Finance Minister Dr Michael Cullen is the probably the only person in New Zealand who takes taxation lightly. This is because he so effortlessly extracts so much of it from the rest of us.

One year, he’s the chewing gum tax refunder who apparently couldn’t afford to give us a packet of chewing gum because it would fuel inflation or cut crucial public services. The next year, he’s telling us that pre-election tax cuts are vital, but must be modest. And the next minute, he’s saying that his tax cuts will be “significant”.

What are we to make of this dancing, prancing nancy?

Well, two things are for sure. He takes, but he does not give lightly. He also has not the slightest notion of how to run a Western-style developed economy that benefits its people.

During the last two years, we have managed to rack up a trading deficit of around $26 billion. That’s an amount so huge that few people could get their heads around it, and it amounts to about $1 billion a month. Foreigners now own at least $26 billion more of us than they did only 730 days ago.

But what it really means is that if the foreigners who lend us money because we pay the highest interest rate in the developed world were to pull the plug, we would be a basket-case and bankrupt nation, and the only way to repay the lenders would be to hand over large bits of our country.

Along with smaller bits perhaps, such as your mortgaged house, for instance. Of course, no Chinese person is likely to walk in while you’re having breakfast – unlike some closer neighbours might dream of doing – and say that they historically own your place and your livestock, so kindly move out by midday. But nevertheless, the creeping foreign ownership of our country shows no sign of being halted, and everyone who has a mortgage in this country is paying a heavy price for it.

Tossers such as the tiny party we now like to call Winston First would have people believe that Asian immigrants are the problem, but we’ve been shamelessly selling ourselves for years to people who wouldn’t dream of coming here, unless their new golf course and airstrip were ready.

How has Michael Cullen achieved this simultaneous series of miracles, disasters and deceptions?

Well, Dr Cullen let consumer spending run riot while he told us that the Reserve Bank, which falsely claims to control inflation, was no longer his responsibility, although Cullen claims to control taxation and much of State spending – which has also run amok under Labour.

The level of personal debt in New Zealand is now so high that many could not meet it without borrowing even more at hideous rates. Rather than “Nothing to pay for two years!”, finance companies such as GE Money now offer “consolidated loans” to people who are uncontrollably in debt - and anyone taking that option is already beyond hope.

Dr Cullen, a pseudo-socialist who may one day tell you that he made a big mistake by relying on market forces, presided over a boom-and-hidden-bust consumer spree for many years because he knew it made voters feel good and that they would tend to vote Labour. He will be praying that the chickens will not come home to roost before the election.

Hopefully, he will be proved wrong, because now the chickens have stopped laying the eggs.

We find ourselves with sky-high interest rates that are slaughtering home-owners trying to pay their mortgages and making it impossible for youngsters to buy a tiny piece of their own country because witless Labour politicians unwittingly let loose house-price inflation. Exporters are being bled to death by a currency that has been artificially over-valued by the Reserve Bank’s interest rate policy, to maintain consumer spending and prevent financial meltdown.

We are in a society where many thousands of decent but gullible and ill-educated savers have been ruined by cowboy financial outfits and their misleading advertisements. Seventeen finance companies have gone bust, and the Labour-led Government has done absolutely nothing about it. Instead, these nondescript socialists and their stupid allies find it easier to posture about global warming, or persecute parents. They just hate people who want to save their own money, and prosper.

We have a housing market in free-fall – causing “negative equity” in many cases – where people cannot sell their previously over-valued houses on which they had been encouraged to “carelessly” borrow to buy the boat or the expensive foreign holiday, or fund a decent education for the kids. But there are also ordinary, decent, hard-working people who did not borrow on their houses, yet will struggle to pay the interest just to keep a roof over their heads. You will never, ever, hear a word from Labour about their plight.

All the while, this obscenely high interest rate is fuelling foreign investment to sustain an economy that this nine-year-old Government has done nothing to help diversify into one that can make a profit that keeps the country afloat, while exporters either go bust or move overseas. And virtually all the interest on this borrowing is sent overseas, further impoverishing us.

Cullen is trying to have it more than both ways, but he cannot.

He walks away from Reserve Bank interest rates, claiming that these are independently set. Everyone knows that, given a sufficiently difficult problem, such independence goes out the window. He would say that the trade deficit is created by uncontrollable market forces, which is demonstrably untrue, because good governance sets the pace. He would say that any crisis, or inflation, or job losses are caused by global issues, also beyond the control of his Government. In this respect, we should remember that Labour will always claim to have created jobs and it has always used taxpayers’ money to pacify people who lose their jobs, for whatever reason.

When we consider the $26 billion trade deficit - money that we owe to other countries - we are only talking about the last 24 months. Only God or Statistics New Zealand, Michael Cullen or Helen Clark can know the true sum owed.

Cullen has built an enormous pot of our money that even he cannot completely waste (and now pretends to be generous with), while virtually every part of our infrastructure – whether it be in health, transport or education – has been invaded, degraded or wasted with the help of countless new bureaucrats, and we are no further forward.

Now, he and his colleagues will offer a meaningless lolly-scramble designed purely to out-tax-cut National.

But he will never be able to answer this question:

Where’s the economic transformation, Michael?