KEY POINTS:
They didn't want to hear the answer, so they didn't ask the question.
MPs on Parliament's finance and expenditure select committee spent a hour quizzing Reserve Bank Governor Alan Bollard about his December monetary policy statement yesterday.
But they studiously ignored one of its most prominent features - a warning that fiscal expansion is looming larger as an inflation risk.
Bollard's warning is as much to borrowers as to the politicians.
He has to take fiscal policy - the amount a Government spends and the amount it taxes - as he finds it and is appropriately wary of seeming to want to influence it.
If there is a case for cutting taxes or spending more on roads, the Government should do that and let the chips fall where they may in terms of any impact on interest rates.
As Sir William Birch said at the time of some procyclical tax cuts in the mid-1990s that prompted a rate hike - ironically from then governor Don Brash - "interest rates rise and interest rates fall, but tax cuts are forever".
But when so many households are up to their nostrils in debt, it is a politically sensitive matter.
Bollard also made the point that monetary policy needs friends: "We can't get full stabilisation from just one instrument." In other words, he has enough of a problem already dampening the household sector's ardour for borrowing and spending in an era of fixed mortgage rates and low unemployment.
Based on the last Budget's figures there is a significant fiscal stimulus, of about 1 per cent of GDP, already in the pipeline for next year and fiscal policy will still be expansionary in the two years after that.
The prospect that the next Budget will deliver further stimulus in the two out years has got to be a worry, especially if the economy has gone through such a soft landing that the inflationary pressures built up in the recent boom are then still in the throes of being vented.
It is only fair for Bollard to warn of the consequences. And it is not a good look for the MPs to clap their hands over their ears like so many hear-no-evil monkeys when he does so.
