Focus on those hit hardest

Budgets were once extremely personal, with motorists for example, making an evening dash to fill their cars before the midnight rise in fuel taxes. Working men – yes it was men back then – would be asked to opine on higher taxes on tobacco and alcohol, their few pleasures.

Budgets have since become more ‘‘big picture’’, and with Finance Minister Grant Robertson’s third, being unveiled as the country enters Covid19 alert level 2, there has never been greater anticipation.

However, with the economic impacts only beginning to unfold, this Budget should be judged not just on short-term financial support packages, but more than ever on investing in those Covid-19 will hit hardest.

There are always ‘‘record investment’’ headlines, as there always should be in a country with a rising and ageing population; the boost of almost $1 billion a year for health is just the latest such announcement.

There will of course be more, on support for businesses and sectors, and these will be important for those who can survive long-term, if only they can cross the bridge of a temporary economic slump.

But how will the Budget deal with those who won’t get over the bridge?

For example, there is no way the country can lose its biggest export earner, tourism, without a huge loss of jobs among the 230,000 who are directly employed in it, and the 163,000 indirectly linked to it. Budget or not, the headlines will continue to carry lay-offs in the hundreds, as reality bites.

What will Robertson propose for those whose work evaporates, and what about those vulnerable urban and regional communities that were already not hooked in to the pre-Covid-19 good times?

Research has found some of the poorer communities have not recovered the income and job losses sustained a decade ago in the wake of the global financial crisis.

Does the Government have plans for how those communities will weather what for some will be a second whammy from the Covid-19 slump? Shortterm, 80s-style make-work schemes may have a place, but long-term investment in meaningful upskilling for the young, Ma¯ ori and Pasifika, into work that has a future, must be spelt out.

It is natural to look to the Budget for specific measures helping one’s own life. Will my business get a hand-up, is my home – rented or owned – secure ?

A society being safe, healthy and prosperous depends on how the most vulnerable are helped. A recovery is not a recovery if as many, or more, people than before are shacked up in overpriced taxpayer-funded motels, without a big social house-building programme in train.

The Government needs to deliver a Budget that simultaneously deals with the shorter-term Covid19 responses, and the longer-term structural social and economic issues laid bare for too long already.

The Budget is also likely to be the moment the discourse switches from the Team of Five Million’s united battle with Covid-19, to the question of who should lead the country after September 19’s general election.

How well Jacinda Ardern’s Government juggles the many layers of today’s Budget will play a critical role both in its own, and the country’s, future.

A recovery is not a recovery if as many, or more, people than before are shacked up in overpriced taxpayer-funded motels, without a big social house-building programme in train.