Tom Frewen: Boring his way into history, or astrology

I caught up with Michael as he left the debating chamber yesterday afternoon.

With his third Budget tucked under one arm, he looked for all the world like a history teacher hurrying to his next class.

I am a journalist. So the first question that sprang to mind was: "How do you feel?"

Without waiting for his response, I decided to find out for myself. I pinched him on the arm. He felt firm.

"He feels firm," sources close to him confirmed to me later. "Firm to steely," they told me. I wrote it down.

"But surely," I said to him as we scurried through the lobby and down the corridor towards the Beehive, "you must be feeling pretty sick about rejecting everything that you once stood for."

"Are you calling me a hypocrite?" he demanded.

"Of course not. It is not permitted to call someone a hypocrite in Parliament. There is a good reason. If the word was not banned, it would be used so often they would have to find another way of describing a person who says one thing one day and the opposite the next."

Michael, for instance, had just delivered a Budget that was, as predicted, dull, boring and with about as much vision as would be available to a blind rat at the bottom of a longdrop on a very dark night.

Did he not recall lambasting poor old Bill Birch for doing exactly the same thing?

When Birch predicted his 1996 Budget would be boringly predictable, Cullen said National's Treasurer had got even that wrong. It was, in fact, predictably boring.

Budgets did not have to be boring and uninspiring documents, Cullen had informed Birch in the 1996 Budget debate.

"They should be statements of vision. They should be statements about the kind of New Zealand that governments see themselves leading and building."

"The vision thing can be a bit tricky," Michael admitted. "Before you can say Joe Stalin you're accused of five-year planning. Boring is better."

Now that he understood the importance of being dull and uninspiring, would he be apologising for what he said about Bill English in 1999?

"What did I say?"

"You said: It must have been difficult to find a spokesperson more boring than Bill Birch."

Cullen followed English in the 1999 Budget Debate. In 1995 - "the mogodon of all Budgets" - he followed Jim Anderton, then the Alliance MP for Sydenham. His speech, said Cullen, showed that "the member for Sydenham is determined never to lead the Alliance into a responsible role in Government".

Devoting most of his time to attacking the Alliance, which had dared to amend Labour's no-confidence motion, Cullen made some interesting observations on the future deputy prime minister's character.

"He will always find an excuse to cut and run when he comes face to face with the prospect of responsibility.

"He needs to remind himself that pride comes before a fall. His hubris will be his undoing.

"For those who think that the member for Sydenham represents consensual, caring, sharing, social-worker politics in action, that is a hard thing to convince members of this [Labour] party of, since many of us have had a close, and long, and continuous experience of the member for Sydenham in that regard."

That last remark followed a claim that some Alliance members had been bullied by their leader. Anderton had either been heading into exile or returning from it and there was a problem with the party's finances, which Cullen described as an attempt to take over control of the Democrat party's funding.

"I wonder whether all those Social Crediters who have run housie up and down this country for decades realise that the member for Sydenham is trying to grab direct control of their funds to use for one big push at the next election, and once used, they will be discarded, and the rest of the Alliance does not exist."

My final question for Michael was: "Instead of history and politics, did you ever consider a career in astrology?"

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