Posted by Blogger Name. Category:
Bill English
,
Budget surplus
,
Decade of deficits
,
John Key
,
The Budget 2014
,
Tracy Watkins
It's Budget Day, and it's an especially significant one for Bill English. After five years of having to balance competing expectations with not enough money to go round, he gets to deliver a budget surplus today. Little wonder that he's smiling in the time-honoured pre-Budget photograph at the printer!
In her preview piece in the Dom-Post, Tracy Watkins suggests this bodes well for the John Key-led Government; she opines:
New haircut, smart blue tie - Bill English was even cracking a big smile ahead of today's Budget.
It has been a long time coming. After six years, a global recession and a devastating natural disaster, the finance minister will announce today that the books are forecast to be back in the black for the first time in seven years.
If the coming election is a referendum on National's economic stewardship, then today's Stuff.co.nz/Ipsos poll suggests voters give it much better than a pass mark, with 69 per cent rating it as doing a good job on the economy.
With the Budget expected to tip surging growth and falling unemployment, that will prove a potent recipe in National's favour at the ballot box, when it will urge voters not to put the gains of an economic recovery at risk by voting for a change of government.
The opposition parties showed their hand yesterday. The new opposition buzz-word is "inequality", with claims that the rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer. Politicians will doubtless argue the figures until they are blue in the face, but it is inarguable that a healthy, growing economy provides the best platform to deliver benefits to every New Zealander. And a healthy, growing economy is what Bill English is going to forecast this afternoon.
Unsurprisingly, we have planned our day so that we will be watching from the couch when the Budget is delivered, and we'll be blogging accordingly. We don't think that there will be any major surprises this afternoon; Budget announcements these days are drip-fed in the weeks in advance of Budget Day. But we expect health and education to be the two major areas of focus.
John Key interestingly dangled the possibility of tax cuts to middle income earners yesterday as a longer-term option. That certainly contrasts with Labour's plan to create equality by taxing those who dare to earn a reasonable income, and could create a significant policy difference on the campaign trail in coming months.
But this is Bill English's day. Faced with an economy in rapid decline when he became Finance Minister in 2008, and with Treasury forecasting deficits for the next decade at least, his conservative stewardship has returned New Zealand to economic surplus in six years. He's entitled to a few smiles today.
