No bite in Brash's baloney

Don Brash

It was privately billed as the speech in which Don Brash would take the gloves off and talk tough about Michael Cullen.

But while "BALONEY" was written in capital letters each time in the speech notes, it sounded as exciting as the word "balcony" each time Dr Brash said it.

He did pause before enunciating the word each time, but unlike Act leader Rodney Hide who has mastered the technique, there was nothing pregnant about it.

But if the venue - the former chapel at Hawkes Bay's Mission Estate Winery less than a kilometre from Dr Cullen's home - failed to inspire a pulpit-like delivery, the gathered congregation was nevertheless in no doubt that this was a man on a mission.

Present were about 100 Hawkes Bay Chamber of Commerce members and a further 70-odd from the local National Party.

A few glasses of Mission, served with fruit and cheese platters on the autumnal vine-laced verandah of the old seminary, only encouraged the appreciative murmurings.

This may well have been to blame for one elderly lady nodding off in the embarrassingly-close-to-Dr Brash third row during the speech.

Or perhaps it was the absence of National Finance spokesman John Key - the other half of the party's Team Finance roadshow this week - whose billed presence had encouraged several punters to cough up $25 for the lunch, but who turned their attention to other pressing matters after hearing only a set speech from Dr Brash was on the programme.

But back to the baloney. If the speech didn't "sound" like an attack on the Government, it of course was.

Wide-ranging, the aim was to remind voters of Labour's mistakes, to paint Dr Cullen as profligate rather than the opposite and Helen Clark as dishonest.

The Budget took a bashing, as did the wananga spending and the hip hop tours - which still get a chortle and a lot of heads shaking.

"Michael Cullen of course dismisses the hundreds of millions of dollars involved in this waste as irrelevant. This is said with the same assurance of a man who has his pockets stuffed with taxpayers' funds.

"At the same time as he dismisses this vast waste, his Beehive spin machine sells the line that he is fiscally prudent and fiscally responsible.

There is one word I would use to describe that: Baloney."

If Kiwis were concerned about their financial health, the good doctor made it clear, they had put themselves in the hands of the wrong doctor.

It was Helen Clark - accused of presiding over an administration "rotten to the core" - who copped the strongest and most personal criticism. She played "petty, spiteful politics", behaved "shamefully over the Doone affair to the extent that "one will be amazed that Helen Clark's nose is not three feet long".

This was the audience's favourite bit.