Despite the arguably modest tax cuts in Budget 2024, National got PR bang for its buck, while Labour appeared disorganised and churlish, writes 1News political reporter Felix Desmarais.
It seems there is a new Budget tradition under this Government - Budget Day cookies, rustled up by the finance minister's children.
It follows previous administrations' Budget Day rituals - for John Key and Bill English, it was a pie, Jacinda Ardern and Dunedin-raised Grant Robertson would enjoy a cheese roll, while last year, under Chris Hipkins, sausage rolls were on the menu.
Notably all of them truly abominable things to eat in the morning, but perhaps that may be personal taste. Cookies seem marginally more appropriate before midday.
Either way, it's all for the photo heralding Budget Day to the public. It's all PR. That's not to say there's not space for it, it's a bit of colour in a day otherwise dominated by numbers and decimal points.
Whatever your political persuasion the baked delights cooked up and delivered by Willis' kids looked utterly delectable.
For some, her tax cuts, like the cookies, were the main sweetener of this otherwise plain Jane Budget.
But if you look at what the finance minister said in the election campaign and in the lead up to the Budget, to all intents and purposes, she's delivered exactly what she said she would.
The Budget was delivered yesterday, revealing tax cuts largely in line with what National promised in the election campaign.
The reason for the surprise amongst the commentariat is at least in part down to some of the apparently moderating language Willis has used about the tax cuts in the lead up to the Budget's release - namely, that they would be "meaningful but modest".
That phrasing doesn't necessarily rule out the tax cuts being what was always promised, or it being a fair description. But political watchers have finely tuned ears for politicians' delicate phrasing, especially when the phrase is repeated over and over.
That is doubly so as when Willis was asked directly, will the tax cuts be what you promised in the election - she'd use that phrase, and never just say an outright 'yes'. Ears perk up when a politician can't answer a question with a 'yes' - it can mean a 'no' or 'yes, but'.
It can also mean Cabinet sign off was still required - so perhaps it was a 'yes, probably, but we're not officially there yet'.
Then once Cabinet did sign off on it, it would have become Budget sensitive - that is, it could have market implications if she'd come right out with it.
But what does moderating language also do? It moderates expectations.
The net effect of that is - when you deliver more or less what you originally said you would deliver, it seems like a bit more.
If it was in any way intentional, it's really rather clever. It resulted in headlines National surely delighted in - that the tax cuts were as "promised".
As to whether tax cuts themselves are clever, that is a whole other debate. It wasn't hard to find people - especially pensioners and those on a very low wage, some of our most vulnerable - extremely disappointed with their meagre tax cuts. For others - families with small children in particular - the tax relief truly is "meaningful".
In the case of pensioners, it's just $9 a fortnight. Greens' co-leader Marama Davidson called the tax cuts "crumbs" in comparison to other cuts made.
"Poverty is a political choice and instead of bringing it to an end, the coalition has prioritised lining the pockets of the wealthy," she said, referring to the $2.9 billion in effective tax cuts for landlords through the reinstatement of interest deductibility, which allowed them to claim a property's interest cost as an expense on their tax bill.
Labour for its part performed an at-times bad-humoured and contradictory rebuttal to the Budget.
At first, Labour leader Chris Hipkins appeared irritated by discussion of the Budget's plain cover and what that meant (as though Grant Robertson had never happily discussed his choice of image for the cover in the past), delivering a curt "so what?" about it.
He also appeared tired of any suggestion he might have a nickname for the Budget, something not remotely out of the realm of the remit of the leader of the opposition.
Politicians know the game, they know how TV works, and they know if they say snappy phrases like the "Fudge-It Budget", "Mother of all Budgets" or - I don't know - "the Wellbeing Budget" then their particular view of that Budget is going to be efficiently and effectively conveyed.
Then by the end of the day, Labour was hashtagging social media posts with #BudgetOfBrokenPromises.
Amazing it took all day to come up with that one, quite aside from it sounding like the 2004 Green Day hit Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
Then on Friday, its party secretary begged supporters in an email to donate their tax cut to the party - something Nicola Willis said some might perceive as hypocritical.
Hipkins visited a student flat in Wellington on Friday to discuss the impact of the Budget with its residents.
There, asked if a tax cut was a good thing when it meant that money flowed back to the Labour Party coffers, Hipkins said that wasn't suggested by the email. He said it was a suggestion to those who didn't want the tax cut to put it to "good use" by contributing to the campaign to change the government.
You only need to look at the comments on that story on social media to see that email was not a masterclass in, well, class. "The nerve" features repeatedly.
It's all PR, isn't it? However the cookie crumbles. And despite coin-purse tax cuts, National might have won this round.
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