In place of a credible and responsible plan, National will borrow, sell assets and hope.
Two and a-half years of lazy, visionless economic mismanagement by National and reckless tax cuts for the wealthy have left the Crown's accounts in a perilous state.
National projects borrowing of $30 billion over the next four years, on top of the $36 billion they have already borrowed.
National is pinning its hopes on growth that it has failed to deliver in the past three years. With no sign of an economic plan from this Government, even the IRD projects revenue will fall $4 billion short.
This is more of the same from National.
In each of its Budgets, it has promised that growth is just around the corner. Every time that growth hasn't occurred and the Government has had to borrow more instead.
The lack of an economic development plan is breath-taking. There is no credible strategy for jobs, training or growth. National is completely out of ideas.
There is no plan to grow savings and capital sufficiency and improve investment incentives for a modern high-value economy. Instead, KiwiSaver is stripped forever and every KiwiSaver account holder picks up the tab.
Instead, the Government plans to flog off $7 billion worth of our public assets. Despite promising not to sell assets before the election, they have already booked the proceeds.
National's promise to fund new health services now depends on selling public assets.
In the long run, asset sales will cost us more in lost dividends than we get from the sales. That is not an economic plan; it is the equivalent of selling our house for scrap to help pay off the mortgage.
There is no plan to deliver much-needed relief to hard-working families stressed to the max by runaway living costs. Instead, a family of four on $80,000 loses up to $50 a week in Working for Families cuts.
No plan for jobs, training or higher wages.
Mr Key and Mr English can't even work out what they will cut to balance their books. Instead, they've dumped that important political choice on to public service CEOs, who are expected to find a billion dollars of savings in the next three years. It is the height of irresponsibility for the Government to base its financial projections on these cuts that haven't even been articulated or specified.
These are tough times and the Government's finances are tight, but the Government always has choices.
Mr Key didn't have to break his promises to hard-working families, who will see their Working for Families payments and KiwiSaver contributions cut, and their wages barely match inflation. He could have reversed last year's tax cuts, which are worth hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars a week to the already well-off.
It was poor decisions like last year's GST hike and tax cuts targeted at the rich that got the Government's books into trouble. The 2010 tax package was projected to cost $460 million in borrowing this year alone, but the cost has blown out by hundreds of millions of dollars because National got its sums wrong.
National has lacked the maturity and responsibility to acknowledge its mistakes and correct them. Instead, it has foisted those costs on to the rest of us.
New Zealand deserves better. Over coming months, Labour will present a responsible and credible plan for the future; the plan that this Budget fails to deliver.
Labour will present a credible strategy for rebuilding our battered economy that will improve opportunities for all New Zealanders. We will lay out a bold, fully costed, balanced alternative to the irresponsible and visionless Key Government. We will confront the tough challenges - the overpriced dollar, underinvestment in capital leading to poor productivity, low domestic savings, high foreign debt and the squeeze on working families' wage packets. This Budget is a bridge to nowhere, built on shaky assumptions about future revenue and spending, and paved with broken promises.
It has no vision for New Zealand to own its own future; no plan for growing the economy; no sense of basic Kiwi fairness; nothing except an agenda to flog off our assets without mandate and hope that the economy fixes itself.
New Zealand deserves better. We need a serious and responsible government with the courage and boldness to make the hard choices that will lead all New Zealanders to a better tomorrow where we own our own future.
But we'll have to wait until 2012, and the first Budget of the sixth Labour-led government, to see a Budget like that.
• David Cunliffe is Labour's finance spokesman.
