Thursday, December 16, 2004
The Press gives National their election campaign message
There is a dynamite editorial in The Press today that spoon feeds National their Election message for next year. It is cogent, concise and conspicuous only for its simplicity. There are a number of themes that will resonate with the prized 'centre ground' - 'Labour are making beneficiaries of the middle class via rampant redistributionist policy' should be an easy message for National to sell.
I'll resist the temptation to reproduce the entire thing here, but here are a couple of key paragraphs:
Cullen and the Government are unabashed redistributionists. They believe in taking from the inventive, productive, enterprising participants in the economy and delivering, via an army of bureaucrats, to those who are not. Cullen's preferred method of creating a "fairer" society is to turn as many people as he can into supplicants for government benefits of some sort or another, the calculation being that the grateful beneficiaries will reward Labour with another term in office.Full Editorial - "Awash in money"
The buoyancy of the economy has disguised the fact that the present front-bench are traditional profligate tax and spenders.
Cullen has been spending a good deal of his time recently playing down the size of the surplus and trying to douse calls for tax cuts. He has raised the old bogey that tax cuts could only be achieved by slashing spending in areas like health and education. Voters may at last be recognising that this is nonsense.
