Opinion: What looks like thrift risks exacting great cost
But from where we stand — alongside whānau struggling to stay housed, healthy and hopeful — what looks like prudence risks being profoundly costly in practice.
There are some welcome commitments: health infrastructure, early childhood subsidies and disability support. But they don't come close to the scale of need we see every day across Otago.
I think of a mum who came to us recently, a first-homeowner with a young baby, working hard to make ends meet. A change in circumstances and rising power prices left her unable to afford heating this winter.
We helped — but changes to the Best Start payment may now force her to give up work just to survive.
Our financial mentors no longer teach "budgeting". They're navigating low wages, food insecurity, mental distress and housing instability, all compounding each other.
Between January and April, we saw a 53% increase in people needing support. These aren't people living beyond their means — they are people whose means are no longer enough to live on.
This Budget reinstates prescription fees, narrows Best Start and halts 33 pay equity claims — decisions that hit women, children and low-income families the hardest.
That's not fairness. That's retreat.
Social service providers such as PSO are foundational infrastructure in our communities. But most agencies got no funding increase and the burden of doing more with less continues to grow.
We need a Budget that sees people not as cost centres, but as potential. That invests in food, housing, connection and care as fiercely as it does roads and rail.
Balance the books, yes, but not on the backs of the vulnerable. True stewardship means investing in dignity.
■ Robbie Moginie is chief executive of Presbyterian Support Otago.
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Analysis: On one level, the new Green Party initiative to protect children could be seen as business as usual – a political play to pressure an opposing government into action. Certainly, launching the party's new 'seven promises to tamariki' by way of an open letter to Children's Minister Karen Chhour of Act and urging the public to sign on to its message online meets that tactic. The petition preamble talks of Chhour 'taking some personal responsibility' for the safety of vulnerable tamariki. And timing it for the anniversary of when a range of community care providers lost state contracts under this Government carries its own message. But the 'For our Children' policy also represents another move by the Greens to set out political priorities and new thinking, out of government, well ahead of next year's election; to get out in front. The party had tried to arrange meetings with Chhour to lobby her directly for attention to its seven goals for child care and protection, but her schedule did not allow it. So, 14 months out from a likely election date, it made its goals into public promises and committed at a launch by co-leader Marama Davidson and children's spokesperson Kahurangi Carter that voters 'can hold us to this'. The Greens did not seek agreement or endorsement from Labour or Te Pāti Māori, its likely governing partners in any future administration, ahead of Friday's launch after months of consulting those in the child welfare sector. Instead, the party has struck out on its own to put the issue of care of tamariki to the front, and near the top, of its policy package for 2026. 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Otago Daily Times
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