No Surprises (in Plain English)

In The Simpsons, Homer's elderly father Abe Simpson instantly falls asleep.  He doesn't just doze off...it's instant loud snoring and dribbles.  Sometimes mid-sentence, while standing up.

I think most of the media do this whenever superannuation and KiwiSaver comes up. 
I don't blame them.  Snakes alive,  it can be a boring subject.   Yet I think the media has missed something recently which was, dare-I-say-it, interesting.

Bill English, the Finance Minister, said in a speech the other day (about the forthcoming Budget) :  “What we are doing is well-signalled and predictable, so I don’t think you’ll see any big surprises on 16 May.”  

Pretty straightforward, then.  The headline message of that speech was the Government's books are on track to return to surplus in 2014/15.  So that's good.  

Until we cast our minds back to the Budget of 2011.   At that time, English said that a form of compulsory KiwiSaver membership would come in.  When?  In the same fiscal year as the return to surplus, which is 2014/15.    Next year.

I think this recent speech may have been a way of gently ushering in that news - without frightening the horses.  If the Budget announces compulsory KiwiSaver for all employees, no doubt this will be reported as shock news.  Yet Bill will tell us that it was well-signalled and predictable.  And he'd be right - it was.

Whether it actually happens is up to the Government, obviously.   But what surprised me was that no-one seems to have asked the question.   In fact, I read one article re-iterating the no-change message.

No disrespect to Mr English in particular, but when a politician says something really straightforward - that really should ring louder-than-usual alarm bells, shouldn't it?