This weekend National is holding its pre-election party conference, so we're finally seeing some policy. Not a lot - its the usual bullet-points, free of those complicated but important little details which might detract from the carefully sculpted marketing - but still a slightly better picture of what they plan to do if they gain power. So yesterday for example we learned that National would "borrow, but not for tax cuts". The Standard has already pointed out how nonsensical this is - if National wasn't planning to give away billions to the rich (sorry - "ordinary New Zealanders earning $100,000 a year" - all 5% of them), they wouldn't have to borrow. Then this morning we learned that they also plan to spend an extra $5 billion on roads and corporate welfare to Telecom. And today, we learned from their list of top ten policies that they plan to "take a more disciplined approach to government spending".
Hold on a minute? More disciplined? They've just promised to spend like drunken currency traders in bonus season, funnelling billions (and quite specifically, billions more than Labour) to their donors and cronies while saddling future generations with debt, and they're saying this is more disciplined? More disciplined than what? Imelda Marcos?
Anyone can see that there is a blatant contradiction here. You can't both promise to spend more and less money. But that's exactly what National are doing. This suggests an appalling contempt for the intelligence of the electorate. They think we can be bullshitted. They think we are fools.
Please don't prove them right.
