John Armstrong: Taxing time in torrid rat race

Why isn't the message getting through? Why isn't Labour sending cold shivers down the spines of voters with its dire warnings that National's tax cuts would come at too high a price?

Labour keeps asking itself those questions. But it seems no nearer to finding the solution despite Michael Cullen mounting his umpteenth offensive yesterday.

Calling a press conference and employing an overhead projector to run through the costings, the Finance Minister put much of National's current surge ahead of Labour in the polls down to the lag effect of that party's tax policy released two weeks ago.

However, Dr Cullen likened the policy to "a castle in the air". If the foundations were knocked out, the whole thing would come tumbling down.

His argument boiled down to National having to find an extra $7.2 billion over four years as the net cost of its tax cuts - money which would have to come from additional borrowing and cuts to spending.

He claimed Labour's message that National's tax cuts are unaffordable without slashing the big-ticket health and education budgets was beginning to strike some resonance with voters. "People are smelling a rat." If so, the rat is not only immune to Labour's poison, it is positively thriving on it.

Labour has just 11 days to find something far more deadly.

It is not as if the Finance Minister lacks for things to scare voters - warnings that social services will be downgraded, predictions of user-pays, highlighting of the risks of putting the country back into hock through overseas borrowing, and forecasts of rises in interest rates.

But beyond saying a petrol price rise-induced economic downturn would make tax cuts even more risky, Dr Cullen had nothing fresh to make anyone present break into a cold sweat.

Meanwhile, National is about to strike back. The party is today expected to detail how much it would spend on health in Government, to reassure voters that it is not planning budget cuts.

Part of Labour's problem is the economic jargon inherent in the number-crunching which had Dr Cullen talking yesterday of things like "net new spend" and "strategic deficits". That was despite his making a conscious effort to use layman's language - and a deliberate, though not very successful attempt at being Mr Reasonable instead of Dr Sarcasm.

Dr Cullen blames the media for Labour's predicament. But privately Labour admits its message is not getting through simply because people do not want to hear it. People want a tax cut. And National is offering some tidy sums.

Dr Cullen has become the proverbial cracked record.

The party needs a circuitbreaker that paints the human cost of tax cuts in far more vivid, imaginative ways.

In its absence, Labour will hammer away as now - but more frenetically. It has no choice. The election could swing on tax. The trouble is the more frenzied Labour becomes, the more desperate it looks.