Robert MacCulloch
Robert MacCulloch is a native of New Zealand and worked at the Reserve Bank of NZ before travelling to the UK to complete a PhD in Economics at Oxford University.
For some light relief and comedy, take a look at Finance Minister Willis’ pre-budget speech. She sets up her party clown theme by saying, “For today though, I’m going to switch out of my economic growth hat and into my minister of finance hat and focus my remarks on this year’s budget.”
What’s with these hats? Shouldn’t a finance minister have a single goal – to design economic policies to raise aggregate welfare in the nation? Is she saying her other “hat” conflicts with that aim? But wait. It turns out that the theme of her speech is, “I can confirm today there will be no lolly scramble in Budget 2025.”
So are government budgets in NZ typically lolly scrambles, where politicians commandeer Kiwis’ hard-earned dollars and throw them to their mates? Since times are tough, has that tradition been put on hold this year? She says, “according to the latest numbers I’ve seen, this smaller operating allowance means we will continue to forecast a surplus in 2029”. According to the latest NZ Treasury and IMF figures I’ve seen, NZ has one of the largest budget deficits in the developed world and is forecast to have exploding public debt levels kicking in around 2030.
We know Willis’ gig now. She’s doing the bidding to push up the cost-of-living on behalf of the Big Banks, Big Supermarkets, Air NZ, Big Construction and Big Energy. She’s helping the Big Banks loosen the capital requirements that they don’t like so next time they get in trouble they will come running to the taxpayer for a bail-out; she approves of stripping the rights of bank customers to sue for overcharging by making legislation retrospective; she sat on the NZ Initiative Board, which has representatives of both Foodstuffs and Woolworths on it; and she is the 51 per cent public owner representative of Air NZ that is doing rip-off monopoly pricing on domestic routes.
Her entire pre-budget 2025 speech could have been written by former Finance Minister Bill English. In fact, I believe that the speech writer was in fact Bill English’s speech writer. It’s a different world since back then. Willis is an economic dinosaur.
This article was originally published by Down to Earth Kiwi.
