KEY POINTS:
Bill English looks like a bloke trying to bail out the sinking Titanic with a bucket. Labour called last week's half-billion-dollar fiscal stimulus package "timid" but I'm buying National's warning that we cannot lumber future generations with oppressive debt levels that will choke the country's future for years.
Muldoon's National Government of the 70s racked up a debt mountain that took us the entire 80s and most of the 90s to get on top of and at a huge social cost that we are still paying for today.
Where do you think our appalling crime figures, lousy health statistics and rickety national infrastructure in the 21st century come from?
Twenty years of neglect in the late-20th century. It produced an underclass of deprived families that has spawned a host of problems our social services are now struggling to deal with.
Meanwhile, like a dilapidated run-down state house, the nation's infrastructure - its roads, bridges, communications and the other stuff a modern economy needs to thrive - was left to rot.
At best this Government can only hope to blunt the sharpest edge of the recession with anything it does and $500 million pumped into the economy is better than nothing. It will save a few jobs and keep some companies afloat.
But it is "a drop in the bucket", as Phil Goff says, when we are looking at 68,000 people losing their jobs this year and many more business failures.
Sadly, New Zealand is export-dependent and when our overseas markets are contracting there is little we can do about it except hope to ride out the storm and pray for an early recovery of the rest of the planet's spending power.
Freezing MPs' and top civil servants' pay is window dressing but it is nice to think, if we are suffering, so they are too.
Letting a razor gang loose on Government spending won't accomplish too much more as the potential savings will be dwarfed by the sheer scope of the problem.
Window dressing or not, if he is in the mood to slash costs, SOE minister Simon Power might like to look closely at the fat bonuses top SOE executives pay themselves to do their jobs.
In the US, Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committees was incensed at bankers paying themselves US$18.4 billion ($35 billion) in bonuses when they were receiving a US$176 billion bailout from the taxpayer.
In a masterly understatement Frank declared, "This notion that you need some special incentive to do the right thing troubles people".
It might trouble New Zealanders to know that in tough financial times SOE executives were pocketing sizeable annual bonuses simply for doing what they were already paid to do.
The Government is giving the impression of much wider action than it is actually taking, by drip-feeding things like assistance for those laid off, infrastructure spending, the razor gang targeting more efficient public sector spending, the tax breaks for small and medium business and the next wave of tax cuts coming in a couple of months.
Frankly, the Government doesn't have a lot of other options and it is trying to keep up confidence in itself and the economy.
Prime Minister John Key is playing the role that he is best suited to, a capable CEO of a company that is facing big trouble.
He is maintaining staff morale while trying to pull back on wasteful spending in the business and raising loans to keep the company afloat and maintain production.
The Government's decision to raise the minimum wage to $12.50-an-hour may not have impressed employers but it demonstrated it wasn't going to do the knee-jerk Tory thing in an economic crisis and throw low-income earners overboard.
The political honeymoon with National is fading but most of the public seem content to give it a fair go for the time being.
That will change in the coming months as the recession really begins to bite.
Intellectually, people might realise this is a worldwide phenomena and wasn't brought about by anything this new government has done. But when the pain sets in, those people will look for someone to blame. That "someone" will be National.
The Labour opposition will be able to sit tutting on the sidelines saying, "I wouldn't have done that, you really should be doing this, oh dear" knowing full well that its options would have been just as limited had it retained power.
Sometimes in politics it is not a bad thing to lose an election and, for Labour - considering the financial state of the world - if there ever was an election to lose it was the last one.
