Jim Hopkins: Every plucky little Kiwi battler should get a $10,000,000 overdraft

Hey, diddle, diddle,
It's all a big fiddle
Our Credit is discredited
Our Rating is waiting
To sink like a stone
And our black's going into the red

And that's it really. You should probably stop now. The rest is piffle to be honest, a netting of mist and a bottling of rumours such as you'd expect from someone who hasn't got the foggiest idea what he's talking about.

Which, as it happens, is the Budget - which hasn't happened yet. 'Wild' Bill English might be gargling right about now, or ironing a shirt or strappin' on his gun belt but he sure as shootin' ain't started pumpin' lead.

So there's no way of knowing who he's hit or what he's hit or how much he's bunged on the petrol or slapped on the fags.

No one cares about the columnists, you see. No one realises how hard it is to describe an axe, metaphorically speaking, when you haven't got a handle on things.

If the world was a good place, a kind place, a fair place, Treasury would put us in their loop and send some spotty little nerdoid down to the The Pontificator's Arms of a Monday night while we're all leaning on our risers and supping our pints to give us not so much a Lock Up as a Booze Up, a few "you didn't hear this from me" tips about the true awfulness of the document so we could say something sensible next day.

But they don't, of course. They're far too busy making asparagus rolls and Marmite sammies for all those snooty geezers from Standard and Poor (so called because they set the standard and could make us poor) who've jetted in this week for a chat with our key players.

Given such vicissitudes, a smarter chap would just ignore the whole thing and crank out a fey, pre-Raphaelite, Qantas Award winning personal meditation, you know, "It's not every day you meet the most mesmerising woman in the world in an art gallery ..." that sort of thing, but, in your heart of hearts, at the confluence of your waters, you know that won't wash. The Harold's readers expect and deserve better.

Because things are amiss and we're in a mess and that's that and there you have it.

Our Credit Rating hangs by a thread, hostage to a Wall Street whim. Doom looms like a phantom spectre. The abyss beckons. Steps must be taken to ensure we don't become agriculture's answer to Davey Crockett (King of the wild Fonterra) roaming the badlands with nothing but a begging bowl and two AI straws to keep us warm at night.

And all because the same useless boofheads who caused this whole Global Fiscal mess by dishing out Triple A ratings to any old sad and sorry, rouged and perfumed, fishnet stockinged, pre-packaged, over-leveraged sub-prime junk bond offering 125 per cent mortgage security on a bunch of Uzbekistan pie carts can now send us all down the financial gurgler if they arbitrarily decide we're a basket case and downgrade us to B- or C+ or some other deeply humiliating score that wouldn't get past first base down at NCEA HQ.

It's an outrage. Of that there is no doubt. As there is also no doubt the Budget will have missed the point - whatever horrors it contained.

Politicians always get things wrong. That's why they were invented - to rectify the mistakes they've already made. And make a mess of that. So the other lot can have a go. And so it goes.

The groundlings are thus encouraged to foolishly believe that everything's more or less under control and chaos reigns.

But there's always an answer. If Sonny Bill English had been boxing smart he could've KO'd the threat of recession with a single blow. What he should have done is give us, not a Black Budget or a Bleak Budget or even, perish the thought, a Beige Budget. He should've given us a Westpac Budget.

He should've stood up and said, in a deep and manly voice, "As of midnight, the gummint of Outer Roa will accidentally give every plucky little Kiwi battler a $10,000,000 overdraft ... but only for 24 hours. Go for it, guys, the drinks are on me."

If he'd done that, everything would be hunky dory. Some of us, the honest few, would have said, "Look, there's been some mistake." But most of us would've taken the money and run - pausing only to spend up large as we did so. And it wouldn't matter whether our spending was foolish or wise. Either way, it would generate a huge amount of economic activity. And, best of all, every 24 hour accidental overdraft would've been funded by a foreign bank.

So the whole world would face imminent ruin. Obama would have to subsidise us!!!!! Forget US dairy farmers. It'd be Kiwis in clover. We could change our name to General Motors. Money would pour in. The Moody geezers at Scandal and Poor would give us a Double Triple A rating with nuts on top!!!

There'd be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dargaville. Annette King and Christine Rankin would discover they actually had a lot in common. And then we could all get a good night's kip - wherever we're hiding!