Birds and the bees? It must be Budget week

Prime Minister John Key last year referred to Budgets as Finance Minister Bill English's children, pointing out he was now proud father to six of each.

Now English has moved on to his seventh it came as somewhat of a shock to hear his confession that he had killed the Budget and was proud of it.

What he meant was that he had stripped most of the excitement out of the actual event by releasing spoilers in advance. His motto when it comes to Budgets is "boring".

So we know about the new restrictions on foreign buyers and increased enforcement of a tax on capital gains. We also know that English's latest child won't be the long-awaited surplus he had hoped for.

All that is left is speculation about whether this year's child will at least deliver something for other children, as promised by John Key in his rather "Miss World" post election speech in which he said saving the children would be top of mind for his third term.

Even this is apparently not that enticing - English has ruled out any major new measures making boosts in funding to existing initiatives more likely.

However, even English seems a little disappointed at the lack of theatrics that accompanies his annual spot in the limelight. So he set about fabricating some suspense anyway. In Question Time English even set up poor National backbencher Chris Bishop with a "patsy" question - a pre-scripted government question usually used to gloat about achievements. Bishop dutifully asked "how will Budget 2015 help New Zealanders and their families?"

"Ah!" English crowed. "you'll have to wait until Budget Day." Bishop now has the dubious honour of being the only MP whose patsy question did not get an answer.

Budget Week coincided with Sign Language Week so Parliament's Question Time included sign language translators. If the Prime Minister's interesting diction was not challenging enough, there was also the danger of repetitive strain injury as both Key and English repeatedly said "wait until Thursday" and "one more sleep".

Happily, the signers got some reprieve with the chance to flip the bird after NZ First MP Ron Mark suggested with his microphone on that people should "shut the f*** up".

It was as if Budget Day was Christmas Day, albeit Christmas in a household which does not give presents and the only turkeys are the ones talking. Labour leader Andrew Little got into the mood and delivered his Twas the Night Before Christmas poem, ending in rather Grimm-like fashion with a "throaty roar" and a coup by Judith Collins.

The Greens were momentarily sidetracked by the discovery of a mass murderer in our midst: neonicotinoids. "Government must put bees first," Steffan Browning wrote in his press release calling for the substance to be banned. "Neonicotinoids have been implicated in bee deaths around the world."

This left some onlookers perplexed. Was this a seismic shift from the Greens "children first" stance? Was it now bees first? Seven minutes later, the Greens followed up with some clarification: the children had it. They used a bit of rhetoric borrowed from Australia, asking about the plight of the "abandoned generations".

For those wondering if they are abandoned, this relates to everybody aged under 40. Metiria Turei wrote that a quarter of a million children were in poverty. "It should be top of the Government's Budget priorities."

Quite where that left the bees is unknown. One reporter did some quick chicken-or-egg logic. "Without bees there will be no children," she suggested on Twitter. "Or something."

This is Labour leader Andrew Little's first Budget in the role. Little has already begun the fun of letting John Key's words come back to haunt him. The Muldoon comparisons were back as Little pointed out Key's was the first Government since Muldoon's to deliver seven deficits in a row. Labour also wondered about the wellbeing of the Prime Minister's cusp, after Key's election night declaration that New Zealand was "on the cusp of something special". They wondered if it was stored in the same place as the surplus.

"Are we still on the cusp?" Phil Twyford wondered. Robertson also was curious: "Has anyone seen the cusp?" he asked. Roberston, too, is facing his first Budget as Labour's finance spokesman. English has made it easy for him.

All Robertson has to do is rub his nose in the red ink - all seven years of it.

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