The government is proposing a parliamentary watchdog to provide costing information on the proposals of political parties in their election campaigns. National is not keen on this idea, claiming that the government will ‘screw the scrum’ on the Opposition, as they can’t even manage to get a Treasury ‘secondee’ to help National’s office, (as is tradition), and they have apparently been asking for this for months.
Yes, this is National playing politics, but hang on a minute. Let us just hark back to the 2017 election,shall we… when Labour promised to build 100,000 houses, fix the health service, fix homelessness, fix the police, the justice system and the prison system, and Steven Joyce accused then of miscalculating by $11.7 billion which we now know was a significant understatement. The truth is much worse than that, only exacerbated by the fact that the current government do not have the skills to actually implement any of their ambitious election promises (including introducing a capital gains tax) and so, at this point, they don’t look too bad.
Try as I like, I cannot see why a tax-and-spend Labour government would want to do this… nor, for that matter, why the Greens, who want to wreck the economy with their ridiculous Zero Carbon Bill, which will cost the economy billions over the next few years, are so keen on it either.
It seems that Labour was badly caught out by Steven Joyce’s claim of an ‘$11.7 billion dollar hole’, even though economic geniuses like Hilary Barry scorned him relentlessly for his trouble. She is very quiet now that he has basically been proved right. Labour had no idea how to run an economy then, and they have no idea now. It may have done them some damage at the last election, as it should… but why worry, when you have a knight in shining armour with a grudge named Winston to come to your aid?
For next year’s election, Treasury will be used to adjudicate on costings for party policies, but from the 2023 election onwards, a body of economists answerable to parliament will be established in order to cost the various political party promises.
This watchdog organisation is intended to be neutral, but the likelihood of that is slim. All supposedly neutral bodies of this nature are almost always quickly politicised, and this one will be no different.
For National, of course, this will rob them of a valiant political strategy, which is always to blast Labour on the cost of its proposals. This has been a key component of their electoral strategy in recent years. Think John Key’s “Show Me the Money” aimed at a hapless Phil Goff in 2011. It worked. Why give up on a good strategy?
I think National will gain from such a watchdog, so long as it is generally neutral (and there is doubt about that) and the costings are realistic.
One of the problems with this is that the proposal, as it stands, allows parties to decide themselves if the costings of their proposals are released to the public. This could work both for and against National. With our ‘open and transparent government’, it is not hard to imagine that they will cherry-pick which costings they choose to release; but then National can go hard on the government on the ones where no information is available.
I would have thought a proposal like this would be good for National, who are generally the party of smaller government, and would not do the parties of the left any favours but then you cannot help but wonder why they are proposing this in the first place. Still, I don’t blame Simon Bridges for not trusting this government to make it fair and neutral. They don’t have a great record on these things thus far. And Treasury being in control on this matter for the next election does not foster much confidence either. From their ‘moon feelings’ training sessions to the website hack that wasn’t, no one takes Treasury very seriously at the moment, so the fact that they will be championing this idea next year does not give anyone much confidence.
Personally, while I know it sounds good, I don’t trust this government either. They just want to look good. I don’t believe we will get the true numbers on their projects. I believe they will do what they do best which is to obfuscate, lie, make stuff up and generally do everything they can to mislead the voters. They have been doing that for the last 2 years, and I simply do not believe that this will be any different. Watch this space.
