Well ahead of the 2008 election, Helen Clark and her strategists knew that worldwide financial trouble and a local recession were inevitable, and they decided that instead of relying on their dubious “record”, they would mount an election campaign based on “trust” or, more accurately, encouraging the “fear of the unknown”.

Remember that Helen Clark ran an administration that did nothing to either protect the savings of countless thousands of investors in flaky finance companies, or monitor the firms themselves. So far, 21 have failed. Real estate is in free-fall, and now yet another major property development has gone belly-up in Auckland.

The Clark Government did nothing when house price inflation rocketed, credit ran uncontrolled, and the dollar flew so high that many exporters (apart from dairy farmers) either found themselves out of a job or moved their production to China. Doctor Cullen said that this was all the fault of “market forces” and said that government powers were limited because Doctor Alan Bollard set the interest rates. May God preserve us in future from the care of these two doctors.

Bollard, blindly trying to “curb inflation”, set interest rates so high that they attracted Asian investors to lend money to this country, setting off the false consumer boom that has now gone bust. He raised our currency to a level where hardly anyone in New Zealand could export at a profit. He can reduce the bank rate to zero; it will make little difference. His problem is that we’re no longer subject to the Bollard rate of interest. We owe unimaginable fortunes to people who don’t even speak English, and now they want even more for lending to us. We have spectacularly laid waste to our credit.

Even in totally ballsed-up Britain, the second nation after New Zealand to free bank rates from political control, there is some small measure of protection for people who put money on deposit in banks. Here, there is no protection whatsoever. You might as well put your cash under the bed and get a licensed firearm.

Clark and Cullen seem to believe that anyone with a few bucks to invest is just another rich prick, unworthy of any kind of safeguard.

Given this seemingly endless catalogue of financial cock-ups and the complete lack of any coherent political idea for preventing future such disasters, it’s little wonder that Helen Clark looks like our own version of a Sub-Prime Minister.