What should I expect? Life must be tough for the spin doctors who put all this stuff up for the us to read: How to make what they have done sound like a lot.
It would be nice to be able to check out a site that puts it all into 2 x A4 pages....Is life this simple? No.
So I will probably be like the rest of the swinging voters and vote for John Key because a) he's someone different, and b) he must know a thing or two about money, and that might be extremely relevant right about now. All this is embarassing to admit.
Someone has lent me Ian Wishart's book "Absolute Power", which is about Helen Clark, the prime minister. In it, he makes the point that Labour came to power on a platform of cutting Governmental spending:In fact, they appear to have increased it.
Listening to the radio on Thursday, I heard a man (not a politician) who seemed to tell it like it is: We are a tiny nation, and our standard of living is going backwards compared to Australia.
Governments, Labour and National have both had a turn, so I don't think things will change much, no matter who gets in. (In economic terms-antismacking, that's another bundle!).
Nothing will change, unless someone in the National Party wakes up one morning and has a rush of blood to the head as follows: What we need is a plan, a ten year plan that copes with all sorts of variables-chief among these would be: how to escape economic harm from events overseas, and how to cope with the worlds expectations on climate change- assuming that there is such a thing.
I remember years ago suggesting to my father that we should be economically independent from the rest of the world. He countered that "trade was the life blood of any country", and that we would all be extremely poor should this happen. If you think about it, we are very dependent on second hand cars from Japan, medicines from USA, machinery from Germany and so on.
Imagining a country of 4 million coping with car production, medicines and so on seems far-fetched. Having said that, I hope we are not about to pay the price for dependance on the outside world.
