Tax scattered on the floor and Joyce’s fluffy slippers have holes

Budget 2017 is basically an extra tuft of fluff atop an old, battered pair of slippers. Mules, at that. Faux, furry, and fallacious.

The people that inhabit such footwear are usually blissfully unaware of how awful they look on. Only Zsa Zsa Gabor could carry it off with aplomb, and Steven Joyce is no Zsa Zsa.

Low to middle income earners may like the tax threshold tinkering, but will no doubt ask themselves whether they’d be better off overall with Labour after 23 September.

After years of denial of the nation’s housing shortage, the Government now says they’re doing something about the non-problem by throwing some money at it. Too little, too late.

The health sector gets a $4 billion bone, but with nowhere near enough meat on it. Magically too, inadequate mental health funding has gone from “letting the market fix it” to $116m for DHBs to provide more support.

The environmental spend-ups are lame, with little allowed for any serious freshwater mitigation; particularly when a further subsidy for agriculture is given in the form of another $300m — on top of the nearly half a billion taxpayer dollars — for irrigation schemes.

Of course, as the Budget is so blatantly working against the environment, it’s not unexpected that New Zealand’s climate change work programme received only an additional $4m over four years to assist with policy work to meet its Paris Agreement 2030 emissions targets. The irony of that — given that climate change is the most pressing issue facing the world today — is not lost on anybody with even just a few working brain cells.

In summation, it’s a dud. It’s squarely aimed at the looming election and, because of that, is openly cynical. Just as I am about those silly, fluffy mules.

All show, no class.