Best of Business
Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: I would argue Budget 2026 wasn't tight enough
Descripción
Well, you would have done well to heed Nicola Willis’s warnings ahead of this Budget that there would be no spend-up, because there is no spend-up. There is no money for - well, there is money for the important stuff. You’ve got the schools and the classrooms, and the hospitals, and the Waikato Expressway, and Winston Peters’ pet projects. But everywhere else, there is just no new money. It is tight. Now, that is exactly how it should be. And in fact, I would say this still doesn’t go far enough. For the third Nicola Willis Budget in a row, it isn’t tight enough because we haven’t even hit our debt peak yet. We are still going up that peak mountain. That is still two years away, which means that interest payments are already at $9 billion and they’re only going to go up. It’s going to take us to about 2040, roughly, before debt is back to where Bill English left it as a proportion of GDP. And that is just the most optimistic scenario. The rest of the scenario is basically never getting back down to where Bill English left it. Nicola Willis is making a virtue today of the fact that she’s getting the books back in black by 2028/29, which she says is earlier than expected. But that is a little bit of game-playing that’s going on, because it was always going to be 2028/29 until December. Then in December it changed, then it became 2029/30. Now it’s just been brought back again to where it was about six months ago. And that is only, by the way, because Nicola Willis is using a made-up measure, OBEGALX, which makes surplus appear a year earlier than the standard old measure, which basically would have had surplus arriving only in 2030 or thereabouts. And by the way, all of this is a broken promise, because Nicola Willis promised the country that if you voted for National at the last election, she would have the books back in the black. When? Today. This year. But after three Budgets, I think we’ve learned to temper our expectations on that front. Now, on the bright side though, she has decided to borrow $6 billion less than she had planned to. I will take that. And while there is a lot of poor spending that continues, at least there isn’t new, more poor spending. And for that, I suppose you have to give the Budget a solid holding-pattern score of 6 out of 10. LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.
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