all we know, "gone by lunchtime" was actually code for something else. Perhaps something like: "reactivate the Waimate deathray". Clearly the Lockwood cable only scrapes the surface of what went on in those infamous exchanges.

I hesitate to bring all this up, but as a loyal member of the pyjamahadeen, I feel I ought to provide a contribution of equivalent robustness to the heroic efforts by Messrs Bhatnegar and Farrar in the past week to carve out their very own Rathergate moments in history. Well done, you part-time Woodward and Bernsteins! The fact that the lefty MainStreamMedia just shrugged should not for a moment cause you to bow your shoulders in dejection. Nor should it give you any pause about the significance or veracity or rigour of your work. Keep at it boys, I say. Keep digging.

If you're wondering about Labour's plans for smearing and discrediting National sufficiently to keep them from winning the election, read on. The 1990 election, that is. We'll get to the current one in a moment or two.

Lynley Hood bobbed up in the news last week with some interesting material she'd unearthed during her tireless efforts to cast some light on the puzzling and unhappy saga that is the Peter Ellis case. She had there in her hand a list of names of National Party members. However they were not the villains of the piece. That honour went to the Labour Party.

What she had unearthed was a collection of documents that painted a less than flattering picture of the Labour Party. Talk about mean! Talk about scurrilous! Talk about down and dirty! Talk about bring back memories!

The documents revealed that in 1988 they were worried about the polls, they were worried about the inroads National was making and they were worried that they might lose the 1990 election.

I read the Herald report on this as I ate my muesli thinking Well that could have been anyone. Could have been the people in the angry punch-ups at the party conferences. Could have been people in the faction that peeled off in disgust to form New Labour. Could have been people in the faction that ended up in ACT.

It wasn't a harmonious time. Many tears and tantrums, tissues and issues. The Prime Minister and Minister of Finance's respective offices waged a Beehive war. Looking back, it seems amazing anyone even had time to think about the opposition. But of course they did.

Lynley Hood had discovered an Interim Report to Cabinet on Anti-National Strategy. Its objectives: to stop National being perceived as a viable alternative Government; to create a weak, destabilized and demoralised National caucus and to render a Winston Peters-Ruth Richardson combination impossible.

Let's pause for a moment and consider how a Winston Peters-Ruth Richardson combination might have played out. Boy, that would have been some trainwreck to watch. But I digress.

Hood went on to describe the report in detail. It included one page of negative comments about National "to be repeated constantly" ("negative - no policy alternatives, whingers"; "a divided party - couldn't govern"; "Promises - where's the money coming from?" "no team to govern") and two pages of negative comments about National MPs ("key lines to be repeated").

The she recited some recommended attack lines, and suddenly she had my full attention:

[Jim] Bolger - not up to being PM - a lame duck leader - weak, boring, timid, gutless - trying to 'sleepwalk to victory', repeat other Winston lines"; "ignore McKinnon - 'Don Who?' "; "discredit Richardson - inconsistent, expedient (for business comments) - naive, impractical (electorate); [Bill] Birch as 'shadow treasurer' "; "destroy Peters - no policies, lacking in substance - arrogant - flashy, superficial - a third party appeal, now fading fast, shrill".

The memories just came flooding back. When you're writing speeches for the Prime Minister, everyone is poking papers and reports and recommendations at you. You happily take them all. You never know where you might find a nice line or a nugget of interesting information.

I really have no idea of its provenance but I know for certain that I got a bit of paper pushed my way with the very lines on them that Hood has unearthed all these years later. One day I used them.

Geoffrey Palmer deplored personal attacks. He deplores various things about politics that he thinks are a bit less than lofty, it has to be said, but I recall that back then he found personal attacks especially deplorable.

At regular intervals - poll result days spring to mind - people would encourage him (in fact implore might be more accurate) - to take a poke at the opposition line-up. One day he relented. Okay, he said, put something together.

I piled into it and used all of the aforementioned abusive material. He hated it. We didn't abandon the speech, but we ended up with an extremely pared-down version. My recollection is that the media leapt on any morsel of denigration he offered and gave the lines a big run. It's also fair to say that as the year went on, the odd line went into the speeches and the press conferences and the press releases about the capacity of National to govern.

But if there was some large and elaborate plan to pin scandals on National, they were comprehensively and hopelessly obscured by such small issues as the vaulting unemployment rate, a deeply contentious frigate contract, the privatisation of Telecom for what then seemed the impressive sum of 4 billion or so dollars, and a leadership change. Regrets: we've had a few.

Perhaps there exists a noble political movement populated entirely by high-minded individuals who never take a cheap shot. I confidently suggest that no party seeking your vote this spring can match that description.

For one thing, people tend to have an appetite for this stuff. We don't think much of a boorish or inane or below-the-belt attack, but we lap it up if it hits just the right balance of insight and barb. Put your hand on your heart and say you've never smirked at a putdown by Cullen, or Tamihere, or Lange or Muldoon.

An all-out smear attack is something else again, but they have a high capacity to do more harm to the smearer than the smeared if there's not a substantial degree of truth to them, and if they don't manage to stay within the parameters of what people perceive to be fair.

If you click over to Scoop, you'll see they've done us all the very generous service of carrying the full tape of the PM's Monday press conference, and it offers a nice example of the issues at play here.

Look out in particular for a question to her of Jeff Gannon proportions - but valid nonetheless - that asks whether you can really call it a personal attack on Don Brash to criticise him by quoting the words he's used. Helen Clark uses this absolute gimme to point out that she's been on the receiving end of some pretty noxious stuff herself.

Michael Cullen predictably got sneered at last week for giving a speech to PR people on the desirability of having less spin and more facts in politics. Well, by all means give me all your jibes about the pot calling the kettle black, but then consider this: Cullen is not just a deft master at the quick soundbite and the barbed wit. He's a thoughtful politician too. I've heard a quite persuasive argument that he wrote this budget with a historian's perspective. (Yeah, yeah - the chewing gum budget means they're history. That's not what I'm getting at.)

A politician can be many things at once, and Cullen is undeniably that. Craig Ranapia could well be right to label him New Zealand's bitchiest straight guy. It would be equally correct to say that he's also one of New Zealand's most intelligent politicians. The speech he gave last week was one of the most enjoyable speeches I've read in a long time.

You can get it here. You may find a barb or two in it. But if you're searching for a sign that the present government will stoop to anything to stay in power, you won't find it in there.

This must be a rough time to be a celebrity in Auckland. Eight weeks of dreary election campaign ahead of you and all your supplies of heinous chemicals have dried up. And what about you gentle reader? Are you looking forward to the election, or would you like to enjoy another week or two of I Know What You Took Last Summer?

Well, there's no reason why you can't have them both. Just turn to your trusty celeb magazine. Who'll win the election? Will it end in tears? What about the celebrity drug scandal? Who'll be first onto the covers with their tearful tell-little confessions?

Just take a look at the cover of one of those mags, and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. You lead with your political story, giving it the old human touch, and you supplement that with a touching story of repentance, contrition, and blame-loading from your celebrity drug taker.

So why don't we close our eyes and concentrate and see if we can imagine what's going to come rolling off the presses before we're all very much older and wiser?

Too hard? Well, thanks to the magic of the Interweb, I've got a little Magazine Cover Generator you can use that will do just about all the work for you.

The trouble is, when it gets to this whole celebrity drug business, I can't use real names.

But go on …you already know, don't you?

The generator can make the rest of the cover for you - you just have to add the name yourself. BUT REMEMBER: YOU CAN'T SHARE IT WITH ANYONE!

Just fill in the box, and presto: instant celebrity magazine cover for you to enjoy in the privacy of your own home or office cubicle. Now you know the rules, click here to make your own.

As you'll see, it's set a year or so on from the election. I've always said you should vote with your thoughts firmly on the future.

I was actually going to write a long piece reminiscing about all the elections I've watched since 1972. You may have heard Linda Clark suggesting to me yesterday that my nostalgia for Muldoon's banter with hecklers made me sound grandfatherly. I suppose she's right, and I do want to talk about that, but it'll have to be later in the week when I sincerely hope my rheumatism won't be giving me so much trouble.

I love paying tax. My biggest regret is that I wasn't in the top bracket when Muldoon was PM. I could have been handing over as much as 66 cents in the dollar then. Just the other day the accountant rang to discuss what we should pay for next weeks' provisional tax. She'd worked it out already, but I said to push it up another 30,000 just to be sure. She thought I was just being prudent. I didn't tell her that in fact I love the idea of paying as much tax as I possibly can.

Such lies, as Ms Kember nicely puts it.

I don't feel inclined to paying any more tax than I need to. So why am I not in a lather of excitement about the National party's plans for giving me a break? I agree with everyone who has emailed me in the past few days telling me they'd like to pay less tax. So would I. But not at any cost.

Michael Cullen says the government needs as much as it does. Dr Brash says vast amounts of that money are being soaked from us for needless schemes. I wouldn't accept either of those propositions without a hard look at the numbers. But the more I look at them, the more I think that one of them is being prudent and the other is bending his words to fit the billboards.

I deliberately designed the tax calculator to demonstrate one particular aspect of this tax debate because it was the one that seemed to me to have the most pertinence to the billboard and bumper campaigning Dr Brash has been doing. Namely: we can cover the cost of a tax cut by cutting wasteful government spending.

What that implies is that it doesn't matter whether you have a surplus of eight billion or a deficit of four, that question is irrelevant. Slash wasteful spending to cover your lost revenue, and you can fund your cuts right there. Nice and simple, and boy does it read well on a billboard. But it's nonsense.

As the calculator demonstrates, as soon as you implement a cut of any heft, you need to abolish entire government departments to get the savings you want. That doesn't just banish the analysts who might or might not be wasting space, it means you have to start throwing overboard the people who do the uncontroversial stuff as well. The ones who pay the pensions, stamp the passports, pay the teachers and the police, and keep an eye on minor issues like foot and mouth disease and mutating avian flu viruses.

But don't just take my word for it. Ask someone who's run the Treasury. Here's what well-known lefty Graham Scott had to say to an ACT function this week:

At the risk of immodesty, the fact is that I know more about controlling government expenditure than the National front bench. They are talking as though it will be easy to cut enough fat from the state to pay for tax cuts - it won't be. Believe me I've been there and I have done that. The combination of the State Enterprises Act, the Public Finance Act and the State Sector Act, which I helped to design and implement, brought remarkable improvements in the effectiveness of public organisations and lower costs. I wrote a textbook about it. But those systems have not been used vigorously for a while and some slack has got into the system. We can get better value for money but it has to be done with a scalpel not an axe.
They say they are going to cut waste out of the health sector but also preserve front line jobs. Fine, who could object to that, but if they try to do this in a way that interferes deeply into the prerogatives of the DHB Boards and management there will trouble. As the former Chair of the Health Funding Authority I have the experience to know what works and what doesn't in quest for better value for the health dollar.
Designing tax cuts is child's play. It is on the expenditure side where all the problems are and where skill and experience are needed.

Let's say that Dr Brash might change his mind and decide to argue that tax cuts cannot be funded purely by slashing wasteful spending. Let's say he argues it on the same basis as one or two writers of spluttering emails to me: THERE'S AN 8 BILLION DOLLAR SURPLUS THAT COULD COVER THESE CUTS. CAN'T YOU ADD, IDIOT?

If you should happen to be the dyspeptic type who has already had two responses from me to this question, I recommend you read the foregoing paragraphs. Slowly.

Having said that, the surplus is undeniably an important question. That and the cost of the spending commitments Don Brash and his team have been making.

Surplus first, then. This argument goes nowhere fast if you can't even agree on the starting point. So I'll state what I understand the numbers to be. Do by all means feel free to correct me. You have your OBERAC, 7.445 billion, and your cash surplus, 2.413 billion.

Your cash surplus equals your OBERAC minus a number of items:

- The one and a half billion or more that goes into capital purchases such as new machines for hospitals and building new prisons.

- The three quarters of a billion that goes to loans - students and District Health Boards for example.

-The two billion or so you put aside to save for future New Zealand Superannuation costs.

-The half a billion or so that goes into cash injections for Crown entities to help them build hospitals and housing.

-And the nearly three quarters of a billion that goes into reserve bank reserves to maintain financial stability.

The actual figures are here at page 26 of this Budget document. Number crunching ends. Discussion resumes.

I entirely recognise the argument that instead of spending that money on these items you could borrow them. I entirely recognise the argument that if you borrowed that money, you'd have enough money this year to cover the tax cuts.

But borrowing money has a cost. 65 million per year, per billion of tax, Treasury says. And yes, that would then leave you some billions spare for cuts.

But that then brings on inflation, and it pushes debt back up and if you have to borrow it more than one year and maybe many years, you're suddenly carrying a much bigger burden. And then you might be wondering how smart it was to strip out the buffer against downturn that the 2.4 billion cash surplus represents.

And this is a good year. Once there are no surpluses, you get a whole lot more to wear.

And if you pile on the Nat's 7 billion of new spending promises, well, it all gets to be a much steeper hill to climb.

Of course you could ditch the super fund, but neither major party is proposing to do that, and for good reason: ditch it and you have an even bigger problem down the track. Nothing imprisons a person like poverty in old age. Just how little would you like the pension to be in 2020?

So yes, there is an alternative way to deal with this surplus. But how smart an idea is it to do a U-Turn on the steady reduction of government debt when so much of our sorry economic history lies back up that road of higher interest rates and inflation? Borrowing to invest in a more productive future is great, but look at our track record: we suck at it.

Fran O'Sullivan gets an important part of the picture right when she writes:

Quite why Cullen would expect a populace that binges on personal debt to fund its over-lavish lifestyle and ridiculously out-of-whack property prices, to continue to forgo today's pledges in order to earn a better tomorrow, has always seemed to be dangerously out of sync with New Zealanders' underlying ethos.

What New Zealanders want is more cash in their pockets so they can continue to fund their habit of living beyond their pay packets.

If they can't get it through wage rises, then another avenue must be found.

But there are also people who are battling along with rather more modest expectations who are finding that it's pretty bloody hard to support a family on the average wage. You'd think they might be pleased of the relief that comes in the Working For Families package, which is in effect a targeted tax cut, and yet you're just as likely to hear the gripe that they don't want to be a beneficiary, they want a plain-old-fashioned tax cut.

Some, though, seem to be a little more clear-eyed, PA reader Rob points out: "many of us 'mainstream New Zealanders' have already had our tax cuts."

It's called the working for families package. As the lucky father of five, I have a reasonably well-paying job and end up paying (gasp) almost NO tax. (esp if you take into account a loss-making side business and the subsidy on the twins' creche).
I don't know how that's gonna play out, but I'm convinced Mr Brash can't give me a bigger tax cut than almost nothing! In fact, it seems likely WFF will be rolled back in some way.
I think that's where the Nats "mainstream NZ" appeal may fall over. After you've excluded maori, the (likely childless) gays AND families... you're left with the economic self-maximisers who voted for act- and who else?

Precisely.

What is it with the Nats and their fascination for simple fixes and magic bullets? If a tax cut and a hands-off approach to economic management is the sure-fire answer, how come we saw so little fresh investment of those tax cuts in the 1990s and how come we saw the economy mired in torpor by the end of their last run?

It's nice to imagine things could be as simple as the billboards suggest, but they're no more grounded in reality than a Star Wars movie, and as the Letterman Show so acutely observed once, there are at least ten disappointments in watching one of those. The cruellest of them, perhaps, is this: when the lights come back up in the movie theatre, you're still a 37 year old virgin.

So what will you be spending your tax cuts on? What fabulous holiday do you have planned? Or perhaps you'll be remodelling the kitchen. Maybe a new house? Don Brash might like you to invest it, but of course it's your God-given right to spray it around any old way you like. Good heavens yes.

Still, before this giddy night-before-Christmas euphoria gets the better of us, perhaps we should work out what we'll actually be getting. That is, of course, assuming the National Party and Winston get the chance to relive those glory days of 1996. And 7. And 8. And 9. Let's not dwell on that. I feel a Sideshow Bob shudder coming on.

Instead, let's give the present a good shake and see if we can work out what's inside the wrapping, because that old rascal Don doesn't want us to know too soon. There is, after all, more than one way to skin this cat. You can find anything on the Internet, and my word, it would be a poor show if you couldn't find a site somewhere that could let you work out for yourself what your tax cut might be worth. Your pals at Public Address are therefore pleased to introduce to you the online automatic Tax Cutter.

Just put in your income (or someone else's if you're shy), and choose the tax rate you want. The Tax Cutter will tell you how much extra money you can look forward to hanging on to each week.

Of course, being the killjoy that I am, I've also built in a costing mechanism. You'll get to see what your tax cut will cost the government, and how they might go about cutting spending to make up the shortfall.

That shouldn't be too hard surely? As Dr Brash says, there is no end of fat to be trimmed; no limit to the "dopey" schemes this government is hosing money at and no better time than "now" to get stuck into a surplus, notwithstanding that it's already been committed and won't actually be there next year.

Just in case I haven't trowelled the sarcasm on heavily enough, it seems to me that some small elements at the margins have been pressed into service as some kind of illustration of the way great wads of the taxpayer dollar are being spent by the current government.

There's a word for that, and it's nothing so prim as "baloney."