Garth George: Miserly Cullen in a spin over National's tax cuts

There is no doubt that National's tax cuts are eminently affordable and that they can be given without depriving important services such as health, education and welfare - no matter what Michael Cullen says.

His rant in Tuesday's Herald [link at bottom of page] that the tax cuts were of an "insane size" is absolute codswallop and simply indicative of the panic they have engendered in the miserly heart of the Minister of Finance.

This, after all, is the man who has presided over a series of Budget surpluses the like of which this country has never seen, culminating in an enormous $7 billion in the financial year not long ago ended.

And the man who didn't know about the $500 million corporate tax windfall until it dropped in his lap at the end of June; and who had to admit when the books were opened the other day that there was $600 million more in the kitty than estimated.

Yet he has the temerity to say of Don Brash that he is "an elderly gentleman who can never remember his own policies". Pot calling the kettle black, if you'll pardon that tired old cliche.

Then, sadly, the unkindest cut of all - not for the two men at whom he directed it, but for Dr Cullen himself - a statement that shows him up once again as one of those querulous, discontented socialists to whom wealth is always a cause for gut-churning envy.

Said he: "I really question in New Zealand today how multimillionaires like Dr Brash and Mr John Key [National's finance spokesman], who likes to pose in front of his trophy house, can award themselves a $92 a week tax cut while they are saying more children should live in poverty."

Which, of course, is nonsense, and just more evidence of how discombobulated Dr Cullen is with National's obviously rational and affordable plan to turn on the trickle-down tap which Dr Brash's predecessors and this Labour Government have kept firmly corked.

And as if all that isn't bad enough, Dr Cullen complains that someone on $20,000 a year gets only $6 a week from National's proposed cuts while someone on $100,000 gets $92.

Well, gee whiz. I suppose Dr Cullen is also angry because someone on $20,000 a year gets a bit less than $400 a week and someone on $100,000 gets a bit less than $2000. Pretty hypocritical from a man who is always banging on about the need to generate wealth but in the next breath treats contemptuously those who do, for themselves and, in doing so, for others, too. Even the Bible tells us that to him who has shall more be given.

The thing about tax cuts is that the extra money's in your hand the day you get paid and you don't have to go cap in hand to the Government to get it as you do under Labour's suddenly-enhanced Working for Families package.

But that's the socialists' way. They are absolutely convinced that they know better than we do how to distribute our wealth and will go to any lengths to ensure that as many of us as possible are beholden to the state for largesse.

It takes me back to the election campaigns of the late 1940s when the whole argument was private enterprise (National) versus state control (Labour). National won the argument in 1949 and Labour didn't retrieve the levers of power for a long, long time.

I watched the leaders' "debate" on TV One the other night for all of five minutes before the loud-mouthed rantings of a hard-eyed, flinty-faced Helen Clark, and the raucous bellowing of the morons in the audience, drove me into another room to read a book.

That was no way to run a debate and if the people who run TVNZ have any sense at all - a matter in grave doubt in the light of events lately in the citadel of ego - then they will ditch that format and give the public the sort of reasoned discussion that such a serious matter as the future of the nation deserves.

Dr Brash has said he would have been harder on his opponent had the Prime Minister been a man, a view which Helen Clark, who in private is far from the shrew she appeared to be in the debate, described as "quaint and old-fashioned".

What's wrong with quaint and old-fashioned? If the gentlemanly Dr Brash felt uncomfortable toughing it out with a member of what he once knew as the gentler sex, then good on him. It might not have been politically astute, but these days we could do with more of it.

A National Party spokesman said later that Dr Brash thought it set a "poor example for men to be seen shouting at women". Helen Clark's response was: "It's patronising."

Tell that to the women who get bawled out by their husbands day in and day out over one triviality after another; and to the men who watched Helen Clark perform on TV and said to themselves "I'm glad I'm not married to her; the one I've got is bad enough".

Meanwhile the rest of us continue to wonder why, in this neck of the woods, only the New Zealand Herald gives us the opportunity to get to the guts of the issues. This newspaper's coverage of the run-up to the election has so far been better than outstanding.