What is the purpose of the state? What is our government for?
If you ask the average New Zealander, you'll likely get some variation on "he tangata, he tangata, he tangata". But from today's budget, National clearly thinks the sole purpose of the state is to balance the books. The stuff government does doesn't matter; what matters is that the numbers all add up (sortof), and - if suitably heroic assumptions about growth and global peace are made - there's some sort of mystical government surplus in the far-off future.
But this sort of government by spreadsheet puts the outdated technological metaphor before the other thing. The numbers are less important than what government actually does. And what National is telling us is that, under them, its going to do less. Its going to support fewer people with state housing, even though need is growing. Its going to support fewer of us to university as well. While they're touting big headline numbers for health and education, when you poke at them, it turns out that its all sub-inflation increases, which means - you guessed it - doing less. And of course they're going to cut the core capabilities of the state, sacking 8,700 public servants to meet some arbitrary target.
Normal governments reprioritise spending to do other things - social spending for labour governments, tax cuts for National ones. Here, the cuts seem to be an end in themselves, driven by a desire to shrink the state, reduce its capacity, and stop it from being able to do things in the future. It's pure vandalism, the American dogma of "drowning the government in the bathtub", with a side-order of "fucking things up for next year", as a poison pill if they lose the election. Because the next government will have to undo a bunch of this damage, if they want government to be able to function at all. At which stage National will scream "waste" and accuse them of excessive spending. It's simply an exercise in sabotage and spite.
Most governments want to leave a better legacy than that. But clearly, the National party is now run by weirdo cultists intent on destroying the very state the purport to want to govern. The sooner we are rid of them, the better.
