PM fends off Nats’ attacks
Ardern hits back after Opposition says Government ‘couldn’t even deliver Uber eats’
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is defending Cabinet’s call to create a new unit within Government to oversee and ensure the success of new major spending decisions.
The Opposition has criticised such a unit, saying the job of managing spending by Cabinet already sits with Government ministries and agencies.
National leader Judith Collins called it a “vote of no confidence” in a Government which “couldn’t even deliver Uber eats”.
And Act leader David Seymour said Ardern has given a hospital pass to this unit and had essentially admitted that she doesn’t have confidence in her ministers to do their jobs.
“We had the so-called ‘year of delivery’ now we have the ‘unit of delivery’.”
But Ardern said that, given the enormous amount of new spending in this year’s and last year’s budgets, such a unit was required.
She said it was “just good practice”. “We wanted to make sure that, given the complexity of some of those projects, we did have extra support available through the form of that implementation unit.”
She said the unit was not a large body but it would support agencies and departments which will have to rapidly increase the amount of groundwork and deployment they are doing.
“This is just an extra support mechanism we can put in given we haven’t asked our departments and agencies to deliver projects of this scale before.”
In response to Covid-19, the Government rolled out tens of billions of dollars’ worth of spending in last year’s budget — $50 billion to be exact.
And it appears Finance Minister Grant Robertson plans on earmarking even more Covid spending in this month’s budget — “this will be a Recovery Budget”, he said yesterday.
Robertson said the new implementation unit would monitor and support a small number of initiatives, particularly where multiple agencies are involved.
This includes areas such as mental health, infrastructure, housing and climate change mitigation.
As a result of Covid, the Government was forced to borrow billions of dollars to fund various initiatives.
Although most of that has either been spent, or already allocated, there is still money left.
Robertson credited the Government’s fiscal management and the resilience of New Zealand businesses for a “better-than-expected” economic outcome.
Yesterday, he also announced $1b of the money unspent has been put back into his Covid fund for new initiatives. But he said that money would not be used to pay down its debt — which is sitting at 22 per cent of GDP, roughly $71b. That’s up from around 19 per cent before the pandemic.
“If we were to try to return to those pre-Covid levels of debt more quickly, that would undermine our public services, it would undermine our recovery,” Robertson said.