Really big bang needed for megabucks

When governments spend money, we tell ourselves we should be able to expect bang for our buck.

But as this Government rustles up billions to adrenalise the economy for post-Covid recovery, there’s a mounting sense that the required bang is going to need to be something heard in space.

The billions being dispensed are needed desperately on an array of fronts as we draw so deeply on the debt capacities built up so resolutely under the Cullen and

English years, albeit as we now know at the expense of serious infrastructure needs.

And, as people are uncomfortably reminding themselves, we’ll collectively have to pay it all back.

Brave words and encouraging case studies do abound. But we’re going to need to be performing wonderfully well amid the prospect of soaring unemployment and a garotted tourism industry and the prospect of our trading partners facing economic nightmares of their own.

Much as the need is widely accepted, there’s no getting around it that the sum of money the Government is dispensing is eyewatering.

Not that many months ago a $10 million injection from the Government for Invercargill’s inner-city block development would have seemed, or at least felt, like a much bigger deal.

It’s still welcome, in itself, and is flagged to be part of a $90m boost that Southland is expected to receive from the $3 billion Covid Response and Recovery Fund.

What should we make of this. Sufficient? Not? Extravagant?

Important social spending is under way for reasons of social health and welfare. Much of this can be expected to prevent what might otherwise be a nightmare of new-poverty social problems that would prove economically as well as socially disastrous.

Vital, then, to prevent horrific deterioration of our situation but really it’s to hold ground rather than gain it.

Projects that enhance our ability to earn a living in this changed environment will be key and it’s neither surprising nor disappointing that sometimes querulous scrutiny is being applied to some of the payouts.

Just one case in point is the payout of up to $10.2m to help

A J Hackett Bungy New Zealand to remain in operation. The arguments include whether it couldn’t really hibernate and wait for demand to come back, or whether there were simply more worthy causes.

And not just economic ones. Other voices would have us look to broader social issues. Why support this company, they say, and not St John Ambulance?

The Covid-19 economic response package is rightly labelled the most significant economic plan in modern New Zealand history. Decisions are being made very quickly, and necessarily so.

There’s a risk that it will become, in terms of public scrutiny, a bit kaleidoscopic.

We can’t disengage from scrutiny about where the money’s going and what, realistically, it’s going to achieve.

It’s neither surprising nor disappointing that sometimes querulous scrutiny is being applied to some of the payouts.