Heather du Plessis-Allan: The Government aren't fixing our economic mess

We knew the Government books were going to be bad, but not this bad. 

No way we’re getting to the surplus we expected in 2028. That is now so far away it’s not even in Treasury’s forecast period anymore. 

It’s some time, who knows when, in the 2030's. 

We’ll have to borrow another $20b in debt to tide us over for the next four years. That’ll push our interest payments over $10b every year. 

So we’ll be spending more on our debt interest than we spend on Defence, Corrections, Police, and Customs combined. 

Now, this is not the current Government's fault. This is a recession caused by Adrian Orr and the Reserve Bank to deal with Labour’s overspending. 

But National are not doing what they need to. 

They need to be cutting way harder than they are. 

There is a measure we use to look at how much the Government is adding to, or reducing from, economic growth. 

It’s called public consumption. 

They were supposed to cut that by 1.4% this year. They cut it by 0.2%. 

That’s basically no cut. 

Next year it's supposed to cut by 2.2%. Now, it's by another 0.2%, which is to say they’re actually not cutting much at all. 

We still pay the wages of 14,000 more public servants than we did in 2018. They’ve only cut one public agency, which is the Productivity Commission. 

Nicola Willis spent more in her last budget than Grant Robertson ever did. 

National keeps saying they can’t cut more because they don’t want austerity, but we are so far from austerity it’s not funny. 

We are spending more and hiring more public servants than five years ago. 

The trouble with that is we’re in a recession, which we weren’t five years ago. 

National needs to treat this like the economic trainwreck it is and cut their cloth accordingly. 

They might not be responsible for the mess we’re in, but they are responsible for fixing it and so far, they’re really not fixing it. 

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