Steven Joyce
Many of us have friends or family members that just ‘‘aren’t good with money’’. They earn a good income but somehow it all slips through their fingers and they never have anything to show for it except a maxxed-out credit card.
This Government is starting to look like one of those friends.
It’s not like they don’t have a good income, courtesy of the tax we all pay. The Government’s half-yearly update this week shows that by 2022 they’ll have collected at least $10 billion more tax than was predicted by Treasury before the last election.
Unfortunately, they are spending it even faster. The amount they are going to spend across the four years to 2022, according to official government numbers, is now $19b more than was in their own fiscal plan prior to the election. Alert readers will recall much wailing and gnashing of teeth when someone had the temerity to suggest they would spend $11b more than their own plan. We are now well past that point.
Debt is now predicted to top out at $78b, as against the $68b they predicted at election time two years ago, and an expected surplus of $6b for the current year is now projected to be a deficit.
All this wouldn’t be so bad if the Government had something to show for it. But just like our friend with the big spending habit, it seems to have all slipped through their fingers.
All the key performance indicators that measure the effectiveness of government spending are currently going backwards. State housing wait lists, poverty numbers and numbers on welfare are all growing. The big hospital metrics like emergency wait times and elective surgery numbers are deteriorating. The performance of our kids in school relative to the rest of the world is continuing to decline, and tertiary enrolments are down despite a year’s free tuition. There has also been no discernible economic uplift in regional New Zealand to match the Government’s fine rhetoric, beyond what was already occurring.
So it’s perhaps not surprising this week that the Government tried the ‘‘look over here’’ tactic to distract everyone from the deteriorating state of the books.