have to admit to a big smile at your “Mr. Ray-Guns”.. reminescent as it was also of an Texan actor – Billy-Joe ? (can’t recall surname) in the DVD movie “The Edge of Darkness”. Movie-making in the Brit grit style, but only Billy could have delivered the conference punchline on Ray-Guns starwars deal back then.

PS; If you haven’t seen this movie and have time and opp do so I’d recommend it..

The reality is that some are, but most aren’t. They want someone else to do it so they can import it and clip the ticket. “best practice” is often a euphemism for sitting on your hands waiting to see how someone else innovated.

The other tragedy of New Zealand business is that those who do innovate then tend to sell their businesses overseas…along with all that innovative IP they created. From that point onward, productivity improves by moving production offshore….so we end up importing what we innovated and used to make.

For the past 25 years, we have not seen an NZ government that understands we are a tiny place far away from markets. If they understood that, they would not have allowed our industrial and creative infrastructure (mostly created behind tariff walls) to be run down and degraded as they have.

Exactly where they thought the designers and engineers would come from after actually MAKING anything went offshore, I have no idea…and I don’t think they did (or do) either.

NZ needs some mixture of openness and closedness. Otherwise, the situation we see today will continue to deteriorate as it has done since the day we decided to drop our pants in the global market….without reciprocity.

As the scope of knowledge and experience across many sectors continues to shrink, the areas in which we might innovate shrink with it….and ticket-clippers carry on calling themselves “entrepreneurs” and looking down their noses at anyone who actually works for a living.

in a nutshell members ought table material to inform Members, and for real..

which would suggest that any Member insisting on so-tabling has either done so (for real earlier) or intends doing so..( validating the Speaker’s point re absence )

in say the event of a Speaker’s unwitting ignorance as to the provision or not I wonder whether an apology to a Member – public or private – would be in order…

just wondering, answer welcome tho unnecessary

Obvious to almost anyone…..except whoever composed that question. Is someone setting Goff up to look bad, or is he doing that himself?

If you want to go there, I think Labour were making a hell of a lot of spending promises that would have turned out to be utterly unaffordable. So take the shot, because its not entirely unfair. I’m just suggesting that there’s more than enough to go all the way around.

Therese Asenau frequently says that people have a stronger grip on basic economic reality than politicians the media often give them credit for. Policies don’t happen in a cloud of perfumed unicorn farts while elves plant the magic money bushes.

All the supply siders messed their pants and the stockie market boiled.

(there’s a parallel story about stagflation, what the fed was doing under Carter’s appointee and how well that man got on with the Laffer nuts, but that’s a different story than this one, and that one’s the story of how the ‘malaise’ got itself undone).

But back to the taxy talk re the cuttin’ and the growin’.

What grew mostest was the deficit in the govt’s books (well durr). Grew so much Mr Ray-guns had to follow up his first term record breaking cuts with some record breaking hikes in his second term.

( How those hikes was distributed is yet another story agin, that one’s more like the grapes of unrequited wrath, the side effects of which a Mr Mark Ames could tell you about, in his book, ‘Going postal’). But the Taxi tale is waiting.

Next up on the presidenting gig was Bush the-less-nutty. He had to hike the taxes yit agin see, in his first and only term. Shit, there is starting to look like something’s wrong with the paradigm here dunnit? All these goppers havin to raise taxes.

Never mind, here comes a demoncrat, by the name of Bubba. He does some more tax rasin see, and finally the ‘murcans gits themselfs a surplus. Bit of a boom occurs, low inflations thanks, and pay as you goes and all looks sense-i-full for a whiles with regards to the tax accounts. strange american bookeeping not wifstanding.

Now comes bush the-lots-nutty-thank-you-very-much. He runz on the ‘cuttin of the taxes because a surplus is thefty’ line and wins big. Well, wins in court after mucho american style shenanigans, but no mind. He wins.

Not his fault but the dotcom goes pops and with it the surplus what now becomes a deficit again, but not a huge one. Doctor McNutjob prescribes the laffer cure of tax cuts that fund themselves through faster growth, bye bye pay as you go. Deficit goes upwards.

Dick Cheney (who’d appointed hisself as Mr VP go forth and torture branch) says, from his undisclosed tomb in an alternate universe, “Mr Ray-guns proved deficits don’t matter”. So more tax cuts for the ritchies, it’s good for what ails ya, if what ails ya is having a functioning gummint.

And all lived happily ever afters, apart from all the dead people, and the ones that have had their life savings destroyed and those as yet unborn that will be picking up the tab. Huzzah! Thanks supply side fruitloops!!

Now you may think some of the above is fanciful and unfair, with unsubstantiations and and the like. You may be right, you may not but you can’t complain, cause you started it.

Jared, “in the right market conditions tax cuts and a redistribution of the surplus would have likely had a positive effect on growth”

If you get the ‘right’ market conditions and give tax cuts, what do you do when market conditions are not longer right? raise taxes? or borrow and hope.

“perhaps could have been more effective in better positioning us by encouraging growth than hoarding it for a rainy day”
Have you forgotten are the billion $ business tax cuts Cullen delivered on to boost bussiness and growth. You and Cullen are on the same page.

Yes tax cuts are always ‘possible’. but the piper has to be paid. Even Graeme Scott treasury acolyte said that spending cuts could only be made with a razor and not an axe.

Whether you like it or not National’s tax cuts were election bribes.