Time to wake up. A storm is a'coming, and smoke and mirrors ain't gonna save us.

"A rising tide will lift all boats," said a euphoric Helen Clark before the last election, promising a steak on every plate through the beneficence of Labour rule. "A rising tide will lift all boats"? But it hasn't, has it.

Not every boat has been lifted.

• Not the 300,000 still on welfare after two-and-a-half terms of Labour rule.
• Not ratepayers, suffering under year-on-year exponential increases in the depth to which petty councillors raid their assets.
• Not taxpayers, suffering under the two-dozen (and still counting) new taxes -- taxes brought in by a Government who had pledged in 1999 to add no new taxes -- and feeling the effects of a spending binge that's achieved nothing except rampant stagflation.
• Not would-be first home-owners, priced out of the market by a perfect storm of regulatory restrictions on land supply, and by exponentially increased costs of land and building and interest rates.
• Not ever-extended borrowers enduring mortagee sales (which doubled in number last year) as those hugely inflated interest rates bite.
  
• Not producers, suffering under those hugely inflated interest rates.
• Not exporters, suffering under exchange rates artificially inflated by Alan Bollard's economic ignorance.
• Not creditors, attracted by all the extra credit in a marketplace awash with investors cashing in on Bollard's rates, credit piling up in more and more malinvestments just waiting to be washed away in the next storm.
• Not the many young New Zealanders who emerge from the state's factory schools functionally illiterate and unable to function in a high-skills economy.
  

In fact, barely anyone except those who've taken advantage of the bumbling, for after seven-and-a-half years of Labour Government our national boat has been sinking beneath the OECD waves -- as their report this week shows anyone who bothers to read it, we are enmired near the bottom of the list of 30 countries measured, and going backwards. Real per-capita income here is diving like a sick man with a snorkel (see picture at right). All the great successes trumpeted out of Helengrad have been smoke and mirrors -- the unemployment figures massaged by the enormous increases in sickness and disability beneficiaries; the growth figures massaged by the government's multi-billion dollar spending binge, and by the massive credit attracted by inflated interest rates and the Reserve Bank's printing presses; the 'prosperity' financed on that credit and on the back of a housing 'boom' that's really an over-inflated regulatory bust.

Except for recipients of taxpayers' largesse -- those unemployed 'artists'; Welfare for Families Beneficiaries; subsidised film-makers -- and all those productive New Zealanders who've done well despite the regulatory and fiscal shackles placed upon them, we are as becalmed as those boats in Valencia were earlier last week.

The tide is high, and the world is moving on -- but it's leaving us behind. A world of economic golden weather has been pissed away in a sodden downpour of politically correct government, and the OECD has just shown us all the tab.

It's high time to wake up.