KEY POINTS:
It is so good to see, in the middle of a global financial meltdown, a gathering recession, projected huge levels of debt, rising inflation, increasing unemployment, and a crashing domestic property market, that the Government is moving swiftly on the issues that matter.
Its regulations to reduce the flow rates of showers to a trickle is a masterstroke and will do much to restore confidence and stave off economic ruin. Not.
What are these people thinking? This Government is in a last-ditch fight to save its political life at this election and all it can do is start fiddling with my shower rose to save energy?
Where is its strategy to restore economic growth and at least cushion the country against the coming international financial tsunami? All I have seen is Finance Minister Michael Cullen grinning and shrugging in a "What? Me Worry?" pose on television.
Not that the National Party unveiled any cunning plan this week to save the nation. John Key and Bill English talked blithely of keeping the economy ticking over with further tax cuts but I do not know of anywhere on the planet where there has been a consumption-led recovery from a recession.
Spending just seems to push up inflation, compound debt and drag economies further into the mire. Anyone seen Iceland lately? It is so broke I think it is listed on Trade Me with a $1 reserve bid.
National is unbelievably vague about its economic strategy to save us from a long and destructive recession. Key talks vapidly of increasing growth. How? He does not say but gestures languidly at the state sector saying he will refocus expenditure to be less wasteful and more efficient.
Again, how? No New Zealand Government in the past 168 years has managed to make the state sector run to maximum efficiency. It is the nature of bureaucracies to be wasteful.
For the first time in many, many years the nation needs strong, thoughtful and intelligent leadership if we are to avoid destroying the lives of many New Zealanders.
That leadership needs to be aggressively pro-active. It needs a plan and a clear strategy to steer us through the bleakest economic times in living memory.
At this stage, four weeks out from polling day, I have yet to see any party project that kind of vision and purpose for the nation.
If National is resolutely sleepwalking to victory in the face of the turmoil abroad, the Government appears to be in a total coma and the Reserve Bank is dazed and bewildered.
Puzzled at why the rest of the world seems to be, again, out of step with New Zealand, slashing interest rates while we hold ours, Reserve Bank Governor Alan Bollard instead tries to pump more money into the banks by lending them money based on bundled up "fully secured residential mortgage securities".
Hang on. Are not those kinds of securities exactly the thing that brought Wall Street to its knees?
Conventional wisdom says our banks were much stricter in their lending criteria, therefore the New Zealand mortgage securities are much safer.
Has Dr Bollard not noticed the property market is sliding and many observers are predicting a fall in property values of between 25 per cent and 30 per cent over the next few years? How many of those securities will be worth anything when those mortgages become 110 per cent to 120 per cent of the value of the property?
When Labour came to power in 1984 the country was in the grip of an Icelandic economic collapse and it convened an economic summit. This largely proved to be window dressing because its finance minister, Sir Roger Douglas, ignored much of what was discussed and simply pushed ahead with his economic strategy.
Whoever wins the election, there is a strong argument that the next government should immediately convene something similar, albeit smaller and more tightly focused.
It makes sense to get together a small group of the country's best economic, financial and business brains, the Reserve Bank, Treasury and a cross section of the political parties to arrive at a non-partisan consensus as to how we can best save ourselves from collapse.
It is too much to expect any one political party or a small group of public servants to come up with a winning strategy, so why not reach out into the private sector and ask for help?
We have the time to do it. International crises are, indeed, like tsunamis for New Zealand. The ripple effect means they often hit here much harder than at their point of origin but at least their worst impact is often delayed by many months.
That gives the incoming government, whatever its makeup, some valuable time to act decisively. Pray it does.
