What a crazy week full of crazy happenings full of crazy times and I get the crazy feeling there’s going to be a whole lot more crazy change to come next week.

This week started with the oil price rampaging through the roof and the Government replying by cutting the tax on petrol.

It’s the sort of direct market manipulation we haven't seen since Robert Muldoon debt pay freezes and car-less days and who remembers those?

We all know how well that sort of thing worked out.

The problem kicking the ball down the road, which is what this has done, is that eventually you have to pick the ball up and when you do, you find out it’s got really, really, really, really big.

So come June, what will this Government do when the three months is up?

Casually whack the tax and road user charges back on? That’ll go down like a cup of cold sick.

This really is a pickle of their own making, and it’s crazy because, in a cruel irony, the oil prices that were soaring at the start of the week have now shrunk to less than they were before the Ukraine war, begging the question about whether we should've done anything at all.

Financial data came out this week highlighting the cost of the past two years.

We had the GDP figure — underwhelming.

It failed to balance the payments data that showed that New Zealand spent $20 billion overseas more than it earned in exports.

We now have a net external debt of $173 billion, which is $17 billion more than last year and $30 billion more than at the start of the Covid crisis.

And interest rates are rising and inflation is here to stay.

In that case, who would be crazy enough to want to be Finance Minister for this scenario?

Well, it turns out that Nicola Willis is that sort of crazy. This week she continued to say tax cuts and a cut in government spending is the answer to these crazy times.

But this week economists also came out and said tax cuts could push prices even higher, when supply is short you don't put more cash in buyers’ pockets.

Nicola was also critical about the Government’s promise of a $6 billion spend-up next Budget, which stands at odds at all the cause for extra investment in our crumbling community and health facilities like the horror story on the front page of the Herald.

This week also saw the Government fling open the tourism doors, but not for a month. The tourism industry said, “we’re ready now”.

And then they’ve just promised today that they’re gonna look at the mandates and the traffic light settings next week.

Oh, another crazy week in a crazy time and next week could be crazier.

But what I will say is that it’s all coming to a head very quickly and it’s coming to the time where we have to start picking up the pieces and there’s a lot of pieces to pick up.