Jim Hopkins: Stand by for the roll out of 'smart, active government'

No prizes for guessing what the 5th Field Pundits are aiming at this morning. It's the Budget, innit? Corse it is. That'll be the thing that's got the big gums blazing.

They'll be wittering on about bracket creep and triple bottom lines and a whole lot of stuff that sounds more like the adverse effects of tight underpants than the detailed particulars of a financial document.

But only to the uninitiated, mind. Your average Pundit understands the true meaning of bracket lines and triple bottom creep, not to mention fiscal drag and currency fluctuations - which have nothing to do with water-heating cuts.

And they get excited by these unfathomable things. So much so that some of them do a passable imitation of Robin Reynolds at a Robbie Williams concert.

It's true, gentle reader. Pundits love the Budget. For these erudite souls, the Gummint's annual exercise in purse-ecution is a big event, not unlike the Melbourne Cup or a Super 12 semi - except, of course, with the Budget you concentrate on spending rather than Spencer.

Having said that, it should be noted that there's not much spending to concentrate on these days. Not in the actual Budget, anyway. By the time the worthy epistle is read, most of its contents have been announced.

Last week, for instance, we learned that (Un)Able Seaman Barker and his waterlogged band of hula-hopers were going to get an extra $34 million, the better to ensure that our Bertarelli-bashing bucket brigade could head off to Europe and strike terror in the hearts of those who've already beaten them 5-0.

Alas, this astute marketing move roused the ire of various carping critics. These negative nincompoops argued that Minister Mallard's smart investment (which they've churlishly dubbed the Dalton Grant) would be better spent on trivial things like hip replacements or extra dialysis for overstayers.

For heaven's sake, people. If we do that, the rich will stay rich and the poor will stay poor and never the (Shania) Twain shall meet. So wake up and smell the coffers.

Your average overstayer isn't likely to be a wealthy investor. And they're the people Trevor's trying to attract. He knows we've gotta be venal, not renal, and that's why he's ladling out the lolly.

Those who claim he's pouring $34 million down a black hull forget one simple fact: if we can pull off a corker in Majorca or even win the day in St Tropez, thousands of wealthy European business typhoons will rush over here to build power stations and hospitals and overstayers' detention centres and all the other nice things to which we'd like to become acustard.

Now surely, this would be a good thing. It must be. The Gummint says so. Mr Mallard rightly points out that we would be fools to clutch at straws when we can nail our colours to a (broken) mast.

He insists that backing Team NZ is a golden opportunity to build a Dream New Zealand and is, therefore, the very essence of "smart, active government".

Ahhhhh, what a seductive phrase that is. Well, for a politician, anyway. If words were aphrodisiacs, merely whispering "smart, active government" in the House would surely trigger a frenzied orgy, a mad members' pash-up of the most unbridled kind.

"Smart, active government" is the language of miracle-workers, which is what most politicians consider themselves to be. They love to speak in tongues of potency and purpose, not so much to delude us as to delude themselves.

If you need to convince yourself that the world's unruly chaos will meekly yield to your will, your words must always sound more transforming than they really are.

By any reasonable translation, "smart, active government" simply means "meddling". But that's not a word to bolster political delusion, so you won't find it in the Budget. Instead, what you'll find is a heady range of erotic mantras. "Growth and innovations strategy" will likely be there. So will "reposition up the value chain". And check out all the things the Gummint plans to "roll out" rather than "start".

See, while us ordinary yobbos might be happy to "start" something, that's just not good enough when you're a Gummint. When you're a Gummint, you have to have a "roll out". If you're striving for importance, nothing less will do.

It hasn't always been that way, of course. In the old days your average Budget was a much more straightforward affair. It would slap 3d on the petrol and 6d on the beer and give you till midnight to top up on both. In a good year, the cockies would get a rebate or the workers might score a boots allowance. Fags would go up a bit and the pensions would, too, and, depending on who got what, there'd be a bit of grumbling afterwards and that would be that.

Mind you, it was a different world then. People had to put up with power cuts and bad roads and long waiting lists for hospitals, not to mention high taxes and fInance ministers who couldn't wait to whack a shilling on the sherry.

Fortunately, with "smart, active government" that's all changed. Nowadays, the only thing we've got to worry about is bracket creep.

And there are plenty of Pundits to deal with that ...