If Helen Clark is to be believed, Labour hasn’t been controlling State finances for the last seven years. Faceless bureaucrats at the Treasury were in charge - and according to her, they’ve stuffed it up very badly.

That’s how she explains why Labour, instead of cutting tax – “I’d like to have done it earlier” – was bamboozled into running up obscene surpluses, year on year. It was Treasury minions who misled innocent Dr Michael Cullen…

If that’s correct (and you’d need to be a complete dolt to believe it), Dr Cullen has been the victim of a long-running public service plot operating right under his nose.

If it’s not, Dr Cullen is guilty of failing to balance the books properly, hoarding vast sums of over-taxation for an election-year war chest, putting a needless brake on private sector economic growth, inflicting unnecessary hardship on working people, and helping to drive thousands of New Zealanders overseas, where pastures are greener, wages are higher and the politicians aren’t quite so greedy.

Clark and Cullen can’t have it both ways. Either argument leads to the inevitable conclusion that they are incompetent. Clark blamed her public servants, in order to take the heat off her deputy leader. She cannot afford to lose him because he has more brains than the rest of her Cabinet put together - and he knows where the bones are buried.

Blaming public servants for what is plainly a failure in political policy is a crass and cowardly act. Clark and Cullen know that their Treasury pen-pushers not only do the hard yards on the economy (while Clark and Cullen posture and pretend to be experts on it) but they also cannot answer back. No doubt there is even more ill feeling bubbling up towards these treacherous political masters in the Treasury this week…

Dr Cullen once fretted about the inflationary effects of handing excessive income tax back to those who originally earned the money, while conveniently ignoring the inflationary effects of his own government’s spending. But even Labour’s largesse with our money, which has included globe-trotting hip-hop studies and more recently a bogus investigation into Bogan culture, could not keep pace with the huge influx of tax cash.

He simply couldn’t spend it all – which is quite amazing for a socialist administration.

Now, he’s promising to return some of our money. How much, he won’t say, except that “it will be small.” Naturally, we’re all gob-smacked by this grudging and tiny U-turn…

Chewing gum size, perhaps? Knowing Labour and its policies for protecting you from junk food and other harmful pleasures, don’t expect a gob-stopper.

Labour keeps its tax-cut powder dry, and so does National. Who’ll blink first?

It actually doesn’t matter too much this time around, in election terms. Either way, there are certain to be last-minute promises of an unhealthy lolly-scramble from all those greasy-pole climbers.

The main thing that voters will remember is this: the last time Dr Cullen pledged some paltry tax cuts, he broke his promise and withdrew them. And he did it with a smirk on his face that told us everything about the Cullen attitude to power.

The suspicion is that, if re-elected, he might well do it again. This will be on the minds of everyone who stands in the polling booths, pencils poised, next year.

This time around, Clark and Cullen could well discover to their cost that we’re not the idiots they imagined – and that we have slightly better memories than they hoped.