Roger Moroney: Balancing the books bewilders

Roger Moroney.

Ah, the dear old Budget.

The annual nod towards that wonderful quote from dear old Mr Micawber - one of my favourite Charles Dickens characters.

His often-quoted recipe for contentment and financial well-being.

"Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 19 pounds 19 shillings and six pence, result happiness - annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 20 pounds ought and six, result misery."

It's all about balancing the books you see, whatever the books happen to be.

I can recall the days of old when Mum and Dad would sit at the kitchen table listening to the delivery of the Budget on the wireless, none of your live television feeds back then.

We'd be up in our room wrecking something quietly and hear a disgruntled roar from father, followed by mum putting the kettle on to make a soothing cup of tea.

Our eldest brother, who had abandoned playing cowboys and indians across the prairies of the mat in our humble room for the Everly Brothers, would fill us in.

"They must have put the tax up on smokes and beer again," he would say.

"Always hitting the working bloke," dad would declare.

"Bet the Government bods are fine for a drop though."

In their own financially unique way, mum and dad would draft a budget for the household.

We didn't worry about the cost of fuel because we didn't have a car in the early years so that was a bonus.

And if we experienced a "Micawber" week, where outgoings threatened incomings, then there would be inevitable cutbacks.

"We're only going to have enough for three scoops of chips this Thursday kids," our Minister of Finance and Fish and Chips would declare solemnly.

"And watch how much sauce you use," he would add.

Which we adhered to, although we'd swipe another slice of buttered bread if they left the room for a minute.

There's always room for some movement in a budgetry situation.

And so, the National Budget of 2016 emerged accompanied by a lot of figures and a lot of talking and a lot of paperwork and of course some slightly caustic comments from those across the floor.

If you watched it away from home then basically there wasn't too much to write home about.

I reckon places like Venezuela and Zimbabwe might just have the right idea.

Simply wipe the word budget from the vocabulary and just keep raising prices and printing more dosh to make up the slack.

Or go down the North Korean path - just build bombs and rockets and to hell with the wheat harvests.

I have never been able to fathom the finer points of budgeting because it all comes across as not so much an attempt to balance the books but more an exercise of how to bewilder.

Figures and sums and costings and expenditure and economic forecasts are often beyond the average person's comprehension because arranging figures can pretty well create whatever answer people would most like to hear.

I think on the whole this land, for an isolated little entity far from the rest of the world, is doing pretty well okay - well that's what we get told.

This is reinforced by tales of financial optimism and slaps on the back for the Minister of Finance after all the talk has been talked and 80 per cent of the population is still not absolutely sure what he was actually on about.

It can be tricky to predict a Budget, although there is always one facet of this book-balancing pursuit that I do find myself being able to anticipate.

If it's an election year there's a very high probability there will be some tax cuts.

So with the election still a year away, no real surprises there.

At the end of the day budgeting is important.

If one has $25 to last the next three days one must be frugal and astute and recognise a good discount when one sees one.

If the overall sum spent at the end of the three days edges in at $25.85 then yes, 'tis misery.

However, I am forever buoyed by the memory of wandering into an Aussie bar many years ago with $11 of their dollars in my pocket.

I was with a couple of other biker lads (we'd ventured over to a race track) and to be sure, we had a few.

Yet when I got back to our digs I found, somewhat bewilderingly, that I had $14.60 in my wallet.

Result ... happiness.

- Roger Moroney is an award-winning journalist for Hawke's Bay Today and observer of the slightly off-centre.