COMMENT:
This was meant to be a Wellbeing Budget. Nobody was entirely sure what that meant, and that remains the case as it became a Budget of leaks and contrived scandal. Journalists and political tragics on both sides licked their lips, while the rest of us rolled our eyes.
When policy is consumed by politics, nobody looks good. Except the populist politicians on the rise around the world, who germinate from ill feeling toward the status quo, something stoked by this Budget debacle.
New Zealand has not yet found an adept populist, certainly not one with the requisite nastiness now in vogue. But they will come. A Wellbeing Budget, yet most politicians appear incapable of behaviour that supports wellness at the highest levels of our democracy.
When your party is more important than the system that supports it, we're in a bad place.
There is something bigger at stake than the Budget. And when we are confronted by that bigger thing, it will be accompanied by people asking how it happened. Responsibility will rest with numerous things we now seemingly accept as normal.
Civility and ethics are not weaknesses that remove power, but things power ought to uphold. We can never find these things in a Budget, but apparently we can witness their absence around Budget time.
