Winston Peters: A Budget like no other in past 26 years

Budget day 2011 has come and gone.
All over New Zealand, businesses and citizens are sifting through the debris of detail and commentary in an earnest attempt to find out what it means to them.
Hundreds of thousands of others, regrettably, will have paid the event no attention, resigned to thinking they can't do much about it anyway.
So what sort of Budget was it?
The answer to that depends on where one politically and ideologically is coming from. Those on the right, but not too far in that direction, will describe it as a steady as we go Budget, whilst those on the left will paint a picture of privilege and unfairness.
This was a Budget like no other in the past 26 years. It is as though the international credit crunch beginning late 2008 and the Christchurch earthquakes had overwhelmed government's economic advisers.
In preparing a Budget to deal with these events they somehow had lost part of the script. There is nothing in this Budget not forecast before the first earthquake in Christchurch in September 2010, and that is significant because the misplaced script would surely have covered the bigger financial and social picture of New Zealand's future.
The arrival of new information technology into every business and most homes really means that there is no excuse for economic illiteracy. Anyone can goggle the economy of Norway, or that of Singapore, and find out how some similar size nations to New Zealand are performing so enviably in comparison to ourselves, and in particular see how they reacted to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression 80 years ago.
These two vastly different countries geographically remain world leaders because they are doing a number of fundamentally important things economically and socially right.
Paramount amongst these are that both countries believe in a set of national institutions and cultural values and they have made exporting their number one priority. They are achieving both successfully, and the economic prosperity of their citizens is secure and assured long into the future.
Alarmingly, there was not a word about wealth creation, and export plans to rapidly grow our way to prosperity in the Budget speeches of Finance Minister Bill English and Prime Minister Key.
Nor was there any mention of interconnected plans and strategies to signpost our pathway forward.
The Budget was obsessed with expenses when the objective is to make as much money as possible for the lowest outlay achievable. That's why business focuses on expenditure as investment towards a profitable outcome. It's that simple abstract which many Budget observers would have been looking for and in its absence been left puzzled, if not seriously concerned.
To use a Rugby World Cup analogy, (an event on which far too much optimism economically is placed) we've got a plan to try and defend our goal but not one to score at the other end.
In short, some of the Budget cuts are justifiable but only if there are counter- balancing investments towards real wealth and prosperity.
New Zealanders need to understand that either we export or we die. Not literally, but we go on sliding down the First World ladder.
In developing a rightful concern about this nation's private debt we are seriously in danger of grasping a placebo and not a lifesaver. If we were performing at the same rate as Australia, we would in May 2011 be talking about an economy 35 per cent larger in which much of our expenditure preoccupation would be put in perspective. That the Government is going to again start selling power companies and Air New Zealand, some of our best performing assets, in which we, not foreigners, reap the added value, defies comprehension. That was the prescription of Douglas and Richardson from which surely we have all learned.
Of course there are things amiss with our welfare state. Clearly many genuine and deserving needy are losing out on welfare to those that are not.
New Zealand needs to fix that for it has gone on for far too long. In the same vein, however, borrowing $2.2 billion to give tax cuts where 10 per cent got 40 per cent of the benefits is not sustainable. Not when it comes to consumption but if those tax cuts had targeted serious export growth, research and development, and new market discovery then they would have made sense.
Perhaps the Government envisages a mini-Budget before the next election to deal with real initiatives for wealth creation. Who knows? However, the way it looks now, this Budget is the anaesthetic that goes before a major operation. Sedate the people through to the end of November 2011 before getting out the knife for a major operation in 2012.