Hard to criticise good work

BILL English and Grant Robertson have been swapping fat analogies of the economy.

Bill reckons if you're wanting to lose 10 kilos in weight, but only get to 9.8kg you are still moving in the right direction. Grant says if you need to lose 10 kilos to fit the suit, lose 9.8 and still can't fit the suit, you have failed.

Labour is wanting to paint the New Zealand economy as a basket case, and this is in spite of many of our friends and competitors on the international stage reshaping theirs to look more like ours.

It is true we have huge bills to pay on the back of borrowing for Canterbury earthquakes, getting through the global financial crisis to make ends meet and this at a time when two of our big earners, dairying and oil and gas are in a bit of a slump. We also have the challenges of finding money for wage increases in the public and private sector and the spending we will have to do to get ourselves on to the right side of the ledger with respect to greenhouse gas emissions.

But most of this is about Labour putting up logical alternatives and they can't. Grant Robertson, like Bill English, in Opposition agrees with the vast majority of Government economic policy and it is darned difficult to find fault when that financial policy is so reasonably bi-partisan.

Labour's big problem is it needs to rubbish what the Government is doing because it can't be seen to agree - to rail against the deficit while needing to offer more to potential voters.

It needs to complain that wages and salaries are so low especially in the public service, and the Government is too mean in health and social spending because all the votes it wants to attract sit there in the low and middle-wage brackets. At the same time it needs to say the Government is useless at running a budget and has failed to reach a surplus it promised.

To do this, Labour points at Sir Michael Cullen's record of reaching a proclaimed surplus that was actually more jiggery-pokery than the real deal and there are fish-hooks in that. Every time Bill English talks about the difficulties of reaching budget, given the debt mountain Labour left National to deal with, Grant Robertson points to the seven years since the Government won office, so the time we've had to get it right.

It sort of works the other way too. Just because Labour had some good years before 2008 is no guarantee that given the GFC, the quakes, the downturn in milk and oil and gas prices they would be doing any better.

This scenario reminds me of a riddle that poses: "If a man speaks in the forest and there is not a woman to hear him, is he still wrong?"

Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition is there to challenge and to offer alternatives, but disagreeing for the sake of it, with no viable alternative, in the face of accolades from other nations, with record spending in the social sector, record achievements in health, education and welfare seems a bit like "he protests too much".