Not much for the here and now

Is it the Backwards Budget, as National calls it? Or the Brain Drain Budget, as ACT says? Maybe it is simply the Better than Nothing Budget. As Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said, when she beamed in like a remote winner at the Academy Awards, we have been hit by a triple whammy. First, Covid. Then inflation we have not seen the likes of since the Berlin Wall came down. And finally, the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

At home, the sudden urgency of economic conditions has pushed other considerations from people’s minds. Covid-19 is in the rear-view mirror. Climate change feels like it is off in some unimaginable future, even if it is in fact already here. More and more of us care about the questions posed by the present. How to fill up the car. How to feed the family. How to pay the bills.

Of course, balancing the day-to-day and the long-term is a perennial concern in politics, as Finance Minister Grant Robertson acknowledged when he said, ‘‘The here and now matters but so too does tomorrow.’’ But the Budget yesterday felt like a tomorrow Budget with a little of the here and now quickly bolted on.

Big and necessary health funding is locked in, including awelcome bump for Pharmac. The new spend sorts out the debts of the DHBs ahead of the new national structure, which is more bureaucratic than headline-grabbing.

The much-vaunted cost of living package will ease some pain for those National leader Christopher Luxon calls ‘‘the squeezed middle’’. But payments of $350 over three months don’t add up to a lot of relief. It boils down to just $27 aweek, as Ardern reminded us, perhaps unwisely. It even feels a little tokenistic. Call it the That’s a Nice Gesture Budget.

It will also mean 81% of working-age New Zealanders will receive some level of state support, a surprising statistic. The problem is that the greater sources of middle-class and low-income pain are beyond the Government’s control, as Ardern’s triple whammy showed.

One measure that may have a significant impact, although not strictly a Budget initiative, is the urgent legislation to stop supermarkets using land covenants to block competitors. Making the supermarket sector genuinely competitive is vital.

Behind the headlines, there is a righting of a long-standing wrong involving the allocation of child-support payments to single parents. Thousands of children will be lifted out of poverty and the Government doesn’t have to spend a cent.

As for the Opposition, Luxon is clearly a student of mantra politics. If you give him a line, he will use it at every possible opportunity. We’ve heard him say Kiwis are doing it tough and Labour has no plan more times than we can count. But repetition works. The cost of living crisis was another National coinage repeated and repeated until it sank in.

Its new buzzword, ‘‘backwards’’, must have been workshopped and rehearsed. It is easy to be cynical about the politics and media training involved, but the concept will resonate with many New Zealanderswho see wages slipping behind inflation while their KiwiSaver accounts are also going, you guessed it, backwards.

National’s message is unsophisticated. It proposes few realistic alternatives, but it has identified a problem, and an easy way to define it, that it will hammer relentlessly.

Unfortunately for the Government, it may not have done enough to turn backwards into forwards.

If you give [Luxon] a line, he will use it at every possible opportunity.