Nicola's Salad Days.

When the going gets tough, take an overseas trip.

I like to keep an eye on what’s happening in places like the UK, the US, and over the ditch with our good mates the Aussies. Let’s call them AUKUS, for want of a better collective term. More on that in a bit.

It used to be, not long ago, that I’d look and think - yoinks, thank goodness those things aren’t happening here. Now it seems more like a glimpse at the immediate future. A preview of what we can expect here, in the coming weeks and days.

Be it the social change swept in by Trump in the US, like high tide following a discharge from a sewage facility. A veritable poonami, destroying affirmative action programmes, brazenly prejudiced against the rainbow community, reducing a women’s right to choose, and of course advocating for guns to be as available as possible.

Or seeing the vicious austerity measures in the UK. People pushed off of support wherever possible, even if they’re ill. Underinvestment in public services until they break and have to be privatised.

So many cautionary signals of what not to do as a society. But our colour blind coalition are interpreting the screaming red lights as green, as a roadmap rather than a warning.

Yesterday I watched an exchange in the UK in which the wet blanket leading their Labour Party berated the Tories for the damage caused by Liz Truss. The absurdity of borrowing large amounts of money for unfunded tax cuts that resulted in her lasting less time than a head of lettuce. You can watch it here if you’d like:

In case you didn’t watch it, and in the interests of fairness and balance, it should be pointed out that Liz Truss does not put her astonishing failure down to her own ineptitude, or the economic insanity of her plan. No, according to Liz it was all a deep state conspiracy against her, and quite possibly the lettuce itself was in on it.

It got me thinking of the parallels. The thing is a lot of these centre right policies, bashing beneficiaries, sending the children of the poor to boot camps, austerity, trickle down and all that other nonsense are continuously recycled by the parties of the right. Just slap a different name on it and it doesn’t matter that it failed the last time, and all the other times before that.

People have short memories and vote for things that they ought not to, before realising - oh yeah, that’s what happened last time too. Be it the UK Conservatives’ surprisingly popular, long running policy of “Kill the Poor”, or National’s much friendlier sounding, but similar, “Back on Track”.

Watching the clip I got an uncomfortable feeling. Like that scene in Pulp Fiction - you know the one. Where the Gimp points at Bruce Willis to say “it’s you now, pal”. Oh crap I thought, that is us. We are them.

I wondered what Willis was up to, she seemed to have been quite quiet of late. I guess if you were laying people off left, right and centre, thousands of them, you might want to stay out of the limelight and avoid the press. Well, either that or take some of the tamer ones on a wee junket far away from all of this…

The Tik Tok King took to Tuk Tuking round Thailand telling Dad jokes with the punchline “Bangkok” before heading to the Philippines. There our Man in Manila would be briefed on the membership hazing that would accompany our re-entry of AUKUS.

Keen not to be left to face the music alone, Nicola headed for Washington. Presumably to receive instructions on what military hardware we’ll be purchasing in order to complete that membership application.

In the clip above Nicola speaks to presenter Anna Burns-Francis much as one would a particularly stupid child. She does this often but I can’t work out whether it’s because she thinks she’s better than everyone else, or whether it’s a result of being in a caucus with the likes of Todd McClay, Tama Potaka, and Mark Mitchell.

Nicola confirmed she’d be flying business class. Which is fair enough, I don’t think many would expect the Finance Minister to be prepping for important meetings back in cattle class. But in a week where you’ve been making as many as a thousand people redundant a day - gee it’s not a flash look eh?

Anna, bless her, wasn’t leaving it at that. She asked whether given all Willis has said, talking down the state of the NZ economic position and demanding belt tightening, this was the right time to be pulling back on “Ferrari trips” and replacing them with “Zoom Corolla” meetings.

A delightful dig suggesting that taxpayers could try their luck across the Cook St in a second hand Corolla but Willis would remain safely ensconced in Business Class. Nicola did not look amused.

Image: 1 News.

Anna pointed out that Winston has just been in Washington, Space Minister Collins has been in Chicago with her new promotion “Got Oravida?”, and Luxon, PM TikTok, will be there soon too.

It’s pretty clear that the US is a big focus for this coalition. But back to the more mundane matters of budgets and funding tax cuts when you haven’t got any money.

Liam Dann asked the question, “Will Nicola Willis do a ‘Liz Truss’?” in this paywalled article in the Herald. It seemed I wasn’t the only one wondering.

Dann says that a plan to borrow for tax-cuts was career-ending for British PM Liz Truss and asks if our government is about to do the same.

He didn’t sound quite as excited as I was about the possibility of Willis’ career being curtailed, and wasn’t making any comparison to lettuce heads - this is the Herald not the UK tabloids. Or Nick’s Kōrero of course.

“I keep having this awful dream where everyone's pointing at me and saying, 'you're Liz Truss with your unfunded tax cuts'. Then I wake up and it's only people saying I'm Ruth Richardson. My happy place.”

Business Herald Wellington editor, Jenée Tibshraeny’s view was that, “the crux of the disagreement hinges on whether it’s fair to ring-fence one type of spending - ie, on tax cuts - and say any savings or new types of revenue are used specifically to cover that cost, all the while other types of new spending are at least partially debt-funded.”

So say for example you own a house and a tree falls on it which takes out your bedroom, but you have a lodger in the front bedroom who’s not impacted.

What Nicola’s essentially doing is saying I have to borrow ten apples to fix my house, but I earned two apples in rent so I’m using those to pay for a trip to Fiji - I’m definitely not borrowing any apples to go on holiday. That would be ridiculously irresponsible, what with this great big hole in the roof.

“It’s the same pool of money,” said Shamubeel Eaqub on TVNZ. Even Eric Crampton, chief economist at the pro-free-market think tank the New Zealand Initiative (NZI), expressed his scepticism.

Isn’t pro-free-market a nice way of putting it? That sounds so much better than “holy heck, these guys are more libertarian that Ayn Rand’s cat.” My apologies to any cat owners reading this.

Perhaps next time try a dog. I’m kidding, please don’t send me email about how happy your cat makes you. They can hoodwink the best.

The NZI’s Crampton said, “the Budget Policy Statement claims that any tax reduction would not add to debt because reprioritization, savings, and new revenue measures would fund it. But debt would be lower and the path to surplus would be faster if tax reductions were deferred until spending cuts provided room for them. The bill for a longer period of larger deficits will come due.”

That sounds like good economic common sense, from either the left or the right, to wait for tax cuts until we can actually afford them without borrowing. So much for National being the party of fiscal responsibility.

By the way if you’re wondering what happened to the Aussies in all of this, that lucky country across the Tassie with a Labor government…

“It’s hard to think of a better start to the year for the Aussie economy given the circumstances,” write Sydney-based analysts Harry Murphy Crusie and Shannon Nicoll. “Inflation is easing faster than expected while the labour market is staying tighter than expected. What’s more real wages are finally rising.”

Imagine that, real wages rising, that’d be nice. But everything our government’s doing seems designed to drive wages down. At least for those at the bottom end of town.

This is how they described Aotearoa:

“Things are grim next door,” the pair write. “New Zealand’s economy finished 2023 by slumping into recession... We expect a slight improvement in 2024 as global demand picks up, inflation recedes and a potential cut in interest rates revives domestic spending. That said, monetary policy operates on a lag meaning economic conditions are unlikely to normalise until 2025.”

Does that sound like a recipe for tax cuts to you? Probably not, unless you’re Nicola Willis.

New UK Finance Minister, Jeremy Hunt, said “I think it’s clear you can’t fund tax cuts through increased borrowing”. This from one of the most loathed figures in the last decade of UK Tory Austerity.

Liam Dann finishes his article by saying, “Unlike Truss and (then UK Finance Minister) Kwarteng, I think PM Christopher Luxon and Willis will be likely to get away with their tax plan simply because it is much less ambitious in scale.”

How typical that the only saving grace, the shortfall stopping Nicola Willis from claiming full honorary Lettuce status was a lack of ambition. That pretty much sums this government up, mean and small minded.

If Willis is not quite the full head of lettuce then I reckon she at least qualifies as a Brussels Sprout. I don’t know about you, but I’m not a fan.

Have a great day all of you lovely people. I shall look forward to enjoying your correspondence on the merits of our feline friends, and the unfairly maligned sprouts.

A familiar number from Lettuce, a funk band from Boston. It’s pretty mellow.