John Roughan: Every dog has his day, and this was Dr Cullen's

Last year's Budget was easy; it was the 1999 election manifesto with numbers. He made it even easier for himself by giving out all Labour's goodies right off (the Alliance would have to wait).

The Alliance still waits. Despite the desperate pre-Budget announcements of parental leave (next year) and Matt Robson's criminal rehabilitation, nothing about this Budget carries the stamp of the languishing, and now very worried, junior partner.

This is a "new Labour" Budget, as they would say in Britain. It is practically devoid of the warmed-over social programmes and incremental redistribution that is standard Labour fare.

There is money for Judge Mick Brown's urgent prescription for the child welfare service but not much else. This Budget is about the economy.

It is not exactly Blair-ite, but it's not Andertonian either. It is taking competition out of the crucial tertiary training sector but it is not venturing very far into the decisions business should make.

And, although it is spending slightly more than it planned last year, and projects lower surpluses for the foreseeable future, it still looks fiscally dry. A new accounting system, to strip out valuation changes, conveniently shows a better surplus in the year ahead.

There is not much in his new spending provision this year for the single most important economic investment a Government can safely make, tertiary education.

But then, this Government does not want to invest there until has more control of the sector. It is an academic Government and, in its heart, it does not believe students know what is good for them.

Tertiary funding will no longer all go to the courses students choose. It will be allocated to universities, polytechnic, private tertiary courses and others, through a bureaucratic supremo to be named the Tertiary Education Coalition.

Some universities will be designated "centres of research excellence" and entitled to compete with crown science laboratories and the private sector for several pots of public investment.

As well as a more commercialised science fund, there is a pot for "seed" capital for new business ventures, another for business "incubators" like those attached to universities at Albany and Otago.

That is the plan, more or less. None of it is blindingly novel but Dr Cullen's calm and lucid Budget speech somehow made it seem fresh, even sensible.

If it turns out to be no more than corporate welfare, at least the amounts of money at stake are modest. Business would like much more, as always. Business ought to be discovering that Dr Cullen is drier than they ever expected.

He gave passing acknowledgement to Mr Anderton's list of pennyfiddling industry and regional development efforts and then launched into a dissertation on the virtues of trade that could only be for the benefit of Alliance and Green anti-globalisers.

"There are some who believe we can achieve success without the expansion of our tradeables sector," he said. "I don't share that belief in the slightest degree.

"The most backward, poorest and least successful economies are those which are least connected to the rest of the world by means of using their natural or created advantages ...

"This is not some recent discovery or some narrowly ideological assertion. It is the thrust of humanity's existence, from ancient Phoenicians to such stellar contemporaries as Ireland and Singapore."

Take that, Nandor. There was not much the Greens could hang their hat on in this Budget either. A little for organic gardens in city schools, a feasibility study for a peacekeeping school for soldiers. It was Dr Cullen's day. He held the fiscal line and gave us something for the economy to work on. And left himself a even greater challenge next year, when a party to his left will be banking on a Budget for survival.

www.nzherald.co.nz/budget

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