KEY POINTS:
With the mood of the New Zealand corporate boardroom squarely in favour of a change of government, Finance Minister Michael Cullen faced what could have been a hostile audience at an Auckland business breakfast this morning.
At the "Mood of the Boardroom" event, sponsored by the New Zealand
Herald, Cullen opened his speech by thanking "both of his supporters" - out of a room of hundreds of business leaders - for attending.
And while he was trying to woo support and show that the Labour Government had in fact done a lot for business, Cullen took aim at business leaders criticising government during a time when around the world taxpayers were coming to the rescue of failing financial institutions.
This was no time for the "top end of town" to be giving one-sided lectures to Government, said Cullen. "The Gordon Gekko's are being propped up by the Gordon Brown's," he said.
Cullen largely stuck to the script for a business audience, stressing the Labour-led Government's ability over the past few years of being able to negotiate with other parties in an MMP parliament.
This, he said, would be a problem for any National-led government - one that needed to pass legislation through Parliament to do things like changing the Resource Management Act, KiwiSaver and the Emissions Trading Scheme.
Under MMP, a Government that said "it will make all the decisions will not work", said Cullen.
When asked about what would be done to instill more confidence in the New Zealand economy, National Finance spokesman Bill English said one thing that would help would be the election of a strong National Government, - with one party having "significant weight". This would be important for confidence. "Clarity of direction" would matter.
Having a dig at the Labour Party's attempt to "smear" National leader John Key over his foreign exchange dealings in the 1980s, English said that when we require leadership in a recession, politics was being put ahead of the economy.
Labour was engaging in "hatching a dirty little plot to smear the Opposition leader".
The topic of extending the bank desposit scheme to also cover wholesale deposits between the banks was raised by both Cullen and English, with the Finance Minister saying it was crucial that any scheme meant the banks looked first to their Australian parents for any help they might need, rather than the New Zealand taxpayer.
- HERALD ONLINE