TVNZ has been talking to voters, asking them how they plan to vote and why.
I came to read this edition by way of someone on BlueSky asking: Where do they find these people??
As I ploughed through it, my jaded thought was: They’re not so hard to find.
In all my decades of living here, this government has proven to be far and away the most dismal. Social and economic vandals, they've been.
And yet for a certain kind of voter it's just been the adults in the room doing what needs to be done. Insert the rest of the usual set of unexamined clichés and assertions here.
Anyway let's hear from a Wellington voter about his thoughts and voting intentions.
He tells them he’s grudgingly going with National, grudgingly, perhaps, because he senses you can't say that without a face-saving semi-disclaimer?
But then he's on to recounting electoral talking points that have clearly landed with him.
He says they alone will stay on this track of trying to reduce some of the spending.
I think we really need to just get ourselves on track as a country again after taking on far too much debt with these nice-to-haves.
Perhaps he has reached this opinion after looking carefully at the facts and listening to all the arguments.
But has he?
Because it is not easy to reach this opinion if you have looked at actual facts.
Let's look at the thing that so many people intone as fact when its nothing of the sort: No, the last government did not borrow like crazy and wreck the economy.
We went into Covid owing about a fifth of GDP and came out owing a bit over two-fifths, which sounds alarming until you look at what everyone else was carrying. Nobody asked for a pandemic. A government's job when one turns up is to keep the lights on and the wages paid, and that costs money, and the money gets borrowed.
What's happened since isn't repayment. Net debt has kept rising in dollars and sat about flat as a share of the economy, while there was room enough for a tax cut and for restoring interest deductibility to landlords. The question to be asking here is not how much we borrowed but what the borrowing bought.
But let's move on to the next ragged article of faith.
