Budget Day an exercise of democratic power at work

For one thing, voters perceive the budget affects them more than other Government business does.

Thursday is Budget Day, a big event in the political calendar. Stephen Joyce will announce the Government’s plans to Parliament. Television and radio will provide live coverage. Political writers will scramble to get their hot takes online.

The Government will toss ginormous statistics around; $72 million for this and $220m for that and $189m for the other. The scale of the numbers, incomprehensible to you and me, will sound impressive.

The opposition won’t be impressed, though. For them, the numbers won’t be nearly high enough.

Or the numbers will be in the wrong places. Or the numbers announced won’t really reflect what the real numbers are at all.

People will entrench the trend of using the word ‘‘spend’’ as a noun. There will be discussions about ‘‘the health spend’’ and ‘‘the film industry spend’’. This will hurt the ears but, convinced it makes them sound savvy and cool, people will do it anyway. Why all this effort? For one thing, voters perceive the budget affects them more than other Government business does.

As enthusiastic users of Government services, we like learning about all the programs being funded.

But since we also don’t really like paying for those services, we also like learning that our taxes will be going down (or not increasing, at least).

Balancing off these competing concerns takes real art. Badly done, it can cause lasting damage a Government. Recall the ‘‘Black Budget’’ of 1958, the ‘‘Mother of All Budgets’’ in 1990 and the ‘‘Chewing Gum Budget’’ of 2005.

The last of these is almost the textbook example of how not to manage public expectations. In the lead-up to the budget, voters had come to expect significant tax cuts. But on Budget Day, the relief announced was truly miserly.

Many taxpayers stood to gain less than 67 cents a week - not enough to buy a packet of PK at the corner dairy. It was so badly handled that it would almost have been better if the cuts weren’t in the budget at all. When Labour limped back into office, a bitter Michael Cullen scrapped them altogether.

If people weren’t going to be grateful for their chewing gum, why should they have it?

So it is no surprise that, since that debacle, governments have tried to make a virtue out of ‘‘boring’’ budgets. In the months leading up to Budget Day, the Government tries to dampen our hopes for bribes. Better to leave them pleasantly surprised than disappointed.

The Government budget isn’t a simple household budget writ large. Nor is it about the Government trying to shore up support in an election year. More than anything else, the budget is an exercise of democratic power.

The Finance Minister does not present the budget to Parliament because it is a nice venue. He does so because he is acting as an agent of the Crown. And, under our constitution, the Crown can’t raise funds unless Parliament consents.

This principle is more important than may be immediately clear.

Its origins had a practical nature. In early modern England, the Crown did not have a large bureaucracy at its disposal. To raise taxes to fight wars and so on, it needed the cooperation of the local notables. The assemblage of these people became what we today call Parliament.

But the Kings hated having to do this. Parliament had the annoying habit of wanting its grievances addressed before it consented to new taxes. It was also guarded its control of such matters jealously. The power of the purse was, after all, the only real leverage it had over the Crown.

Over time, the tension between the Crown and Parliament reached the point of civil war. Parliament prevailed in that conflict and its financial powers were entrenched accordingly.

The idea that the King could govern with the support of Parliament was also planted (though it would take another few decades to fully take root).

And emerging from all that is what we call the Westminster tradition of democracy.

We have progressed much further down the path, of course. Ministers of our Crown are all members of Parliament. The prime minister and cabinet depend on Parliament’s continuous support to remain in office. This, taken with the particular structure of New Zealand’s Parliament, means Governments generally do not have trouble passing budgets.

This certainty may not be a given forever. Things change. The adoption of MMP has injected a latent uncertainty into the system. So far, voters and prime ministers have delivered stable minority Governments. But the day could come where the Government isn’t sure that it has the numbers to secure funds for its programs.

But until that happens, we should remember that Budget Day is about the rulers coming cap-inhand to the ruled. Partisan politics aside, that is a beautiful thing.