It's a kind of magic: Budget 2011

Bill English has always considered himself to be the mutt’s nuts, and with a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp, it must be conceded that there is something top-doggish about his appearance. But the reality is very different. As he staccato barked his way through his third budget yesterday, he resembled nothing so much as a career con man whose latest parole had been granted only on the condition that he learn how to read.

A “remedial English” was what was being dangled in front of us yesterday, a carrot attached to a stick attached to a spin-doctored John Key. Now remedial English lessons are of course pitched at the lowest common denominator. They rely heavily on stories – students are read stories, they read stories and they write stories. Kids are forever being told to use their imagination, and the stories judged to be the best by teachers are invariably those that are the most imaginative. The very imaginative story Bill English told us yesterday starred the nameless wizards at the Treasury, a sort of Hogwarts for adults, who have conjured up the following happy ending:

And lo, GDP growth will reach 4 per cent in the coming year, followed by 3 per cent and 2.7 per cent rises. No less than 170,000 new jobs will be created in the next four years. In 2015 the country will be back in surplus and everyone will live happily ever after. 

It sounds rather like the Book of Revelation in reverse: lots of suspiciously exact figures and a promise of Heaven, rather than Hell, on Earth. This week Stephen Hawking, long hailed as the greatest mind on the planet, was quoted as saying:

I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

Unfortunately, we live in a universe in which some components of the human brain stop working but do not stop overall brain function. The technical names for these components are “common sense”, “higher reasoning” and “grip on reality”. Bill English’s budget is an assault on all of these. The Government is manufacturing a positive ending in the same way reality TV producers do. “It’s a kind of magic,” National is singing through Auto-Tune in our karaoke parliament, “There can be only one.”