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The investigation is underway as to how Treasury advice was leaked around the Fair Pay Agreements.\xa0

One headline suggested the Government were shaken by it.\xa0

I wonder if that is slightly overstating the case, but you would at least be surprised that something like this happened so soon after the country decided you were \u201cit\u201d for the next three years.\xa0

But then, this is what we see at a change of Government. There are people who don\u2019t like what happened at the election, just as there are people that don\u2019t like what happened at every election.\xa0

In a way it's another of those weird outcomes of MMP, despite the fact the result was very clear, and we wanted the old lot out and a new lot in.\xa0

You just don\u2019t know in detail what that new lot are going to deliver.\xa0

This time especially, given it\u2019s a three-way deal for the first-time involving Cabinet responsibility, you get the mix of three lots of thinking.\xa0

The irony though, when it comes to the FPA's and the leak, is several fold.\xa0

The most significant bit is that none of the parties now in Government campaigned to retain FTA's, so you can't have it both ways. You can't vote for change then be surprised when change comes.\xa0

A lot of the coalition document does actually have a commonality in thinking about it.\xa0

Yes, the foreign house buyer idea of National got shelved and yes, ACT's Treaty vote only gets to go to select committee. That's the headline stuff.\xa0

The meat and potatoes, the bulk of what this Government will do, comes with three-way universal agreement.\xa0

As for Treasury, we must remember they are but a Government department. They are often wrong and, most important to remember, all Governments have and do take advice and not automatically act on it.\xa0

So, when the media breathlessly trumpets this as some sort of scandal, they conveniently choose to forget this has happened many, many, many times before, including very often with the last Government, and if you took the advice each and every time you could ask why Treasury aren't in fact running the country. Why do we need a Government?\xa0

The advice must be treated as a whole. The specific advice the unions are pedalling was that the lower paid would get more money, and that is true. But there is a cost to that. It's called a deficit, it's called debt, and it's called inflation. The last Government handed out money for no return like it was water and look where that got us.\xa0

You don\u2019t need to be in Treasury to work that out.\xa0

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