Damien Grant: Why default is inevitable under our current fiscal trajectory

I’d ignored the Budget. I am good at ignoring things. Dental appointments. Column deadlines. Parking fines. Eventually they catch up with me. Like death, taxes and tooth decay.

It was the American polymath Benjamin Franklin who is credited with the quip that only death and taxes can be certain and a few wags have pondered that perhaps he meant debt and taxes. It’s a good joke but what Franklin actually wrote was “... excepté la mort et les impôts.”

That’s French. Franklin was writing in French. Dette and mort don’t rhyme. And given everyone his age had false teeth I think tooth decay should have been included. I am off-track.

JC: A Budget for the Times

I started to write about the budget a week after its reading in parliament but scrapped it, deciding it was too late. Then, in the Weekend Herald, an article appeared on the topic from Bruce Cotterill. A lot of what he said reflected the points I was making. Bruce described it as a boring budget, but boring in the right way. I agree with his reasons: this boring budget is reflective of the current economic climate.

Dr Michael Johnston: A good budget for education

Budget 2026 was not a typical election year budget. Instead of breaking out the pork barrel, Finance Minister Nicola Willis brought forward New Zealand’s projected return to surplus by a year, even if the projection rests on some bold assumptions.

Cast in that light, Vote Education did well. While the ‘fees-free’ year for tertiary students was cancelled and, like most government departments, education agencies will have to trim about 12% of their spending over four years, education as a whole came out ahead. In addition to reallocated savings, about $1 billion in new money will be spent on educational essentials over four years.

Kerre Woodham: As far as Budgets in tough times go, this was a pretty good one

As far as Budgets in economically precarious times go, I thought it was a pretty good one.

And save yourself the 20 cents, anonymous texter. I can see you typing from here. "Well, you would say that, Tokyo Rose, wouldn't you?" Well yes, come on, be fair though – what on Earth were they supposed to do? We were warned that there would be very little money to spend.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: A prescription that fits

This week’s Budget confirmed what most New Zealanders already suspected. The government’s finances are tight, the deficit persists, and there is no pot of money waiting to be spent on the country’s problems.

Just as well, because government spending never delivers growth or prosperity. The question is, what will?

Peter Dunne: Budget strategies

With her latest Budget Finance Minister Nicola Willis has joined some very unlikely company.

In 1972 then Finance Minister Rob Muldoon crowed that “I’ve spent it all for them”, meaning that there was no room for rash spending promises from Labour before that year’s election. In a somewhat more genteel fashion, former Finance Minister Grant Robertson deliberately set constrained forward spending allowances and booked $4 billion in savings and reprioritisation in the 2023 Budget. His intention was to leave the National Party with extremely limited fiscal room to fund its election promises without having to either cut public services or rely on highly optimistic economic revenue forecasts.