The government has to date spent NZ$1.1 billion responding to the two earthquakes that hit Canterbury on September 4 and February 22, Prime Minister John Key says.
"Around NZ$800 million of this has been for residential claims paid out by EQC, around NZ$175 million has been spent on wage subsidy and job loss cover packages so far," Key told journalists at his regular post-cabinet press conferrence this afternoon.
"There are a number of other spending areas I won’t detail here today, but obviously there’s a lot more spending to come," Key said.
Meanwhile EQC now had 282,000 claims on their books from both quakes, Key said. EQC covers the first NZ$100,000 plus GST worth of damage for private dwellings.
Meanwhile, Key said the latest figures he had seen showed the expected fall in the government’s tax take from previous forecasts was just under NZ$5 billion over five years due to the quakes.
“I think originally the estimates were NZ$3-NZ$5 billion, I don’t off the top of my head have the numbers to hand, but NZ$5 billion’s definitely on the high side," Key said.
(Updates with comment on tax take, video of Key.)
5 Comments
Wow .... I am surprised at this number over and above aour current deficit spend , I am somewhat concerned that the effects of the earthquake are going to have a dramatic effect on our little economy in the next few years .
Kiwis should face the fact that we are going to enjoy a lower standard of lving.
There must be a return to the ethics of doing a hard days work, paying our taxes, saving carefully for our old age or a rainy day (of which we have many )
The days of sitting around coffee shops, using our houses as ATM's and thinking we are wealthy on borrowed money from rising asset values are gone .
If I were John Key, I'd be bring out absolutely ever cockroach in the woodpile, right about now. Things look grim; so put the whole nasty picture in front of New Zealand, and outline what hard steps we have to take. No point deferring anyhthng until later. I mean, Who wants to take a punch bowl away, twice !
Most of that is from EQC.
Why have EQC bothered getting everyone to make another claim? Their computer systems haven't even linked the two claims together and the claim numbers all start at 1, so there are two totally different claims for each number just with the prefix varying - this is going to great - just because they didn't have enough confusion already.
Now on the 2 claim issue, I have a number of houses over cap from Sept 4. The private insurer reckons that EQC will pay 2 lots of $115k, EQC say no way. Please someone inform the private insurance assessors what is going on so this can be sorted.
It's just more disarray by utterly useless Government departments miscommunicating what is going on.
I'm in a similar situation, but where my claims are just over the 10K cap. I could have 2 properties fixed within the week, but are now forced to wait an uncertain 12 months for someone to ring me. I'd be even happy to take a reduced payment to get the ball rolling and save EQC a bit of money, but that's impossible to do.
EQC is in big trouble, and most of it is their own doing!
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