Nats dodge responsibility (try to)

Gordon Campbell's cutting to the chase now and covers the details that concerned me, as described in my previous post.
He writes:

"The dire downturn illustrated by those figures happens to virtually coincide with the term of the Key government. In Parliament, Social Development Minister Paula Bennett tried to pin the entire blame on the global financial crisis:

“I think that what we have seen is that the effects of the global economy have really hit those people hard … jobs were lost, people on part-time work lost some hours, and that, unsurprisingly, has had a direct effect on some of those people’s household incomes.”

Really? But I thought the external forces – e.g. those relatively buoyant performance of China and Australia – were what shielded our economy from the impact of the global downturn. On Planet National – which unfortunately is the one we all have to live on – every signifier of failure by this government is to be treated as entirely external. No responsibility for income inequality for instance, is to be laid at the door of the government’s last round of unfair and patently unaffordable tax cuts. Has the government’s response to the global downturn – i.e., tightening up on government spending, cutting public service jobs and services, further partial privatization and all the other headless chicken policies of economic contraction – been the right reactions or wrong ones that have made a bad situation even worse? Just about the only good thing that has saved us from the full blast of the global recession has been our relatively low levels of government debt – and that is something the Key government inherited, and did not create."

Quite right.