I think Nicola Willis may be right when she suggested to us the other day Chris Hipkins might not be very numerate. 

He is undoing himself in front of us. As he does, he reminds us why he has basically done as little as possible these past few years, because when he does he is either in office blowing the place up, or putting out policy in Opposition that makes literally no sense. 

He has blocked petrol excise increases for three years. 

The bill for that is $4.6 billion. He said yesterday he didn’t think that number was right, even though it is. He had an idea what the number was but wouldn’t say. 

Cool policy. 

By the end of the day, he wasn’t ruling out borrowing it. Now, you can't borrow it because in another policy he told us we were returning to surplus by 2028/29. You can't run a surplus as you borrow more. 

Do you think he realises this? 

Then we get to the pay equity bit, which they haven't told us how they are paying for. That’s $12 billion. 

So $16 billion and counting and all paid for by a capital gains tax that, so far, will produce exactly nothing given housing is flat. And even if it wasn’t, it takes years to fire up. 

Oh, and the capitals gains is already paying for free doctors visits we don’t need, or mainly, want. 

To try and come to his defence, is there $4.5 billion worth of stuff you can cancel and cover the excise hole? That's a lot of money on something that gets cancelled and given we are already running things tight, because we have no money, you inevitably come back to the borrowing bit he mentioned late yesterday. 

I cannot overstate the danger of more debt. In the next couple of years, the world is going to go through another financial crisis, driven by debt and overcapped nonsense around chips and AI.  

You do not want to be a small economy at the bottom of the world in a sea of debt reliant on people bailing you out. It is literally the path to ruin. 

We already pay $9 billion a year interest on our debt and people like Fitch have warned us our credit rating is on watch. 

Yet Hipkins has diametrically opposed policies that get us to surplus and have us borrowing more, all at the same time. 

It's all embarrassingly amateurish, short-sighted and dangerous. 

I cannot overstate the idiocy if you think any of this is a path forward.