End the turgid speculation and show us the money

Minister of Social Development Anne Tolley. Photo / Mark Mitchell

For reasons long forgotten and now covered by the essentially meaningless blanket explanation of "tradition", Budgets are always delivered on a Thursday afternoon.

One should be grateful for small mercies. In the good old days, the Minster of Finance did not start reading the lengthy Budget speech until MPs had returned to the House at 7.30pm following the dinner break.

If some appeared to have devoted much of that intermission to taking advantage of the cut-rate liquor prices that used to apply in the bars and restaurants, that was understandable.

Ahead of those MPs was more than likely an all-night sitting to pass legislation okaying a rise in the price of booze and fags for everyone else.

A revamp of Parliament's rules in 1995 shifted the delivery time back to 2pm. It would have made more sense to present the document at 2pm on a Tuesday afternoon when the House begins its sitting week.

That way everyone could then devote the rest of the week to debating the merits or otherwise of the Budget instead of playing an extended and interestingly turgid and pointless guessing game for most of the week as to its content.

This pre-delivery hiatus was much in evidence yesterday with the House meandering through a lethargic ministers' question time with all the fizz and excitement of a tortoise race.

To say the mood in Parliament ahead of Bill English's seventh Budget is anti-climactic is to be kind.

Even the Cabinet ministers who approved the Budget's contents seemed confused as to its contents.

In the wake of the public clamour for action to reduce child poverty, the Government had been understood to have been preparing a package of measures.

In recent days, the Prime Minister and Finance Minister have been downplaying the size of any package, with English saying there will be no new initiatives to tackle what is a deep-seated problem.

No one appears to have told Anne Tolley, who as Minister of Social Development, will be responsible for any poverty package. She continued to assure Parliament that John Key had declared "hardship is going to be a focus of the Budget".