Bruce Bisset: Broken promises in no frills Budget

Seems to me there's nothing worse than a populist right-wing government, especially in a time of crisis. Which, perversely, is exactly when right-wing governments are popular.
There's something about the cosy buddies-with-business bonhomie and civilised veneer of the well-heeled that seems to strike a chord of comfort for voters when things are looking dire.
As if the assumed mantle of "natural rule" is a reality, a blanket we can wrap up our fears in and think them taken care of.
John Key has profited from such perceptions. Affable, apparently money-wise, he seems to epitomise the "no-look pass" of politics: someone voters instinctively trust to catch the ball, whether there's good reason or no.
That there isn't is evidenced by the latest Budget. Instantly labelled and lauded as conservative, in actuality it's the sort of tinkering with the housekeeping you might expect within a family of modest means who find their disposable income shrinking.
Cut out extras in the school lunchbox; try to put aside a bit for a rainy day; knuckle down and focus on merely keeping your job.
The sort of approach one might expect from the son of a welfare family: solid, prudent, no frills. Most average voters can relate to that - so it's popular.
But National aren't running a household; they're running a country. There's a smidgen of difference: a government is not subject to a householder's constraints; they make the rules, and can change them at whim.
So it's not about what is in the budget so much as what isn't. And what isn't is anything that will actually cause this country to grow.
No genuine support for R&D or for high-end manufacturing; ongoing cuts instead of boosts to education at all levels. Equals no support for a growth future.
We're constantly told the only way to compete on the global stage is to think and act smarter. The promise that we would is one of the key planks John and his cronies were elected on. Clearly it's an empty one.
And surely the mantra that freeing up business to prosper will result in more investment in capacity and jobs is proved a dead-duck concept by now: Muldoon, Douglas and Richardson all parroted that line, and what happened? Artificial profit-taking booms followed by hard-landing busts, with little or no real advance.
Frankly as bad as things are now, the only reason we're not in far deeper doo-doo is because commodity prices are high. A well-known maxim suggests the most effective way to turn around a downturn is to spend your way out of it. At the bottom of an economic cycle is exactly the time money should start flowing out to create jobs and infrastructure and stimulate growth.
If you're a government, that is. Households have already spent as much as they can afford; household debt has tripled in the last 12 years; every man woman and child in the country now owes around $40,000, averaged.
But government debt, though burgeoning, remains less than a third of GDP, so there's plenty of borrowing upside. What matter a few billion more so long as it is used to creatively stimulate growth? Thereby funding a return that acts to reduce debt, instead of merely treading water (or slowly sinking) servicing it.
Instead we get a sell-off of the remaining public assets, to be used for basics like public buildings, not to create jobs that will create wealth.
And at a loss not only of public control but of the dividends the power companies and airline pay into central coffers each year. Of course, perhaps Treasury is right and we're about to enjoy 4 per cent growth simply by wishing it - though a swag of economists have already scoffed at such projections.
What startles me is that this so-called money-wise pro-business government somehow believes what the Treasury boffins are telling them, so think they can sit on their hands and it'll all come right.
They're wrong.
Because there's no vision to provide impetus for policies that genuinely promote growth. And without that vision, growth will not occur.
That won't stop people voting this lot back in, unfortunately. Not until the cosy blanket of popularity is proved threadbare, and the cold wind of poverty blows through it and strips us naked.
That's the right of it.
Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.