Money or the bag?

Have we been well served by those who hold the country's purse strings? Our ranking of the best and worst reveals the cavalier, the timid and those who just got lucky.

- ERIC FRYKBERG

Being a finance minister is probably both dream and nightmare. The dream is spending billions of dollars acquired by political diktat, not by toiling away in the marketplace. The nightmare is having to pay for another person's decision, cop the blame if it goes wrong and defend it in public even if it's a bad idea. In addition, finance ministers are pestered for money for other ministers' pet projects, even if they are unaffordable and might not work. Sir Michael Cullen found such requests could be for double the amount of money that was available. But ministers would still give it a go, and Cullen would have to play the Grinch.

Then there is the chronically bad press. To borrow from US economist Art Laffer's quote about congressional spending, a finance minister is worse than a drunken sailor - who at least spends his own money. According to another American, sardonic commentator HL Mencken, “No politician has ever benefited from saving money, only by spending it.”

However, a finance minister probably deserves more than sarcasm and throwaway lines. It is a deadly serious job. Its impact can be deep and long-lasting - it’s often argued New Zealand has still not fully recovered from the authoritarian 1970s-80s rule of Sir Robert Muldoon.

It’s also said that the easygoing years of Sir Keith Holyoake and his first finance minister, Harry Lake, in the 1960s allowed New Zealand’s economic strength to erode drip by drip.

However, it would be flippant to apply Mencken's cynical assessment of politicians as spendthrifts to all of this country's finance ministers. So the Listener set out to rank their performance - good, bad or indifferent.