The economy has the

When it comes to snappy and compelling titles, Treasury’s Half-Year Economic and Fiscal Update needs a bit of work. Nor is its acronym any improvement. Worryingly, HYEFU always sounds more like an involuntary sneeze than an airport-bookshop blockbuster.

But the timing of the latest Treasury update, delivered just before Christmas, mapped out a useful watershed between the departing Hipkins Government and the incoming Luxon one.

It was based on the pre-election policy decisions and economic legacy of the outgoing administration, with only a cursory stab at costing the Mini-Un-Budget because its deadlines pre-dated the coalition deals.

So it fell into a sort of de-militarised zone after several months of policy ceasefire and, as such, it offers a clear snapshot of the situation Finance Minister Nicola Willis and her colleagues inherited.

There are a couple of caveats to the view that the HYEFU presents a clear picture of the state of play. The first is that by trimming future allowances for new spending, the Hipkins Cabinet painted future operating balances and the debt track in the best light possible.

The second proviso is that some statistics were still in the pipeline when the HYEFU was being prepared.

On that score, the nasty minus 0.3% GDP figure delivered just before Christmas was far weaker than the positive 0.3% tipped by Treasury. That would have made several of the numbers in the HYEFU weaker, especially revenue.

However, it is a two-edged sword, because the inflation track should now