NZCPR Podcast: Labour is the Problem

Grant Robertson has delivered his 2023 annual budget. 

This year's budget was more about words, than figures. 

It was an election-year budget. 

The Labour Party speeches were about success, and sound economic management. That’s despite its failure in virtually every area of governance. 

Frank Newman: A Budget of Low Expectations

The Budget has sent us yet another reminder that New Zealand has become a miserably dependent and introverted society.

It’s a sad state of affairs when reducing prescription costs by $5 is heralded as a great initiative and roundly applauded as a policy of significance by those in charge of the taxpayers’ wallet.

Let’s face it, a government giving back a few dollars that the government has taken from someone, is not going to be a life-changing event. It’s not going to make people who are currently dependent on the state less dependent – and it’s certainly not going to make them more aspirational about the future. Nowhere in the budget was there any hint of transitioning people from welfare to work.

NZCPR Newsletter: Labour is the Problem

The release of government budgets used to be memorable affairs. Crowded around the radio or telly, it was excise tax changes on petrol, alcohol and cigarettes that exercised Kiwis the most. Some, car keys at the ready, would make a mad dash to try to beat any price rises, while others simply resigned themselves to lamenting yet more tax hikes!  

Nowadays budgets are more about the narrative and less about the numbers.

Getting the narrative right is something the Labour Party understands only too well – as former Labour Cabinet Minister Richard Prebble explains:

“It was in 1981. I was on the campaign committee. We did a party poll and found the electorate thought that Labour had no practical positive solutions. The Labour party’s policy machinery takes months and the election was only six months away. So what to do.

“I instructed every MP to include in every speech and radio and TV appearance the statement ‘Labour has practical positive solutions’.  There were prizes for MPs who managed to get the line onto the TV news. Heaven help an MP who gave a speech in parliament, no matter what the topic, who did not include the line. We changed not one policy.

Cam Slater: More Debt, More Corporate Welfare & Higher Taxes, Thanks Labour

Grant Robertson’s Hail Mary budget, ostensibly designed to save the election for Labour, has shown that he learnt all his book-keeping sitting on the knee of his fraudster father. What he has delivered is more debt, more corporate welfare, higher taxes, more subsidies for EV owners, billions of dollars on infrastructure in order to save the Hawkes Bay electorates and a good deal of hopium and heroic assumptions.

The Taxpayers’ Union has summarised the budget well: