KEY POINTS:
Read our lips, Dr Cullen: tax cuts now.
The Treasury's final accounts for the last financial year have landed an $8.7 billion surplus in your lap, well ahead of forecasts. That's a testament to your prudent stewardship of the economy over eight years, but it is also wealth that has flowed from factors beyond your control: strong worldwide commodity prices, the robust performance of our currency - or rather the febrile state of the greenback - and a pleasing confidence on the part of overseas investors. Growth has prospered despite the steady rise in interest rates. Even the turmoil in US mortgage markets and the failure of finance companies here have failed to dampen economic spirits.
But running the country means more than just adding up figures in a ledger. As finance minister, you have a duty to look after the country's books, but you also have a responsibility to look after the country's people. You have loosened the purse-strings to allow social spending that will assist the most underprivileged, and few of us begrudge that. But it is way past time to acknowledge that the vast majority of Kiwis are neither rich nor poor: they are middle-income, hard-working, self-reliant folk and they have been missing out. Those interest rate rises take savage bites out of otherwise solid household budgets. Now milk and butter and sugar and power prices are up.
We've waited long enough. It's all very well for you to say you will "address those issues" in the budget next year but everybody knows that means an election bribe. In May, a tax cut will look like cynical opportunism. Voter goodwill may be for sale now - but not next year.
