National denies new $3.9b budget bungle

The hole in National’s alternative budget may have blown out by another $3.9 billion after the party appears to have doublecounted part of its transport programme.

The error has come about after National twice counted $3.9b left over from the New Zealand Upgrade package, an infrastructure plan announced by the Government in late January.

In fact, the leftover money was put into Treasury’s multi-year capital allowance in May. In National’s costings, the party had counted the two sums of money separately, when the NZ Upgrade programme money now only exists in the capital allowances.

The result is National needs to find $3.9b from somewhere else.

It comes after two earlier embarrassing errors in which National’s finance spokesman,

Paul Goldsmith, made a $4.3b miscalculation of NZ Super Fund contributions and $88m in capital spending which had come from an earlier set of forecasts.

But Goldsmith has denied the mistake this time, saying he left the line in Nationals Economic and Fiscal Plan for ‘‘consistency’’ with an earlier National plan.

Goldsmith told Stuff the missing billions will come from reallocating money collected in fuel taxes and road user charges in the National Land Transport

Fund (NLTF). But this appears to distance Goldsmith from his own budget, which explicitly states the money is coming from the core Crown balance sheet. The NLTF is not part of the core Crown balance sheet, but a fund which all revenue from fuel and road taxes flows into.

Goldsmith’s claim also contradicts the National Party’s costings vetted by economic agency NZIER. The document they released alongside Goldsmith’s alternative budget lists

the NZ Upgrade programme as a distinct funding line.

When approached by Stuff, Goldsmith said the release of the Government’s final transport plan earlier this month had prompted him to change the way he would fund his transport package. Goldsmith said the $3.9b would come from the NLTF, which is the pot of money NZTA uses to maintain roads and build new ones.

Yet, Goldsmith’s alternative budget also has a line for NLTF reallocations – which is distinct from the line for unallocated NZ Upgrade spending. Goldsmith says this was deliberate.

‘‘We retained the label ‘Unallocated NZ Upgrade Programme’ in our Fiscal Plan for consistency, although it could just as easily been added to the NLTF reprioritisation line,’’ he said.

The potential error comes from changes National made to its transport policy between when it was announced in July, and when the transport costings finally appeared in Goldsmith’s alternative budget last Friday.

In National’s original plan, the party’s transport spokesman, Chris Bishop, said he would spend $3.9b of the money the Government had left over from its $12b NZ Upgrade plan announced in January.

The Government had spent $8b of this at the time, keeping $4b stashed away for projects that would be announced in the 2020-2023 budgets.

But there was a problem with National reprioritising this money: the Government had already dropped it into another budget funding line, the multiyear capital allowance.

The budget lines National appears to have double-counted are the NZ Upgrade Programme and the capital allowances.

National has counted the NZ Upgrade Programme funding as a distinct pot of funding separate from the capital allowances when in fact they are one and the same.