This is edition 2026/097 of the Ten@10 newsletter.
Hi all,
This is the Ten@10, where I collate and summarise ten news items you generally won't see in the mainstream media.
Enjoy!
1. Long-term pain or long-term wait?
Bryce Edwards
- 🔵 National's election billboards frame the choice as "long-term pain under Labour or a long-term plan under National", but critics say Budget 2026 delivers neither.
- 💰 Finance Minister Nicola Willis resisted election-year spending, delivering no tax cuts, no household handouts, and no headline giveaways in an election year.
- 🏛️ The Budget's core function was described by the 1News team as "keeping the lights on" — catch-up spending on hospitals, schools, roads, police and defence.
- 💰 Willis set aside a contingency of around $450 million in case the fuel crisis deteriorates further.
- 📊 The headline surplus forecast is $2.6 billion in 2028/29, pulled forward by one year, calculated on the Government's preferred OBEGAL-x measure.
- ⚠️ On the traditional measure, the books balance a full year later, prompting Vernon Small to label the approach "measurement cherry-picking".
- 📈 Fuel-driven inflation is simultaneously treated as a temporary shock and used to inflate the nominal tax take that helps the surplus forecast.
- 🔍 Some projected savings depend on, in Pattrick Smellie's words, "heroic assumptions" about AI productivity gains that have not yet materialised.
- 📉 Treasury itself rates the chance of reaching an OBEGAL surplus at no better than even over the forecast period.
- 📰 Business writer Smellie and left-leaning Spinoff writer Joel MacManus both concluded the Budget does nothing for New Zealand's "national malaise".
- 🔥 Former National communications hand Janet Wilson said the Budget amounted to "the can being kicked down the road. Again."
- 📊 MacManus pointed to a buried Treasury graph showing the economic boom Treasury keeps forecasting and the flat line the economy keeps delivering.
- ⚖️ Even Budget defender Liam Hehir's case rests on a forecast rather than a plan, arguing voters need to believe the Government has "found the road".
- 🏛️ The article argues the Government's position is a "long-term wait" rather than a long-term plan, with recovery perpetually promised but not delivered.
