Bob Edlin: Budget benefits builders of statues of Maori leaders

It’s not enough to monitor the flow of Jacinda’s Treaty Treats by visiting the Beehive website in the belief it will have registered them in the name of transparency.

Some Ministerial statements are posted on sites such as Scoop before they are posted on Beehive.govt.nz – The official website of the New Zealand Government.

A post on Scoop this morning tells readers that Budget 2021…

• Appropriated $1 million  to build statues of Maori leaders;
• Is investing $20 million over two years in Māori boarding schools; and
• These are part of a Budget package of more than $1 billion for Māori.

Fair to say, the ministerial statement at Scoop (posted in the name of the NZ Government yesterday) expands on spending initiatives to benefit Maori that were declared on Budget Day in a document headed WELLBEING BUDGET 2021: SECURING OUR RECOVERY

NZCPR Weekly: The Dependency Budget

Dear NZCPR Reader,   

In this week’s NZCPR newsletter we examine Budget 2021 and raise concerns about the underlying incentives to increase dependency – as well as providing a brief insight into the Government’s $55 million taxpayer-funded public interest journalism fund, our NZCPR Guest Commentator Professor Robert MacCulloch explains why the Budget’s failure to address the extraordinary rise of the regulatory state is so significant, and our poll asks whether you would give Budget 2021 the thumbs up or thumbs down.

*To read the newsletter click HERE.
*To register for the NZCPR Weekly mailing list, click HERE.  

Heather du Plessis-Allan: Budget gets a 'B' for Boring

 

You know what’s missing in this budget?

Ambition.

The difference between this budget and the Aussie budget from last week couldn’t be starker.

Here, we’re getting a big boost for benefits, a huge amount of money for Māori initiatives ($243 for the Māori Health Authority, $380m for Māori housing and $42m for Māori media), the health and education spending that you would expect, and a $200m funding boost for Pharmac that is welcome, but isn’t even half what Pharmac needs to pay for all the medicines it wants to buy.

Obviously missing, anything for middle NZ workers, anything for businesses and any plan for how we grow the economy now that the government is shutting down the ability to hire migrant workers.