Finance Minister Nicola Willis will fail to balance the Crown accounts in the next five years due to a weaker economy and annual deficits from the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC).
Treasury’s Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update showed the annual deficit would be extended for another two years relative to Budget 2024, and there would not be a surplus in the forecast period.
New Zealand’s recession had been longer than expected and, while growth will resume next year, the economic potential of the country has been revised lower.
Treasury expects relatively rapid growth of 3.3% in 2025 as interest rates fall, but long-term growth rates of just 2.4% due to poor productivity. This is similar to the Reserve Bank’s assessment.
Weakness in the economy generally means deeper deficit as the Government spends more on social support and collects less tax revenue as unemployment rises. Treasury now expects the annual deficit to be $17.3 billion next year, and only reduce to $2.4 billion by 2029.
Those deficit numbers are equal to 3% and 0.4% of gross domestic product (GDP). Net core Crown debt will peak at 46.5% of the economy in 2027 and only reduce marginally in the forecast period.
With no surplus in sight, Willis has opted to create a new fiscal indicator called OBEGALx. This measure will exclude ACC which is supposed to be a self-funding entity in the long-run.
OBEGAL has been the standard measure of the Government’s annual spending since 2008. It already excludes valuation changes which can impact the overall operating balance. Treasury advised against excluding ACC and will continue to report the old measure in all of its documents.
Willis’ new measure will show a surplus of $1.8 billion in 2029, having essentially balanced the budget in 2028 with just a $300 million deficit. These numbers are 0.4% and -0.1% of GDP, respectively.
Despite not recommending the new measure, Treasury Secretary Ian Rennie said it may prevent governments from cutting spending more than needed to achieve long-term fiscal sustainability.
Willis said there would be no changes to the fiscal plan and operating allowances she outlined in her first budget in response to the worsening outlook.
ACC Minister Matt Doocey last week announced an independent review of ACC, citing concerns about declining rehabilitation rates and increasing costs.
203 Comments
What's that? Move our country to the logistical centre of the world, ensure we're a major thoroughfare for burgeoning east-west trade and oil trans-shipment, build enough state housing for 80% of the population and then raise revenue by fining everything from chewing gum to missing the urinal?
Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of Singapore, but do realise that they're surrounded by countries that could've been them. What Singapore had was a chokepoint on Malacca Strait shipping, a sizeable Chinese-speaking population keen to be part of trade, and a UK legal system that made fostering western connections possible.
I agree, let's align car taxes with Singapore, the most expensive place in the world to own a car.
With taxes a toyota camry hybrid is approximately $320,000 new zealland dollars. No, I did not get the number of zeros wrong.
$320,000 NZ.
Bring it on.
EDIT: this is a response to Donny.
Immigrant workers cannot access a path to citizenship and are sent packing if they have no job even if they have worked in the country for many years. You don't think Sg got to where it was by being a soft touch, did you? Mind you, you might approve of their extremely hostile attitude towards anyone who dares to express dissent against government policy.
“Immigrant workers cannot access a path to citizenship and are sent packing if they have no job even if they have worked in the country for many years.”
I know a whole heaps of immigrant workers who came here from Central East Coast Africa 24 months ago to work in our hospitals as health care assistants. Their contracts expired 6 months ago and they are still here
our immigration system is just not that into it
Interestingly back in the day New Zealand was on a logistical trade route for the British empire - the SW trade winds. Sail down from Europe, around the Cape of Good Hope to South Africa then either up to India or on to Australia to pick up some grain. Then, following the trade winds toward Cape Horn back to Europe, on the way why not stop in to New Zealand. Technology changed, there was a couple of world wars then the torch got handed to the US. Globalization which is now seeming falling apart....not sure where that leaves 3 small islands at the bottom of the world?
Taxing sources of income that are currently un-taxed, while handing it back as tax cuts to those who actually work for a living will NOT make the problem worse.
It will - in fact - in a single stroke - remove many of the problems.
Which would be good ... Because it seems our politicians can't be trusted in dealing with most problems.
Many of the people that 'take financial risk in business', and build successful businesses, start with nothing. And many more fail, but keep on trying until they do succeed.
The others get it handed to them - starting with silver spoons at an early age - before getting helped up further by the family bank.
Neither of these two groups will be affected in any significant regard by the change I proposed. (And as has been proven by other countries with far wider tax nets than ours.)
So - thinktank - the facts are heavily against you - so you Fixed Nothing For Us (FNFU).
Are the higher earners any more productive than the lowest paid? I'd say not. Take the lower paid away, the frontline and support staff, and what's left to manage, to be the CEO of?
Many of those taking so called financial risk are risking other people's money and livelihoods. The real risk is whether they can create demand for their product or service, and sustain the profit or market values. But it would appear we'd rather risk it all on boosting asset prices and generating returns that come from anything but productive work. We'd rather retain it all for ourselves rather than give anything back.
Many employees take the risk their job is going to be there tomorrow. That it's not going to disappear because someone over leveraged, sold out to money chasers, or frittered it away on the opulent lifesptyle.
None of it can be achieved in a vacuum, in isolation.
"Making large changes always results in unexpected changes in behaviour usually for the worst..."
Statistically untrue. What 'large changes' do do is compress the pain for some into shorter periods - while delivering benefits to others far, far faster.
And to be blunt - these necessary changes have been telegraphed for ages. It's not a case of "if" - but "when".
"HIGH HOUSE PRICES DESTROY ECONOMIES"
The bigger the party, the bigger the hangover.
Time periods for real estate market prices (nominal) that are yet to recover to peak price levels in some residential real estate markets:
1) Japan: 33 years and still counting (peaked in 1991)
2) Russia: 18 years and still counting (peaked in 2006)
3) Kazakhstan: 17 years and still counting (peaked in 2007)
4) Cyprus: 16 years and still counting (peaked in 2008)
5) Spain: 16 years and still counting (peaked in 2008)
6) Italy: 13 years and still counting (peaked in 2011)
7) Saudi Arabia: 10 years and still counting (peaked in 2014)
8) Qatar: 9 years and still counting (peaked in 2015)
9) Macau: 6 years and still counting (peaked in 2018)
10) Hong Kong: 5 years and still counting (peaked in 2019)
New taxes would just cripple abysmal GDP growth even further, except perhaps a land tax, but even that would have a net negative impact on GDP growth if it isn't net neutral, as it still reduces investment and consumption spending.
We ultimately need to scrap almost all land use planning, deal with nasty abatement rates baking in low expectations for low/middle income earners, reinvigorate the private sector and capital markets via better and clearer policy and regulation, and take a sledgehammer to the unregulated monopolies in this country. If you do all that, shortage based excess gains from housing speculation will disappear, while the construction industry simultaneously booms, and capital will seek higher returns in the productive sector. The yoke of high housing and food costs will be removed from the poor & middle class, boosting savings and consumption spending, growing the economy while simultaneously reducing social security payments.
Let's hope we don't need to wait till we're in as dire straits as Argentina for the people to be willing to vote for radical change...
Unintended consequences strikes. You remove land-use restrictions and all farmland anywhere near a city turns into city. The city starts growing so fast that to keep things sustainable [read: homeowners not losing equity] you import lots of migrants to live in the new suburbs. Feeding the city becomes harder because the farms are now further away and less numerous, so food becomes scarcer and more expensive. More of our farmland becomes dedicated to feeding our own cities and agri exports dwindle. We may even start needing to import food, like China.
This only grows the economy through construction and real estate, and related industries. It doesn't solve balance of trade or determining our purpose which is half the problem we have.
Alternatively, we turn into a nationwide pine plantation exporting carbon credits to the world and all the people move to Aussie.
Increasing existing taxes like GST would likely increase inflation and put interest rates back up. But the government seem to want a house price led recovery as they were desperate to get interest rates dropped. NZs interest rates are now lower that Australia which I suspect does not help the NZD. Good for exporters but not good for imported inflation.
Honestly I wonder if a restructure in our taxation system would even be enough to sort out our economy.
No doubt a CGT or LVT and lower income taxes would help. However how to you lift incomes? How do you pay the pensions and super for the ever increasing number of old people? How do you stop people from going to Australia?
CGT won't work, LVT will. Because it makes more efficient use of land over time and therefore more efficient use of infrastructure, which is the biggest deficit we have. This would have very important changes to our housing and land use policies AND encourage investment by rotating money away from speculative investments and housing.
House prices are set to go up by 7% next year, that's something like $100b. Imagine if we were able to redirect just half of that into growing the economy, long term through R&D, infrastructure building, grants to new businesses, grants for new technology etc etc. Keep doing that year after year and the economy will take care of itself. This will help pay for the ever increasing number of old people and their health care requirments.
Add means testing for super, flexible retirement age after 65 and increasing that age to 67 over 10 years or so and most of that problem is solved.
Growing the economy doesn't address the deficiencies of where the growth goes. Does it go into more asset inflation, which is just speculation, or does it go to the people who need it, to spend on existing goods and services, to pay taxes?
Creating more products doesn't address the issue that we're not using or maintaining what we already have responsibly.
CGT is too late. We should never have allowed house prices or land values to inflate. Will LVT bring down other taxes? Would it not just create additional cashflow problems for those having to pay it? The tax issue and infrastructure deficits is because we haven't been willing to address the current deficiencies.
Our current technology isn't channelled into the right places. It's already placing increasing demands on a range of resources.
Believing that more of everything will address our deficiencies is our blind spot.
You prevent rentier behaviour to begin with. Once it becomes embedded it's more difficult to remove.
When it becomes the game that everyone's playing, the players will rage vehemently against your tax.
Has any government got the teeth to tax this or know what is a truly productive asset? Do they/we truly know what we're trying to produce?
Government spending is ideally for positive social outcomes. Government is the social servant. They can't manage the economy. The RBNZ shouldn't have the responsibility to manage the economy either.
Let the economy do its thing. We should be looking closer at how we respond to the outcomes. How do we direct and regulate the flow of money to something more than GDP numbers, bigger numbers on a screen. Let The Market be free to chase capital and profit, but ya gotta encourage it in a better direction, towards more beneficial results for society. Let The Market adapt like it's meant to.
The state/government and its institutions are meant to be us, to represent the people and negate iniquities. Ya wanna be one people, ya gotta come up with a better vision and picture than what exists now. We've created all this wealth for what? What has it really achieved us?
The government's tapped out and broke. Borrowing debt and spending on the whole in the economy is pretty tapped out, so the people must be broke. When The Market is given all the power - the property market, the debt market, the asset market, the stock market - all too big to fail. And we'll keep putting all we've got into it.
Insanity.
Nah. It happened very very slowly and started nearly a generation ago when we focused our economy on immigration and residential housing.
The global economy shifted and now the foolishness of our strategy simply became visible.
Like the proverbial cruise ship.. it's gonna take a while - possibly another generation or two - to turn it around.
Engineering an economy for growth in the next decades means buuldinh productive businesses, training and retaining people with specific skill sets, inyegratingsupply chains, aligning tax rules
... and changing habits.
I am anticipating a lost decade for many.. and the exodus of our smart ypung talent to accelerate for 5 years at least as we approach the bottom.
ACC is effectively a legal system with services attached, after all they are governed by the ACC Act 2001. As with the legal system, when case law sets a precedent it opens the flood gates for exponential costs and changes the interpretation of certain situations.
Although in the last I have mostly been against privatisation, I can say there is a case to be made for privatisation in some situations.
Having experienced the diffidence in service and expertise between ACC and private insurance in this field, I can tell you it’s night and day and ACC needs to be locked at.
Why does it need to take years to assess someone for weekly compensation when the private insurance companies can do the same thing in a few weeks.
private insurance is also far better at being proactive to help clients into rehabilitation, where as ACC tend forget about you and expert you to figure out how to rehabilitate yourself. Also because it’s a government agency ACC tends to get caught up in the modern woke nonsense eg. ACC will find Māori a spiritual massage but not any other massage etc.
So it should be looked at, not to privatise for the sake of it, but if it means that we Kiwis get much better service that it should be considered.
I don't think they will go too low. They don't seem to care about the economic damage they are causing and they are more concerned about inflation heading back up overseas, blowing us back over 3% CPI. If that is the case and the OCR stays above 3% with mortgage rates 4.5%+ then I can't see house prices rising 7% like the RBNZ are predicting. Maaaybe if they loosen the LVRs and DTIs, but that would be pretty reckless
I don't think they will go too low.
You really trust the RBNZ after their performance record over the last 4-5 years??? The trend says otherwise. Wild swings in OCR due to failing to read the room economically when the majority of us here could, then playing catch up with large hikes to try and kerb the inflation they fuelled with FLP, LSAP and removal of LVR's, thereby punishing all NZ'ers with a mortgage (many businesses also) for their own incompetence. They then give their lord saviour Orr double his pay for another 5 year term as a slap in the face to the public (it is obscene to pay $800k+ for the head of the RBNZ when presidents around the world do not get paid this for running far larger countries). I wouldn't hold my breath.
National Party finance spokesperson Nicola Willis criticizes Labour for pushing interest rates up during the 2023 election campaign.
- November 2023 - The Monetary Policy Committee agreed to maintain the Official Cash Rate (OCR) at 5.5%.
- August 2023 - The Monetary Policy Committee agreed to maintain the Official Cash Rate (OCR) at 5.5%
- May 2023 - The Monetary Policy Committee today voted to raise the Official Cash Rate (OCR) from 5.25% to 5.5%.
Made me laugh too.
This is what happens when we have a Minister of Finance that has absolutely no idea about what she's doing or saying.
Still - if the comments we see here are anything to go by - many fools will believe the government sets interest rates.
When Luxey visited Orr shortly after he was elected - November 2023 - he should have put the hard word on Orr that interests rates were too high and the results would be inevitable. He didn't. (By all accounts he left the meeting with his tail between his legs. )
They can't 'bypass their independence'. They can however exert pressure.
Further, they can use their raft of non-RBNZ economists at Treasury, other departments, and independents, to present views counter to the groupthink we see from the RBNZ (which have 4 of the 9 seats on the MPC).
"...many fools will believe the Govt sets interest rates..."
As you know, the RBNZ has statutory independence
https://teara.govt.nz/en/reserve-bank/page-3
The RBNZ has a number of stakeholders: Minister of Finance, Treasury, financial institutions (banks, non-bank deposit takers, insurers), regulatory bodies such as Council of Financial Regulators, industry groups and associations, academics and economists, IMF and BIS, and the hoi polloi.
To suggest they're "independent" is little more than window dressing.
Chalk one up for the conspiracy theorists and Team misinformation.
I'd disagree that's misinformation, or a conspiracy theory. That's how it should work. I.e. they should be listening, and getting out, and taking advice on how their clearly out of date models need to be upgraded, much more than they currently do.
But as they have the final word, that makes them independent. Rightly or wrongly.
I assume that the Coalition have continued to include the NZ Super Fund as an asset, following the change made by Labour/Grant Robertson in 2022.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/128607232/how-far-has-grant-robertson-…
As with excluding ACC, everyones looking for change down the back of the couch now...
I'm not surprised ACC is broke. I've personally heard of people getting $2M payouts, and people being paid $170k a year to be carers. Its about time a good long hard look is taken at whom is getting what out of that organisation.
Very similar to the Australian NDIS rort where people were being given $11k each to go on a weekend holiday. And paying for sex workers. The Aussies clamped down on it, time for NZ to do the same.
Add in that minimum wage currently sits around 49-50k gross. Time to stop the silly minimum wage increases annually and reinvigorate a culture of investing training into your staff for retention and also rewarding individual contribution. In govt for the last several years there have been hopeless blanket pay increases to try and retain staff which, while somewhat helpful, simply raises the base salary new hires get and devalues experienced staff.
Do we not need to value people at a minimum though? Time to stop all inflation adjustments to wages and only value the extra contribution then?
Isn't minimum wage a response to negative market outcomes? We keep failing to address the causes.
The idea that it devalues someone else could be the faulty perspective. We can't celebrate someone for getting into work and instead think we're missing out? Minimum wage must be the starting point for bringing staff in. Ensuring your staff are able to provide life's basic necessities for themselves, might mean they can perform better at their jobs. Balancing out doing it just for the paycheck and wanting to contribute more to the work environment, wanting to develop themselves. So the workplace needs to be more encouraging.
We keep failing to adjust our values. Valuing roles and positions and KPI's, metrics, data, more than we do people. The higher up the chain you go the more the value is being taken from those that produced it. The frontline, customer facing, support staff ultimately produce more.
The results of the cleaners, the rubbish collectors, the dirty and physical hard work, and many others we choose to ignore provide more benefit that we don't value.
In a relatively short timeframe we've overvalued money and capital above people. How do we get our culture to move away from investing in money to investing in people? How do we move to valuing people as assets - rather than expendable resources - over material assets? How do we move the culture to truly invest in healthier outcomes?
We need to bring some balance back and I don't think we're capable of facing it.
I know someone who fought (together with others) for a claim of drug harm where a newish drug had unknown side effects on pregnancy and caused severe mental damage to the kids once born. It cost them [collectively] half a million in legal fees fighting ACC, and what they got back was funding for 20 hours a week for a carer, and a teacher aide in school. I'm not sure whether the litigious approach ACC likes to take to to avoid liability is very "kiwi" but you can see if they go that route they're going to have to pay legal fees etc every time they lose.
We should have the right to sue the medical profession in New Zealand.
To much of our health system acts like they are God and quite frankly have the power to ruin your life with little ability to fight them.
ACC just acts like a gatekeeper and decides for you only if it’s something they actually cover.
if not, sucks to be a victim of what is repaidly becoming a third world system. Mind you it’s just following the trajectory of the country as a whole.
As a tourist, you pay for ACC in the tourism levy and baked into the pricing of the operators, who are passing funds on to ACC. It's irrelevant whether you're a taxpayer because ACC isn't taxpayer funded. They are essentially a private insurer that you can't avoid.
If you get injured while on holiday in the USA, you just sue the operator. Last time I was there an injury lawyer was giving out his business card at the ski resort!
Travel insurance is a poor option for injuries. At best they'll fly you home bleeding all the way where ACC won't pay for your injury because it didn't happen here. In my experience they actually make you pay whatever it is then they consider refunding you 3 months later.
I've had friends fly home form overseas and get immediate treatment at the hospital then ongoing ACC support. I believe they were told you have to be a tax resident at the time of injury an on return or something similar which makes sense, but as they hadn't been working for a while having been overseas travelling for a couple of months, no ACC compensation.
Depends on insurer and policy. I had travel insurance pay for hospital stay and surgery while in Europe 2 years ago. Hospital delayed surgery 24 hrs while they waited for payment confirmation from insurer, which wasn’t ideal, but I ended up paying nothing. Some policies are good, others are not, understand what you’re buying before paying for it
Over looking what it would result in. A litigation industry like the USA where the lawyers always win, the injured miss out and the business go broke from the insurance and litigation.
ACC avoids this is the most effective answer.
Watch them undermine it so the big boys and legal friends can insert themselves.
I used to do a fair bit of amateur boxing (before realising I was never going to be the next Muhammad Ali and being whacked in the head isn't great particularly if you aren't making big $$$ in doing so) and even now my life insurance and disability/injury policies won't cover if I have any form of boxing-related death or serious injury.
However, as far as I can tell, ACC will step up to the plate if I'm foolish enough to lace them up again, step into the ring and get clobbered - as I most certainly have lost a step or two over the years.
I love the sweet science but at the end of the day it is kind of crazy we have a system where you can opt to participate in fundamentally dangerous activities and expect somebody else to foot the bill if (when) it all goes wrong.
Welcome to socialism!
You could say the same about the health system funding cancer treatment for people who eat BBQ food or chocolate cake. Ultimately the state could save a lot of money if they coerced everyone into eating their 5 veggies a day and attending mandatory 8am aerobics in well-padded public squares.
There comes a point where the state is there to enable people to live, not just to ensure they get to their grave safely.
All those dangerous activities like driving cars to jobs, social activities and holidays? The dangerous activities like walking around your house and doing day to day stuff? We should give up all forms of physical activity and sports?
Don't the bulk of injuries happen at home?
To think that only yesterday they were just banging on about council rates and debt. This just shows it was all virtue signalling.
Turns out this Government is in no position to lecture other elected bodies on how to manage taxes and spending.
They are an absolute joke. Here for the comms and the job titles and not willing to make any hard decisions. Now just trying to cover their butts so in 2027 (if they are still in government) they can get their 9 social media comms staff to crank out content on how they have made surplus as they promised... even if it is all lies.
Can anyone actually trust what 'surplus' even means is any more? Will the credit rating agencies see through the BS?
Labour's Michael Cullen? (PhD in social and economic history from the University of Edinburgh.)
Bill English had some chops too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minister_of_Finance_(New_Zealand)
Pretty sorry looking list I'm afraid to say ... (Can't think why NZ Inc is a constant mess. Can you?)
A Finance Minister who graduated with a English Lit Degree and a Post Grad in Journalism. While someone with some mildly relevant finance experience, Simeon Brown (Bachelor of Commerce, ex-Senior Associate at BNZ), would rather be Transport Minister.
Politics seems to be a tax-payer funded apprenticeship scheme where people "cut their teeth" into areas they want to further their careers. Nicola will likely leave politics to pursue a role on some bank board, and Simeon may end up on the board at some Civil/Roading company (Fulton Hogan??).
So the new government should have ...
1) put huge pressure on the RBNZ to start lowering far, far earlier (basically, on the day they were elected, November 2023)
2) not embarked on their austerity program with such vigour
3) not dumped so many of Labour's in-progress works (e.g. 2 x ferries & 2 x port works)
4) not given the tax cuts to either earners, or non-earners (i.e. landlords), as early as they did (or at all for non-earners)
5) ... and I could go on and on.
Another 3 years lost. In fact, another 3 years of going backwards!
Why does NZ have such poor government? Methinks we must have really pissed off the Flying Spaghetti Monster at some stage.
We need to do a Milei in Argentina and about to be Trump/Musk/Ramaswamy in the US.
- Completely slash all bullshit government expenditure
- Eliminate all the virtue signalling crap
- Eliminate 90% of the tax code.
- Have a referendum on the Treaty and stick to whatever the results are. NZ isn't just Maori and UK descendants anymore. We've got ever increasing Indian and Asian immigrants and we need to cater for all.
- Come up with a plan to double electricity production which will crash prices and enable us to compete internationally and make converting to sparks the economically sound solution. Do this and the transition off fossil fuels for transport will happen quickly and our balance of payments will be significantly better for it.
- Stop effing around with ferries, which we crash. Ask Elon to dig multiple tunnels between the Islands and supply us with a heap of his semi-trucks from his soon to be opened semi factory.
Eh? Milei and Elon are small government people. Small government (and slashing bullshit spending) is incompatible with "asking [x] to build [y]", "coming up with a plan to do [z]". Those things are up to the market to provide and fund in this utopia, once the ferries have sunk. Transitioning off fossil fuels surely also falls under your "virtue signalling" point.
And, just like Seymour, you sneak in some irrelevant constitutional rethink that has no bearing on economic performance. Do you hear Elon saying the US constitution needs should be binned because it didn't foresee how great Trump is and he should be allowed to be emperor?
"For nearly 40 years, Argentina’s poverty level had consistently hovered above 25 percent. But since the far-right Milei took office on December 10, 2023, that figure has skyrocketed.
Over the last year, the poverty rate reached nearly 53 percent."
Yeah nah no thanks
How do you double electricity production if the companies who will need to invest in electricity infrastructure know that if they invest too much they'll lose the return on their investment? It makes no sense. Crashing the price of power is giving the wrong incentives.
How do you double electricity production if the companies who will need to invest in electricity infrastructure know that if they invest too much they'll lose the return on their investment? It makes no sense. Crashing the price of power is giving the wrong incentives.
Splitting the current 'gentailers' into separate generators and retailors will solve this dilemma. Geez - even the OECD has figured this out and has been quite blunt in their recommendation that it should be done. Meanwhile - our government? crickets. Most probably because the government owns 1/2 of many of the gentailers and wants to protect their profits.
The coalition govt. were already about slashing regulation and spending, and giving more power to The Market. It would appear this is what the conservative, "right-wing" governments, including the US are doing.
Is it just the same historical ideological playbook? The same lassez faire ideology that regulates the people and not the market?
The govt should resign now. They have set the policy direction since being elected and are trashing NZ.
Real gdp per capita continues to fall and record numbers of kiwis are leaving.
a) borrowing for tax cuts - absurd
b) a ferry procurement disaster- absurd
c) training NZ nurses and then not having jobs for them - absurd
d) giving landlords back their rentier profits - absurd
e) the prime minister of all people taking advantage of that tax change - absurd
Sure thing put Hipkins in charge of the country, or have you forgotten that he was a senior member of the Cabinet which lost the voters' trust so fast that they went from an MMP record majority in two years to him trying to salvage a sinking ship from an Ardern who fled overseas?
The stuff presented today is forward looking, projecting the mess that hasn't been created yet, right out to 2029. This is about where they plan to go next, and what Treasury thinks the impact of that will be.
Labour's impact on this is marginal. Yes initial debt servicing is higher than it could be, but that's still only about 3% of the budget. But out to 2029 this government claims to have plans to borrow much more than Labour did in their 6 years, so they're not really in a position to call Labour's debt problematic. The plan of this government (and most, really) was to grow their way out of the debt pile. Labour's compound GDP growth was about 20% over their term, but this government is looking at a reality of maybe 8% growth over 6 years, which is obviously a major problem. Honestly they'd be better off not being in government over this period, it's a no-win situation.
The big problems were caused by the RBNZ.
As if Ardern and Robertson didn't have a hotline to Orr. Given that the RBNZ was arranging massive deficit spending for Labour on a weekly basis to cover over incompetent and unnecessary Auckland lockdowns and secret Big Pharma contracts, etc.
Willis [in a tantrum]: "I can't seem to get the ball between the posts !!! Or over the bar !!!"
National Party Board of Directors [as to a petulant child]: "Poor Nicola. Don't worry, Nicola. We'll get Luxey to triple the distance between the posts and lower the bar to ground level. You'll be fine, dear."
As I have been saying for the past 6 months, tax receipts are about to look dire and worsening.
It's laughable that anybody thought austerity would work, but you all voted for it, so suck it up. It's embarrassing though that as a finance minister, you don't understand basic economics.
While its clearly a strong lobby group in National, it really looks like they should not have rolled in the property tax cuts. Mass immigration has no electoral mandate. Interest rate cuts to juice investment will just pump housing again without tax reform.
What to do indeed....
"It was so stupid to cut front line services/infrastructure projects to pay for tax cuts. "
Did the tax cuts, and tax benefits to non owner occupied property owners attract sufficient voters to vote in the last popularity contest to get the current government into office?
God they're going hard on privatising all healthcare aren't they? First laying off loads of staff from NZ Health, and there has been another proposal with a few 1000 people circulated to hospital workers last week.
Now they are talking about how ACC is a problem....
I have worked and lived in Ireland, UK, and USA for decent periods and can say without doubt that NZ's health system is by far the best of all those. For how much longer, who can say...
If we had a journalist investigate these politicians ties to private healthcare providers and insurance companies, would be interesting!
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