Muriel Newman on the National Party:

‘..Helen Clark was responsible for the largest expansion in the size of government in modern times. Over the final three years of her term in office, state spending grew from 29 percent of GDP in 2005 to 35 percent in 2008. It was economic mismanagement on a grand scale. Not only did the country fall into a recession months ahead of the global economic crisis, but the incoming government was handed a raft of increasingly unaffordable policies including interest-free student loans, massive increases in Working for Families, and overly-generous KiwiSaver subsidies. But rather than seizing the mandate for reform given by electors, by cutting government spending back to affordable levels, the National Party took the easy road, positioning itself in the middle ground to essentially continue Clark’s agenda…’     the rest is HERE