I’m not dead

There’s a plague scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail that starts with a cart full of dead bodies and the driver shouting “bring out your dead”. A bloke dumps an old man on to the cart who promptly wakes up and cries out “but I’m not dead!”.”I can’t take him,” The driver points out. “‘E’s not dead!” “Don’t worry,” the younger man replies “he soon will be.” – and whacks him on the head with something heavy.

The scene reminds me very much of the media and blogosphere interest in just the rumour of Michael Cullen’s departure. All it really needs to complete the scene is for Phil Goff to find a nice, heavy object…

Cullen was a mass of contradictions. He paid down debt to a fiscally very conservative level, while, at the same time, allowing government spending to balloon almost unhindered. He was a very smart man and yet allowed ideological considerations to sucker him into paying three times the going rate for Kiwirail. He built a buffer against the future blow-out in pension payments, but did it by keeping taxation high at a time when Australia was systematically reducing taxes, ensuring high salary earners left the country. Apparently, he failed to realise that “budget surplus” is synonymous with “taxed too much”.

He set up a widely praised savings scheme but then failed to make it compulsory or affordable, thereby ensuring that low-wage earners, the people least able (and therefore least likely) to save, would be subsidizing everyone else. He had nearly a decade of budget surpluses but managed to deliver New Zealand into a recession a year ahead of the current crisis. He had the lowest unemployment rate for decades and yet substantially increased welfare payments (working for families). I suspect that history will record the noughties as “the decade of lost opportunity”.

Cullen is a first class example of what happens when an otherwise intelligent person lets ideology get in the way of common sense. Unfortunately Clark provided no counterbalance to Cullen, instead encouraging him to indulge in ideology instead of good financial management. Although the relationship between John Key and Bill English is often portrayed as less than cordial, what is actually happening is that Key is providing English with a pragmatic counterbalance to English’s ideology and English is providing Key with reality checks. Would that the Clark/Cullen relationship had been as balanced. 

David Farrar considers Cullen a “flawed genius”. I think “short-sighted academic” is more apt.

Now where is Phil with that heavy object…

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