Heather du Plessis-Allan: A vast majority of us will get no help at all from Budget 2023

I'm sorry if you were, in the end, expecting something big in this Budget. 

I certainly was, given it is election year, but unfortunately there is absolutely nothing big here. A very small group of people will be happy with what they get, but the vast majority of us get absolutely no help at all with the cost of living crisis that we're all going through.

Let me run you through the details.

What you need to know is, the surprise we were expecting in the Budget is there, it is extending early childhood subsides to two-year-olds. As you well know, right now if you're a parent with little ones, it is only subsidized for three-year-olds and up.

Now, parents of two-year-olds can also get 20 hours free which is fantastic for them. It should save them $133 per week, it's going to really help them out. 

But we are talking about a very, very small number of families here who benefit from this. By my calculation, only about 37,000 of them or so. That is out of a population of more that 5 million people.

That is a tiny group of people who will benefit,

The free prescriptions- The Government's decided to wipe the $5 fee that you would have had to pay up to now. Again, sounds great. Not as great when you look closer.

Because if you can't afford the $5 fee or if you're smart, you already know by now that you don't have to pay a $5 fee. You just have to go along to Chemist Warehouse or the Countdown pharmacies and they don't charge a $5 fee.

So for a great number of people, this will make no difference whatsoever.

The there's the free public transport for kids under thirteen and the half-priced public transport for the young people under twenty-five. Why they've cut it off at twenty-five, I'm not entirely sure.

Again, sounds great. It will definitely make a difference for the people who rely regularly on the buses. But the trouble is, the buses in all three main centres and plenty of other places around the country aren't reliable at the moment.

So you're getting a discount to use a system that's so broken, you don't know if it actually works from day-to-day. Good luck with that.

It is going to take another year to get to surplus, they've pushed it out again. It was supposed to be next year, now they've pushed it out to 2025/2026. Even then, the surplus will be small, $600 million.

The debt is just growing and growing, it's expected to top $91 billion next year. And that is the generous measure that Grant Robertson like to use. The less generous measure, which he doesn't like very much, is hitting close to $180 billion in just a few years.

On the bright side, and there is a bright side to this, surprisingly- Treasury is now joining a growing number of forecasters who think we're not going into recession, which is great news.

And inflation is also supposed to fall away to 3.3 percent in the coming year.

So that's the overview, let's crack into it.

Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show.