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Image: Jose Barbosa
Image: Jose Barbosa

The BulletinMay 12, 2023

Policy purge propels Robertson to $4b saving

Contributing writer
Image: Jose Barbosa
Image: Jose Barbosa

The finance minister is touting the bump in funding for next week’s budget, but critics say it’s a drop in the bucket, writes Catherine McGregor in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s morning news round-up. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here.

$4b more to play with

With a week until budget day, finance minister Grant Robertson has kicked off the customary series of pre-budget speeches by announcing just how much the government’s cavalcade of cost-cutting has saved the public purse. The 2023 budget will include “$4 billion of savings and reprioritisations over the four-year forecast period”, including those garnered from prime minister Chris Hipkins’ recent policy purge, Robertson said in a speech yesterday. Talking to reporters afterwards, Robertson said a significant portion of the savings came from cutting budgets for staffing vacancies within the public service. Exactly how the $4b in savings – about $1b a year over the next four years – will be added to the budget will be revealed on budget day itself, Robertson said. A proportion may support the cyclone recovery, and Robertson is due to make a new announcement on next steps regarding the recovery project on Sunday. He’ll also give a speech today in Auckland “that will give more pre-budget guidance on infrastructure investment”, Businessdesk’s Pattrick Smellie reports (paywalled).

Just how much is $4 billion?

Immediately following the announcement, a debate erupted over whether $4b is a big number or, in the grand scheme of things, a very small one. Speaking to Toby Manhire on The Spinoff this morning, Craig Renney comes down on the side of “big”. “A billion dollars a year of new money [is] quite a lot of cash,” says the economist, who worked on Robertson’s first three budgets. “The most we could ever achieve [when I was there] was, I think, one year when we saved $1.7 billion over four years.” Writing in the NZ Herald, Jenée Tibshraeny argues the opposite. Saving $4b isn’t much given the size of the government’s books, she says, especially when you consider that many billions of the “whopper $81b allocated towards the Covid-19 response” were never spent. National’s finance spokesperson Nicola Willis also thinks it’s a piddling amount, all told. Having “sprayed the public money hose around with wild abandon” in last month’s budget, Robertson “now expects New Zealanders to be grateful that he’s cleaning up a small corner of the spending mess…. It’s simply too little, too late,” she said.

Seymour blasts ‘humblebrag’ tax letter

Following his speech, Robertson was asked about the open letter from 96 high-income New Zealanders calling for higher tax rates on the wealthy. While he wouldn’t be drawn on its content, Robertson did reaffirm that the government was not contemplating tax cuts now. The letter was criticised by Newstalk ZB’s Heather du Plessis-Allan, who notes that most of the signatories are not the “high net worth” individuals that were the subjects of the IRD’s recent survey. “So let me ask you this,” says du Plessis-Allan, “if extreme wealth is not the thing these signatories have in common, what is it really? Political leanings, maybe?” Another opponent is Act’s David Seymour, who says the group’s call for higher taxes is “anti-aspiration” and a “humblebrag” about how much they earn. The Greens’ Ricardo Menéndez March says a tax on the wealthy would make New Zealand more fair. “It’s beyond doubt that the money we need to support everyone in Aotearoa is already there.”

Beneficiaries and small businesses among Aussie budget winners

Across the Tasman, the Australian federal government has just announced its own 2023 budget and The Guardian has a good rundown of the budget’s winners and losers. Among those celebrating are low-income renters, small businesses, most beneficiaries, and politicians (they’re getting a big budget boost for frontline staffing and travel expenses), while the losers include middle-income renters and “rail lovers” – the latter because, despite an election pledge to prioritse a long-promised high-speed rail track along the east coast, the budget contained no new funding for the initial Sydney-Newcastle section, “nor for any other significant commuter rail projects around Australia”.

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Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi and National Party leader Christopher Luxon (Photos: Supplied)
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi and National Party leader Christopher Luxon (Photos: Supplied)

The BulletinMay 11, 2023

Luxon rules out te Pāti Māori – and kicks off a new controversy

Contributing writer
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi and National Party leader Christopher Luxon (Photos: Supplied)
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi and National Party leader Christopher Luxon (Photos: Supplied)

His comments about the party have been accused of ‘dog-whistling racism’, writes Catherine McGregor in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s morning news round-up. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here.

A run on ‘ruling out’

All we need is one more politician to rule out te Pāti Māori and we can call it a trend. First it was Elizabeth Kerekere who ruled out joining the Māori Party following her exit from the Greens. Then just an hour or so later, National leader Christopher Luxon took to the podium to announce he, too, was officially ruling out working with the party. To anyone who had been paying attention, the announcement came as no surprise, so why make a big production of it? On the NZ Herald (paywalled), Claire Trevett says Luxon’s move was “naked politics”, marking the day he may have finally become “an actual politician, rather than a businessman trying out a politician’s suit”. The point was to damage Labour, Trevett says, by grabbing the opportunity to highlight the various divisions within the government and its allies – the so-called “coalition of chaos” which, as Toby Manhire notes on The Spinoff this morning, has quickly become National’s attack line du jour.

Accusations of dog-whistle politics abound

As for the reasons National couldn’t work with te Pāti Māori, Luxon said the current iteration of the party is too extreme. “For example, National believes New Zealand is one country with one standard of citizenship, meaning one person, one vote,” he said. That and another comment about “separatism” had some “hearing troubling echoes of Don Brash’s infamous Orewa speech in 2005”, writes Manhire. Among those who accused Luxon of “dog-whistling” yesterday were Labour deputy leader Carmel Sepuloni, te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi, and Greens co-leader Marama Davidson, who pulled no punches when talking to 1News: “If he wants to talk about chaos, using some lazy dog-whistling racism is pretty chaotic and it’s a sign they’ve got no actual substance and just want to kick up that racism,” she said. Waititi also mentioned the ratepayer roll, which allows people paying rates to a different council than where they live – for example, landlords – to vote in multiple local body elections. Asked whether his “one person, one vote” stance meant he’d be open to scrapping the roll, Luxon said “possibly, yes” – an “about-face from National’s previous position”, notes Newsroom’s Marc Daalder.

Co-leaders make waves in the House

Te Pāti Māori were back making headlines later in the day, when a bill banning all seabed mining, sponsored by co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, was heavily defeated in Parliament. Before the vote, Ngarewa-Packer made an angry speech to the House. “It has been insulting to our people that we’ve had to watch these amateurs sit here and talk about things they have no understanding of,” she said, referring to Labour MPs who had voted against the bill. The session also saw Greens co-leader Marama Davidson turfed out of the House for repeatedly interjecting as Act MP Nicole McKee spoke. “After apologising, and again interjecting, Speaker Adrian Rurawhe ordered her out of the House,” Stuff’s Thomas Manch reports.

Lib Dems: in or out?

In the UK, potential coalition partners are also a hot topic – even though the next general election is almost certainly well over a year away. Labour leader Keir Starmer, riding high after gaining over 600 council seats in local body elections, has refused to rule out a deal with the Liberal Democrats if Labour fails to win a majority, but said Labour would not form a pact with the pro-independence Scottish National Party, “because of their politics of separation”. The official Lib Dem position on a possible post-election coalition also remains ambiguous, the Guardian reports, “although much can be read into the fact that their leader, Ed Davey, has definitively ruled out a deal with the Conservatives but not Labour”.