Talk is easy

The Herald reports:

The one thing alternative finance minister, Labour’s David Parker, won’t be criticising in tomorrow’s Budget is the Government’s confirmation that it is on track to return to surplus in 2014-15.

“I always thought it would; I’ve always said it should, and we would have too,” Mr Parker says.

That is unadulterated crap. Nothing Labour have done in the last five years suggests they would have done the same. Quite the opposite.

Labour left the incoming Government with not just a decade of deficits, but actually a permanent structural deficit. A deficit that would never have been plugged without policy changes. One so large that you could not just rely on economic growth and increased tax revenue to get back into surplus.

National has both frozen and cut spending. On every single occasion they have done so, Labour has attacked them for it. Labour has also consistently come up with massive new spending proposals such as extending paid parental leave and attacked the Government for not agreeing to it.

They also relentlessly criticised the Government what what they said was austerity measures, and said it was the wrong policy.

So to turn around now, and say “Oh yeah we would have got the Government back into surplus also” is just crap. They’ve spent years opposing every single spending cut and even explicitly saying that there is no rush to get back to surplus (I don’t regard six years as a rush!).

If you want an idea of what would have happened if Labour had been in power, just look at Labor in Australia.