Andrew Dickens: When you hear deficits, that means borrowing

The last thing I did before the Waitangi day holiday was talk to Kieran McAnulty about the financial strife surrounding Kainga Ora, and it's bugged me ever since.  The Labour Housing Spokesperson denied the agency was in financial difficulty.  He told me that Housing New Zealand's asset base was so large there was no problem borrowing more money to keep its construction schedule on track.  And that bugged a lot of you too.  The typical response was typical socialist – just borrow more and more to fund your ideological programme.  But it doesn't really have anything to do with your political bent, it's basic fiscal management.  The world is full of people who have the assets to borrow whatever they like, but the devil in the detail is whether they have the capacity to pay it back.  Increasingly we don't.  Yes, our debt is internationally insignificant and still not at an extreme level.  We're not the UK or the United States who have debt ratios over 100% of GDP, and we're certainly not like Japan who has a debt of over 250% of GDP – a country that's stuck with stagflation and has been since the 1990s.  But we're still heavily indebted and our cashflow is poor.  And what Kieran and the Labour Party don't realise is that is the principal reason they no longer control the Treasury benches.  Yes, there were sideshows like the gender war, Māori relations, and benefit levels.  But at the core of Labour's electoral collapse was the feeling that they were not fiscally prudent and that recklessness with debt was not the right direction for the country.  It's a lesson for the current government, who, for all their posturing that they are the most prudent fiscal managers, are still running deficits, falling further into debt, and the timing of future surpluses is sliding ever further into the future.  Deficits mean borrowing, and New Zealanders are not happy voting for anyone who commit us to that track. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.