This is Bill English’s dubious legacy

Departing National Party leader Bill English gets undeserved kudos for supposedly ably managing the global financial crisis. But he never acknowledges that Labour had nine genuine surpluses, and set up the Cullen Superannuation Fund (payments to which English immediately axed), leaving fiscally healthy books.

Flogging off shares in power companies and selling Housing NZ homes, which we all own, while also demanding a dividend from HNZ, swelled National’s slush fund.

Untold millions were saved by negligently short-changing education, health (especially mental health), the Christchurch rebuild and, as the report just out shows, social housing. Preelection claims of a surplus were a black joke. English quashed Sue Moroney’s bill for 26 weeks of paid parental leave, maintaining it was too expensive. When caught out inflating the cost, he lied he’d ‘‘made a mistake’’.

He asserts National improved child poverty by 10 per cent, but never pays tribute to many other groups and individuals who really stepped up, often by default, eg nurses, teachers and grandparents. Even a gang made sandwiches for needy children.

In 2009, English overclaimed $32,000 for accommodation; kept asserting he was merely a ‘‘bystander’’ in the Todd Barclay scandal; and backed Stephen Joyce’s monumental lie that Labour had a $11.9 billion gaping hole in its pre-election costings. And just this week, he spread downright lies to confuse many about the future of current charter schools.

Ursula J Rose Christchurch Central