It was high five time in the Beehive as the Dipton Drawler Bill English opened the Government's books and didn't see red.

For the first time since coming to power the Tory led Government's declared a surplus for the financial year ending June even if, when talking to a graph, The Drawler assured us you could see the surplus providing you looked carefully enough and held your glasses a bit further out from your face.

At just $414 million it's small change but at least it's finally falling on the right side of the ledger.

English didn't break the record created by the the man who was ruling the sty when he signed up to become a Tory and then later coming into Parliament as a fresh faced kid from Treasury. Rob Muldoon made an art form of the seven deficits he presided over, always declaring they were going to be much larger than they ended up being and then setting out to convince the great unwashed, that the lower figure proved he was a better economic manager than the bean counters had been picking.

And anyway, The Grunter reckoned the punter wouldn't know a deficit if he fell over one in the street. It seems we've all become a little more economically literate these days and achieving a surplus makes big news.

Certainly the current crop are sucking up the surplus, staking their economic reputation on achieving one this year, even if they did have long faces earlier this year saying it was unlikely. That wasn't helped by the Treasury forecasters though who were a billion bucks out on their predictions of the books remaining in the red.

So they got there by being tight fisted with the bureaucrats and raking in more money in tax. All this though on the back of a debt mountain which has grown from ten billion to more than $60 billion bucks since they came to power.

English was like the cat who'd got the cream as he strode into a media lockup to deliver the good news, and was even more joyful when he was reminded of Labour's Angry Andy Little's state of the nation speech earlier this year where he described the likelihood of National turning the ink, from red to black, as one of the biggest political deceptions of our lifetime.

The Finance Minister chortled that Little's view was one of the biggest clangers of his short political leadership. More like a case of eagerly counting his chickens before they were hatched - they never stood a chance!