John Roughan: If anyone deserves help, it's families on single incomes

COMMENT

When Michael Cullen lays out his fifth Budget on Thursday it will tell us whether this Government has crucially lost its confidence. Lately it looks to have lost it, although the symptoms may be more apparent in Auckland than elsewhere.

Once governments sense a wind-shift in public opinion, they face a fatal temptation to forget the national interest and spend public money on anything that promises a round of applause.

This one felt the wind change in February when Don Brash pressed the racial button at Orewa. As Dover Samuels has ever since warned Maori on the foreshore, "There's a tsunami coming."

The illusion that popularity might be regained with careless spending must be especially tempting right now. The reformed economy has been running well through an international recession and continues to defy dour forecasts.

It has generated this year the largest Budget surplus New Zealand has seen and if ever the time is ripe to attend to some social hardship, this is it.

Moreover, there is genuine hardship in a section of society now that deserves as much help as finite public funds can afford. Unfortunately, it's not a particularly fashionable section of society and not normally inclined to put its hand out.

We're talking about young families in which only one parent brings home an income.

For a generation now, our living standard has been set by households with at least two working adults. It is a consequence of a thoroughly good social development - the liberation of women to pursue paid careers - but the inequity it leaves has too long gone unacknowledged.

When a couple with children decides one parent will stay home for the kids, the household is destined for relative poverty. Unless the single earner has a fairly high income, the family are going to struggle to pay a city mortgage and household bills, let alone afford the pleasures most of their contemporaries are enjoying.

The obvious solution is to split the single income into two for taxation, but the Labour Party has long held a mysterious objection to that.

The suspicion is that it doesn't want to help a parent, usually the woman, to opt out of the paid workforce. Or perhaps it thinks income splitting would give two-parent households an advantage over single parents.

Neither objection bears scrutiny. But unless United Future has finally exerted some leverage in this Budget, income splitting is unlikely to feature.

Labour has a philosophical preference for providing help in the form of benefit payments rather than tax reductions in any form. The Budget is likely to bring a dizzying array of income supplements rather than simply leave more money in the wage packets of the lower paid.

Benefits look generous on paper but to get them you have to know the system. The Government is probably anxious to look generous on paper right now. The temptation will be to produce a Budget that responds to the loudest complaints or most publicised cause rather than the most needy.

Paid maternity leave, for example, is an utterly needless benefit for the better-off. It might be fattened. Student loans, now interest-free during the years of study - which means students who don't need them should be taking them out for the arbitrage - might be made even more generous.

Transparent bribery seldom turns the political tide, it merely tells most people the Government knows it is on the slide. But temptation remains and two decisions this Government has made for Auckland lately suggest it is now desperate enough to waste public money.

The first was the purchase of Westhaven. Numerous marinas around Auckland function very well in private ownership. Westhaven was set to join them when Ports of Auckland decided to put it up for sale.

In better days Helen Clark and Dr Cullen would never have contemplated financing a facility that was easily able to attract private investment. But when it appeared that a foreign bid might succeed, the Government gazumped the auction.

Its gesture was duly reported as having "saved" Westhaven from "falling" to a foreign owner. It received a round of applause from the council, resident yacht clubs and commentators, who presumably believed a foreign buyer would pull up the piles and ship the boardwalks to Mexico.

If Westhaven was one ominous sign, an equally pointless land purchase for Auckland was soon to follow.

You have been hard pressed to find an Aucklander who had heard of a place called Kaikoura Island until it was suddenly adopted as the ideal memorial to Sir Peter Blake by one or two writers who had never previously expressed anything but distaste for the America's Cup.

You can admire their sense of humour. The island lies at the entrance to Fitzroy harbour on Great Barrier, undistinguished, far from Auckland, far from anywhere.

It had an American owner who had put it on sale. A veteran conservationist of the Hauraki Gulf Maritime Park, Jim Holdaway, wrote an article for the Herald gently suggesting he was asking too much.

Undoubtedly the place would have been sensibly left to its hopeful owner and wild goats were it not for the change in the political weather. Instead, it became, to the seller's certain delight, one of the early appetisers of this Budget.

This is Labour's long-awaited opportunity to leave a worthwhile social monument. But if it spends for popularity it will do itself no good in the end; voters have a good sense of a government's character.

When they sense it has lost its nerve, it's gone.