Early in the first episode of Dead Like Me, slacker-protagonist George sums up her philosophy as follows:
I'd say I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I'm not. I excel at not giving a shit. Experience has taught me that interest begets expectation, and expectation begets disappointment, so the key to avoiding disappointment is to avoid interest...According to John Armstrong in the Herald last week, National is now applying this same philosophy to the economic crisis:
The pressure to "do something" is only going to intensify in coming months as the dole queues lengthen.So, they're going to deliberately fiddle while Rome burns as a political strategy. And John Armstrong thinks this is a good idea. But that, I suppose, is the sort of twisted logic you get when you focus exclusively on the game rather than the stakes. Which, for the real people who will suffer from National's inaction, are fairly high. While I'm under no illusions about the New Zealand government's ability to manage the international economy, it sure as hell can manage and reduce its impact on ordinary New Zealanders. And we expect them to. And if they don't - and in particular if they deliberately dick around and do nothing in the hope of getting a greater political payoff later for the SFA they are going to do - then they deserve to be given the boot as quickly as possible.That is one reason why the Government is not going to be panicked by Labour into coming up with a mini-Budget or some other "big bang" package of initiatives in the short term.
No sooner had such a package been unveiled then there would be cries for more. The policy cupboard stripped bare, the Government would find itself being castigated for doing nothing at the time the recession was really biting.
The danger is that the Government would lose all momentum and start to drift. When governments drift, things really start going wrong internally. Such an eventuality would be fatal in the depths of recession.
