Clive Bibby: We need a government that is prepared to say NO!

Listening to the different political parties contest the right to occupy the treasury benches after the election campaign isn’t an exercise that instils confidence in the nation’s ability to extricate itself from the economic and social mess we are in.  

Admittedly, a decent chunk of the debt accumulated over the last three years has been money spent where the government had no choice.

And it is fair to say that the debate surrounding the accumulation of that debt should not be about whether the mostly borrowed money should have been spent but more precisely about how it was spent.

Peter Dunne: It’s the economy stupid

When Bill Clinton first ran for President of the United States, back in 1992, his campaign chief James Carville coined the now immortal phrase “it’s the economy stupid” to focus his team on what that year’s election was all about.

Over thirty years earlier, Stanford University economist Anthony Downs had postulated the theory that because they do not understand all the nuances of economic policy, voters judge governments at election time on how much they intervene in the domestic economy and what impact that has. He argued that public opinion about economic management was shaped like the traditional bell-curve, with a small group of voters having extreme views at either end of the spectrum, and the bulk of voters holding more moderate opinions in the middle. In turn, this meant mainstream political parties shaped their economic policies in a more centrist way to maximise their political support.