"Better economic management"

At the 2023 election, National basically ran on a platform of being better economic managers. So how'd that turn out for us? In just one year, they've fucked us for two full political terms:

The government's books are set to remain deeply in the red for the near term as a big dent in the tax take and higher expenses deliver continued budget deficits.

But the government has adopted a new measure of its finances, excluding the impact of ACC, which it said has distorted previous forecasts and had the potential to affect spending decisions.

[...]

Using the established measure the deficits would rise more than expected in the budget and a surplus was not expected in the forecast period to 2028/29.

The reason for this of course is austerity, which has seen core government services cut and 11.6% of all the workers in wellington sacked in a single year. Meanwhile, they're grinding down ordinary people with sub-inflation increases to the minimum wage and 0% pay offers to public servants (so: pay cuts in real terms). And all of this flows through to the rest of the economy. The only people doing well are landleeches, who are gouging us for an extra 6.9% this year. But then, that's who National works for, isn't it?

If this is "better economic management", I'd hate to see what worse looks like.