Oops! And oops! again

Prime Minister John Key and Finance Bill English simply have to start finding out what the other is saying.

That way they can stop contradicting each other in public.

How about this for the day before the National Government's first Budget?

John Key said this morning at Francis Xavier school in Tawa: "Our primary focus out of this Budget is to avoid a ratings downgrade because we think that would add about one and a half per cent to mortgages for New Zealand home owners."

And this is what Bill English said less than two hours later when he was asked on his way into Question Time if the "primary focus" of the Budget was to avoid a ratings downgrade.

"No it isn't. The primary focus of the Budget is making the right decisions for New Zealand, to manage our way through a recession and deal with the consequences of that."

It is not as though that was a one-off.

Early last month English showed that they had different views on how New Zealand would emerge from the recession.

English said on TVNZ's Q +A programme he thought New Zealand was "unlikely to aggressively grow out of it".

Key had told the same programme the month before that by this time next year New Zealand would be starting to come out of it "reasonably aggressively".

Question Time was irritating. Labour decided to pick on the Speaker Lockwood Smith today.

The feature of today's Question Time was Trevor Mallard getting chucked out by the Speaker.

Mallard had just finished upbraiding Education Minister Anne Tolley on the wrong spelling of the word "academies" in some literature she had put out.

Funny that. Mallard's recent post on the Labour MPs' blog site Red Alert has the following words: denomitated; incoherant; speechs; catelogue; and Brethern!

He should have been chucked out for bad spelling at least, but perhaps hypocrisy.