I needed hope.

I got Gerry Brownlee.

(Photo evidence of Wellington’s one good day per year.)

Morena team,

Well I say morning, I know it’s afternoon, I just only really wake up at 12pm so it feels like morning.

I hope you’re all lying down somewhere eating Nutella out of the jar this public holiday.

So I popped in last week to say I was down in Welly, somewhat unplanned, to go bts during budget week and get a closer look at parliament.

I was there because it turns out Gerry Brownlee reads the odd column of mine. (Never would have picked that.) And he read the one I wrote about TOP the other day.

It essentially said that a lot of us feel completely unserved by basically every major political party on offer, and don’t see anything they want to vote for right now. (Hence the appeal of TOP. The new, unknown, “well I hate everything else so I may as well give this a go party”)

He was worried I was too depressed about The System, and invited me down for budget week with the aim to restore my faith in The System.

Now, first up, as I say in this weeks column, I think I’m actually slightly more depressed now about the government (and opposition) than I was before I went down.

There was something dispiriting about having your sneaking sensations confirmed.

Namely, I’ve had for a long time that a lot of MPs just don’t have any conception of how tough normal life is for the “hardworking Kiwis” they keep saying they’re thinking about.

And that’s because, when they imagine ‘tough’, we don’t actually share a common baseline.

Basically their version of ‘hard’ is probably 60% easier than the lived reality of it.

It’s not necessarily that they’re out of touch (although I think a lot of them seriously underestimate how broke we are as people. I was certainly the only person in there on 60k a year.)

I think it’s more that they think there is still space left to belt tighten. When in reality, if you tighten us any more we’ll asphyxiate. (It’s kinda like how Thatcher wanted the nation - the patient - to take it’s medicine and endure the rough ride. Which the obvious response to is, but what if the patient dies?)

But what the scary part for me is that the budget really didn’t dive into the things that will materially improve my or yours life.

So the budget was all about - let’s cut spending, pay down our debt, and get back in surplus.

Now, that’s not in itself bad.

But it’s not the thing that’s going to raise your wages, or your purchasing power, or kick start the economy into growth.

If you think about the debt numbers, they’re all done as a ratio. So ‘what we owe’ (debt) is divided by ‘what we make’ (gdp).

So you can try to reduce this by spending less (which is this Gov’s approach). Or you can reduce it by ‘growing the denominator’ ie. making more money as a country and growing our GDP. (eg. finding new ways to make money as a nation, instead of just cutting costs.)

When you make more money, the GDP goes up, and you and me start seeing benefits from increased productivity, industry growth, hiring, pay rises ect. That’s what impacts us as everyday people.

But when you just focus on cutting costs, you don’t get that immediate impact. You get the eventual hope that things ‘pick up.’

So really, what I wanted to see, was a debate on why we’re so focussed on cutting costs (and eventually hoping that trickles down to the people) as opposed to stimulating our GDP growth (and kicking starting industry and productivity.)

In other words, stop running the country like a struggling restaurant and find a new way of making money (eg. buy a margarita slushie machine.)

But Labour didn’t do any of that.

There wasn’t any challenge to the idea of lowering the debt ratio or making our focus a return to surplus.

It was just…well, a lot of venting of feelings.

National said this, the other guys said that, everyone booed and jeered and hissed and, well, that was it. That was the analysis.

(That being said, I do think Barbara Edmunds, Labour’s Finance Spokesperson, is a very smart cookie. I caught up with her, and we talked about how she’s a fan of targeted investment, spending to kickstart parts of the local economy that are going well and grow them so they really add to our GDP. Eg. Aeronautics is kicking off, so let’s invest in it as a Gov, and really grow it. She recommended Mission Economy to read too. So there was a faint lil ray of hope there for me. She’s boss.)

On the whole, no. I didn’t sudden find faith in either major party. But I did find something far more unexpected.

Namely, I thought I was going to hate Gerry Brownlee.

I thought he was going to be a pale, stale, old school boomer male who didn’t have the faintest interest in young Kiwis and our frustrations.

I got that completely wrong. He’s a gent.

Not only did he listen, very intently, to everything I’ve been trying to say in print for what feels like forever. But he was genuinely sincere in his concern.

Which, after listening to so much insincerity all week, felt like a throw back to a far nobler time of politicians.

I don’t think we agree on anything at all. But despite that, I could tell he really did want to listen. And he did want to fix it.

It also taught me that - even though you don’t agree with someone - you can still connect with them. And that gives me hope. Which is good, because I’ve been really bloody depressed lately that things will never get better.

So it was very cool, on a personal level to get a flicker of hope.

It’s nice to be proved wrong about people. It reminds you how resilient hope and common connection - especially in the face of us all shouting at each other - really is.

So yes, have a read of today’s column. “I asked for hope. I got Gerry Brownlee.”

I think it may surprise you. It certainly surprised me.

I’ll see you soon, team,

much love

Vee xo