Toby Manhire: Walk a bit, run a bit, it's a middling Budget

Act Party leader David Seymour. Photo / Jason Oxenham

With such a surfeit of pizzas and pies it's hard to know which trending viral phenomenon to choose, but in tribute to the Prime Minister's finest Facebook moment of recent times I'm going for The Walk-Run Budget.

The incrementalist philosophy of this National-led government - walk a bit, run a bit, keep moving, no wild bursts of speed - abides: modest but broad tax relief for most of us, sprinklings of sugar almost everywhere, and spiking the guns of the opposition by camping a tent in their territory.

Sorry to put it like that, but it's Budget Day, and metaphorical soup is compulsory.

Messrs Joyce and English have apparently resisted the temptation to follow the enthusiasm of the last Prime Minister - I forget his name - to splurge with a $3 billion tax cut, though that could yet be powder kept dry for the manifesto.

The biggest risk of this Budget is that it lacks any big ambition, it does nothing dramatic to address National's three biggest vulnerabilities in election year - housing, health and Auckland - but a lack of big ambition has hardly hurt them much so far.

And it says something that the most impressive of the Opposition speeches in response was from Winston Peters, and half the time I wasn't sure what he was on about.

David Seymour, leader of the Act Party, was this week issuing breezy comparisons with the colonisation of Africa to denounce National's embrace of Labouresque ideas.

Yesterday in Parliament he was staying laidback, saying that "Finance Minister Steve now proudly wears the hammer and sickle on his sleeve".

Amid such hyperbole you could easily overlook his observation that this was "the type of budget we used to expect from Michael Cullen".

Assuming this is right - and it largely is - that's a hell of an indictment of the party to the right of National, which is called the Act Party and led by David Seymour.

Clowns to the left. Jokers to the right.