Taming The ‘Devil Beasts’: National’s 2013 Budget Feints To The Left

IF LABOUR BUT KNEW IT, Bill English’s fifth Budget is a tribute to the Opposition’s emerging 2014 manifesto. National’s strategists (or at least those of them not yet in the thrall of Judith Collin’s janissaries) know that the Key Government’s eighteen month feint to the right has sorely tested the loyalty of its centrist supporters. To hold them in place, Mr Key and his allies have now executed a feint to the left.

Not a very big feint, but big enough for Messrs’ Key, English and Joyce to feel confident that the doubts and worries of their less committed supporters, along with any wayward thoughts they may have been entertaining about who to vote for in 2014, have now been laid to rest.

In a gesture towards beefing-up the supply side of the affordable housing equation, city councils have been told to open the gates of the nearest green field to the nearest property developer. The scores of budget advisors, all trying to fit a dollar’s worth of living expenses into their desperate clients’ fifty-cent incomes, will receive a modest boost. Funding to combat rheumatic fever has gone up. An announcement on child poverty is pending.

To those on the front lines of poverty alleviation, the measures announced in the Budget must seem derisory. But alleviating poverty is not what these measures are about. Their real purpose is to salve the conscience of the 40 percent of New Zealanders who have politically, economically and socially detached themselves from the 60 percent of the population whose incomes no longer afford them a dignified existence.

In the minds of the former, the latter are not “real” New Zealanders. To the comfortable and secure, the poor come across as seriously deficient creatures: of little value economically and dangerously bereft of even the most basic life skills. Like Mitt Romney, New Zealand’s fortunate 40 percent regard the nation’s “other half” as a net drain on its resources. They’re takers rather than contributors: parasites on the incomes of their betters.

Even so, the more than 270,000 New Zealand children living in poverty present these “real” Kiwis with a problem. Only the most brutal of them (a terrifyingly large number if the e-mailers to Campbell Live are any indication!) are prepared to insist that child poverty, entirely the result of poor parenting, be left to fix itself. The state certainly must not intervene on behalf of impoverished children – lest the lessons of their parents’ poor life choices remain unlearnt.

But, a larger number (hopefully!) experience unsettling moral twinges at the stories of children coming to school hungry, without shoes and showing the symptoms of diseases more usually associated with the Third World. Like the well-meaning but hopeless Edward VIII, they’ve taken to frowning sympathetically and muttering: “something must be done”. Nothing too drastic, mind. Nothing requiring massive tax hikes or a crash programme in state house construction. But . something.

To these, the “better angels” of “real” New Zealand, Bill English’s 2013 Budget offers a finely judged quantum of solace. Just enough to reassure wavering National Party voters that their Prime Minister and his colleagues are not monsters; and that, when required, they are perfectly willing to follow the promptings of their conservative consciences and . do something.

Meanwhile, the important stuff: the stuff that allows the fortunate 40 percent to go on making their profits, collecting their rents and receiving their annual bonuses; is well in Mr English’s capable hand. With only a little bit of jiggery-pokery, the Finance Minister has been able to project a $75 million surplus in the government accounts of 2014-15. The rate of economic growth will soon top 3 percent p.a. – on a par with Australia’s! And unemployment is predicted to flatten out to less than a quarter of the rate afflicting much of Southern Europe.

This is the stuff that National hopes to place before “real” New Zealand next year. The message contained in its positive numbers is reassuringly straightforward: National knows what it’s doing. Labour and the Greens don’t. They are dangerous radicals. Economic saboteurs. In John Key’s own (rather odd) terminology: “Devil Beasts”.

The choice thus presented to the electorate will, the Government hopes, be brutally unambiguous. From National: Sound economic management in difficult times. From Labour and the Greens: far-left economic lunacy and profligate social spending. Channelling George W. Bush, John Key will warn voters that, come election day, they will have to decide whether they stand with him – or with the Devil Beasts.

The fact that the Government stands for the fortunate 40 percent of new Zealanders will not dampen their optimism in the least. National’s strategists are well aware that perhaps as many as a third of the electorate – most of them from the bottom three quintiles of the country’s wage and salary earners – are likely to repeat the experience of the 2011 and sit the election out. If anything, the Right enters the race with a slight numerical advantage.

National’s greatest fear is that their Labour and Green opponents will realise that the best chance of securing a decisive victory over the Government lies in dramatically increasing the voter turnout. Purely on their own terms, the Opposition’s policies have the potential to energise and mobilise a large proportion of the 2011 “Non-Vote”. Fortunately for National, however, the teams of Labour and Green politicians available to sell these policies are, for the most part, considerably less exciting than their product.

In the absence of an energetic sales campaign designed to re-engage the 2011 Non-Vote, Labour and the Greens only alternative strategy is to try and peel away 2008-2011 National Party voters.

Which, rather neatly, brings us full circle. Bill English’s 2013 Budget has been crafted to make the job of peeling away National Party voters as difficult as possible. National’s political face may not be all that friendly, but the Government is working hard to present itself as decent, responsible and humane. What’s more, with the proceeds of Meridian Energy’s partial privatisation safely locked away in its war chest, the face National puts on in 2014 is certain to be a great deal more attractive that the one we see today.

Labour’s emerging manifesto has forced National to lift its game. Unfortunately for the Centre-Left, Messrs Key, English and Joyce have risen to the challenge.