KEY POINTS:
Michael Cullen's Budget was a "money-go-round" effort which gave with one hand but took with the other, National leader John Key said.
Labour had trumpeted the "good news" to businesses that they would get $1 billion in tax cuts from the Budget without telling them in four years they could be paying $2 billion in contributions to their workers' savings accounts.
"That's the truth about this Budget. [Businesses] get given a billion and get $2 billion taken off them."
Mr Key's response to the Budget was one of his big tests as National's leader.
With little time to digest the Budget, he was armed only with notes scrawled on the back of Leader's Office compliment slips.
At the end of each page, Mr Key screwed it up and tossed it aside, prompting Winston Peters to later comment it showed everything Mr Key said was rubbish.
But Mr Key started in good tub-thumping fashion, calling the Budget a "cruel hoax".
He said people on low incomes were unlikely to benefit from the KiwiSaver tax credits because they could not afford to save.
They could also be stripped of good pay increases because employers could use the requirement to make contributions of up to 4 per cent of workers' salaries into workers' savings schemes as a bargaining chip.
He wrung his hands and bellowed at the plight of those in "the mortgage belt" and Aucklanders hit by a fuel tax to fund electrification of the rails.
"They don't get a personal tax cut. There's none of those in Budget 2007. There is a special little treat for Aucklanders. They get a tax increase. I'll look forward to Helen Clark parading round Auckland and telling Aucklanders why she's got a $1.7 billion cash surplus, a $6.3 billion surplus but there's not enough money to pay for electrification so we have to have a tax increase."
Two thirds of the way through the energy was flagging.
"He's fizzed out," said Minister of Transport Annette King. "He's lost his mojo."
Mr Key soldiered on. "You've only got four minutes to go, hang in there," the minister chirped. "You'll make it!"
Mr Key rallied and, in good rollicking style, predicted the end of Labour in government.
He berated Labour for wasting eight years of "the best economic conditions we've have in a generation."
"[Dr Cullen] had the opportunity to deliver a really bright future for New Zealand and he failed. No Mickey Mouse, round-about Budget is ever going to save that."
He declared Bill English would be reading the 2009 Budget "and it will be a lot better Budget than that".
Then he sat down, grinning like a schoolboy who had just hit a six.
"Was that it?" Prime Minister Helen Clark asked of Mr Key's offering.
It was.
