KEY POINTS:
Get out your calculators, here comes the election and, like those flashy Lotto ads, Labour and National are wildly hurling big figures at us in the hope we will buy their political tickets.
The trouble is you need a nuclear-powered calculator, an accountancy degree, and a degree of scepticism to work out who is telling the truth. Actually, both parties are telling the truth but it's not the whole truth. Both selectively bend the statistics to their own advantage.
National has made much of the wage gap between New Zealand and Australia, pointing to the great flocks of Kiwis heading across the Tasman as evidence of the failure of this Government to deliver a decent income to New Zealanders.
While John Key was in Sydney at a CEO forum this week the Government tried to undermine that picture of Australia as the Lucky Country compared with us.
Labour Minister Trevor Mallard attacked Key for claiming National would narrow the wage gap between New Zealand and Australian workers. He is either telling lies deliberately or is just making things up.
Mallard claimed there was no steadily increasing wage gap between New Zealand and Australia, although that accurately described the situation in the 1990s, under National.
He made the point that the inflation-adjusted gap between Australia and New Zealand wages was 18.9 per cent in 1990 and had widened to 28.4 per cent by 1999 when National left office, while last year, the gap had widened by only 0.4 per cent under Labour.
Are you still with me? I hope you're taking notes because I'll be asking questions later.
Actually, Mallard is telling the truth. Those are the wage-gap figures. Gross wages. But what he ignores are the figures that matter most to you and me: our take-home pay.
Because of tax cuts and higher tax thresholds across the Tasman, the gap in tax-paid, take-home pay has widened rapidly under Labour.
Finance Minister Michael Cullen was also busy damning Australia with faint praise while boosting his own economic performance. He told an Auckland audience of economists our unemployment rate is lower than the Aussies', we've created a higher percentage of new jobs, company profits are up 13 per cent, wages up 15 per cent and household incomes up 25 per cent.
Pay attention at the back of the class, these figures will be in the exam we all will face at the ballot box next November.
Cullen's figures are accurate but omit one thing. The average wage in Australia is about a third higher than in New Zealand, and higher still if you are talking take-home pay.
In 2006, the average weekly gross earnings of fulltime workers in Australia ranged between $1025 and $1248, depending on which state you worked in. New Zealand's averaged just $906.
A study late last year showed an Auckland dump truck driver might earn between $45,000 and $60,000. In Sydney the same driver would earn $73,000 to $84,000.
Ever wonder where our doctors have gone? In Auckland a senior doctor picks up $133,500 to $163,500. If he or she went to Sydney they would make from $150,000 to $203,000 a year.
Add to that mortgage rates being lower across the ditch, with housing therefore more affordable, and it explains why New Zealand migration to Australia is at a 20-year high.
Want to get really depressed? Australians have higher life-expectancy, lower infant mortality and don't kill themselves with the same monotonous regularity as New Zealanders.
Those last statistics could have more than a passing relationship with Australians having a higher income than us.
The answer to at least part of the problem is, of course, tax cuts. Another study last year showed taxation makes up 37 per cent of the entire New Zealand economy. In Australia it is 31 per cent.
The question is how much are we likely to get? Cullen says don't get your hopes up. His will be smaller than those offered by National and they will be unveiled in the budget in a few weeks and probably come in to your pay packet a month or so before the election.
National's Bill English is slippery on the detail of what he has in mind. He's waiting to see what Cullen does and what the latest economic data says before he comes out with his tax cuts policy.
English told me that what National is offering would be out before the election and would be tabulated so you and I could work out what we will get and compare that with Labour's offering.
Sharpen your pencils and warm up that calculator - you'll need it before November.
