Budget error a ‘botch’ Mr Jones admits

Press, 28 May 1984, Page 1

Budget error a ‘botch’ Mr Jones admits

PA Auckland The Broadcaster turned consultant, Mr Gordon Dryden, bowed out as the New Zealand Party’s Tamaki candidate with the comment, “Maybe I am a more competent journalist than I am a politician.” Although he remains a member of the party that he joined four months ago, Mr Dryden said he would no longer seek the deputy leadership. Earlier he had been asked to resign by both his own electorate committee and by the party’s leader, Mr Bob Jones, who accused Mr Dryden of manoeuvring to topple him. “What we have seen is the first and failed coup against me,” Mr Jones said. “I liked the bloke’s enthusiasm, but what he did on Friday was intolerable,” he said. On Friday evening, Mr Dryden issued a statement in Mr Jones’s name to the “New Zealand Herald,” newspaper, saying that Mr Jones accepted full responsibility for the final drafting of the party’s economic policy, released

on May 20. That said the statement was in spite of mistakes in the draft budget which could make it impossible for any Government to balance its books within two years, unless it took drastic measures which would increase unemployment. A statement including these two paragraphs had been approved earlier on Friday by Mr Jones at a meeting in an Auckland hotel with Mr Dryden and the party’s Pakuranga candidate, Ms Josephine Grierson. In that statement, released by Mr Dryden yesterday, Mr Jones’s acceptance of full responsibility for the matter had been relegated to the eighth paragraph. “He restructured it to make me look a damn fool,” said Mr Jones yesterday. “I do not accept full responsibility because I was not even partly responsible. It was not my mistake at all.” However, the party’s president, Mr Malcolm McDonald, said yesterday that all members of the

party’s economic policy committee had been against Mr Jones’s proposal to publish a draft budget at all. “It was Bob’s initiative. He has said he did so against the advice of the professional economists,” Mr McDonald said. Mr Jones confirmed that he had made the suggestion, and said the budget had been prepared late at night on the day before it was sent out to candidates and the media. “We made a botch,” he said. But he emphasised that the budget was only an appendix to the economic policy. It was “not very important,” and did not affect the main problems of a floating exchange rate, deregulation, tighter monetary policy, and a shift from direct to indirect taxes. The chairman of the New Zealand Party’s Tamaki electorate committee, Mrs Adrienne Teape, said she had already received nominations for two men and two women seeking to replace Mr Dryden as the Tamaki candidate.