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RNZ News
21-05-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
Budget Day: Government looks to make its promises add up
The Budget will reveal just how much money will be cut from various services and where the money will go instead. Photo: RNZ "It feels like a kid robbing his mum to pay for his mates" says library assistant Alex Cass, as she prepares for the government to reveal Budget 2025. New Zealanders will find out on Thursday just how much money will be cut from various services, as the government looks to make its promises add up. Just how much is saved from the pay equity law changes - and where that money will be going instead - will also be revealed. Cass was part of a pay equity claim scrapped due to the government's last-minute law change. "It's unbelievably underhanded the way this process has been done. It was done lightning fast, with no chance for any of us to object. It's incredibly cruel, and it's a legacy of cruelty." Cass felt like the government was saying to those who are fighting for their work to be taken seriously, "you don't deserve better". She said she would be on Parliament's lawn on Thursday afternoon to react to the budget - money she said the government got from people who were "already massively underpaid". But Nicola Willis said New Zealanders were "realistic", because the new scheme would still deliver a scheme protecting women against sex-based discrimination. Finance Minister Nicola Willis is primed to unveil her "no BS" budget. Photo: RNZ She said "every single cent" reprioritised from money reallocated from those claims would go into "priorities for New Zealand". "I've had it with opposition politicians who keep promising they can 'do it all', that somehow they're gonna stick to the debt levels, they're not gonna have deficits but also they're not gonna make savings and they're gonna spend on everything - that doesn't add up," said Willis. "Our approach is different" she said. "It's about prioritising your taxpayer money carefully and ensuring that we're actually nourishing the growth that ultimately delivers the jobs and living standards we all depend on." For this budget, the government's given itself only $1.3 billion of new money to use on day-to-day spending. Already $2.5b is needed for yearly cost increases and more than $3b has been allocated in pre-budget announcements for health, defence, social investment, state abuse survivor redress and the screen production rebate. "It's not a budget filled with rainbows and unicorns," Willis said, "It's a reality budget that will deliver genuine hope for the future." She also called it a "no BS" budget, but would not specify what that stood for. Labour leader Chris Hipkins said "paying women properly" should not be described as "rainbows and unicorns". "Making sure women who have been underpaid are paid what they're worth is something that a responsible government should prioritise - this government isn't." Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick says it does look like a "BS" budget. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said it did look like a "BS" budget. "The government has decided it is going to be cutting public services to the bone in order to pay for its landlord and tobacco tax cuts of the last budget." Council of Trade Unions economist Craig Renney, who is also on the Labour Party's policy council, said the government did not have much to work with given it would not borrow more money. "We're cutting government services at a time when we know there's increasing demand on those services," he said. "We have an increasingly elderly population. We have increasingly higher needs in terms of health and education." Now is the time, he said, to invest in the economy and inject some confidence into the economy. Renney said despite the government saying it would not cut frontline services, New Zealanders were finding it harder to access those frontline services. "It's not that there's a direct cut, but because these services aren't being properly funded for change, they're having to work harder and harder to deliver the same services with less real cash available to them." In the budget, he will be looking out for how the government has chosen to use the savings from stopping the pay equity claims. He will also be looking at Treasury's estimates for what is happening to unemployment, wages and the cost of living. "We've actually seen wages rising far less quickly than in the past, and we've seen two years of cuts to the minimum wage in real terms, and we've seen rising unemployment. "If those trends continue, that will suggest that the medicine and the pain of economic change is really being borne by workers, in particular, low-paid workforces, rather than by others in the economy who might have broader shoulders." He also will be looking to see if the government changes KiwiSaver settings, or begins means-testing for the winter energy payment or BestStart. "If it tries to do all of those to balance the books, we'll be asking why is it that these workers are having to pay the price for the fact that the government hasn't been able to deliver its fiscal plan to date." New Zealand Initiative chief economist Dr Eric Crampton said the government should focus on getting spending back down to pre-Covid levels. New Zealand Initiative chief economist Dr Eric Crampton. Photo: Supplied He wanted to know where the government was planning on reducing expenditure to deal with its deficit. "If it's simply tighter spending allowances over the next few years, you start wondering how credible it is as a path to get out of structural deficit. "Pulling the government out of the provision of some services, or explicitly cutting the amount that's provided, would signal a more serious approach." Crampton was interested to see Treasury's projections of future paths for government spending, and for productivity and GDP growth, as well as government spending priorities. "I'm watching for the tweaks the government might make to align the budget with the economic growth agenda. "There has been talk of changes in depreciation schedules to encourage private investment." He also pointed to a coalition agreement promise between National and ACT to provide housing incentive payments to councils, asking if it would show up in the budget "at least as a forecast for next year". "The government would need to make fiscal room for it. But it is important if the government wants councils to welcome urban growth." The Finance Minister has confirmed she will not be making any changes to superannuation. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
New York Times
20-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The President Will Destroy You Now
One thing stands out amid all the chaos, corruption and disorder: the wanton destructiveness of the Trump presidency. The targets of Trump's assaults include the law, higher education, medical research, ethical standards, America's foreign alliances, free speech, the civil service, religion, the media and much more. J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush, succinctly described his own view of the Trump presidency, writing by email that there has never before Some of the damage Trump has inflicted can be repaired by future administrations, but repairing relations with American allies, the restoration of lost government expertise and a return to productive research may take years, even with a new and determined president and Congress. Let's look at just one target of the administration's vendetta, medical research. Trump's attacks include cancellation of thousands of grants, cuts in the share of grants going to universities and hospitals; and proposed cuts of 40 percent or more in the budgets of the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Science Foundation. 'This is going to completely kneecap biomedical research in this country,' Jennifer Zeitzer, deputy executive director at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, told Science Magazine. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, warned that cuts will 'totally destroy the nation's public health infrastructure.' I asked scholars of the presidency to evaluate the scope of Trump's wreckage. 'The gutting of expertise and experience going on right now under the blatantly false pretext of eliminating fraud and waste,' Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, wrote by email, 'is catastrophic and may never be completely repaired.' I asked Wilentz whether Trump was unique with respect to his destructiveness or if there were presidential precedents. Wilentz replied: Another question: Was Trump re-elected to promote an agenda of wreaking havoc, or is he pursuing an elitist right-wing program created by conservative ideologues who saw in Trump's election the opportunity to pursue their goals? Wilentz's reply: I asked Andrew Rudalevige, a political scientist at Bowdoin, how permanent the mayhem Trump has inflicted may prove to be. 'Not to be flip,' Rudalevige replied by email, 'but for children abroad denied food or lifesaving medicine because of arbitrary aid cuts the answer is already distressingly permanent.' From a broader perspective, Rudalevige wrote: I sent the question I posed to Wilentz to other scholars of the presidency. It produced a wide variety of answers. Here is Rudalevige's: Another question: How much is Trump's second term agenda the invention of conservative elites and how much is it a response to the demands of Trump's MAGA supporters? 'Trump is not at all an unwitting victim,' Rudalevige wrote, 'but those around him with wider and more systemic goals have more authority and are better organized in pursuit of those goals than they were in the first term.' In this context, Rudalevige continued, the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 In the past, when presidential power has expanded, Rudalevige argued, One widely shared view among those I queried is that Trump has severely damaged American's relations with traditional allies everywhere. Mara Rudman, a professor at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, wrote in an email: Trump is not unique in his destructiveness, in Rudman's view, Trump's second term agenda, Rudman argued, is elite-driven: Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, shares the belief that Trump has taken a wrecking ball to foreign relations. Cain emailed me his assessment: Similarly, Cain continued, Cain argued that in both economics and politics, destruction can have beneficial results, but not in the case of Donald Trump. Musk and Trump, in Cain's view, 'are driven more by instinct than knowledge, vindictiveness than good intentions and impatience than carefully designed plans.' They In ranking the most destructive presidents, the scholars I contacted mentioned both Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan. Geoffrey Kabaservice, vice president for political studies at the Niskanen Center, a center-left libertarian think tank, wrote by email: Paul Rosenzweig, a former deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush and a lecturer in law at George Washington University, was even more pessimistic, writing in an email that he fears that Rosenzweig believes that I asked the experts I contacted whether Trump was laying the groundwork for a more autocratic form of government in the United States. Robert Strong, a professor of political economy at Washington and Lee, replied by email: From a different vantage point, Ellen Fitzgerald, a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, questioned the value of trying to determine 'whether Trump is the most corrupt and/or most destructive president in U.S. history.' Such evaluations Despite those cautions, Fitzpatrick acknowledged that 'it's fair to say that if we look at the arc of American history from Reconstruction to the current day, there's no question that Trump is busily destroying much of what several generations of Americans worked very, very hard to achieve.' 'The anti-immigrant sentiment of the late 19th and early twentieth century,' Fitzpatrick wrote, and 'the rhetoric abroad in the land today': Some of those I questioned argued that Trump's assault on American institutions and values is not supported by most of his voters. Russell Riley, professor of ethics and co-chairman of the Miller Center's Presidential Oral History Program, took this view a step farther, noting that Trump explicitly dissociated himself from Project 2025 during the campaign and then, once in office, adopted much of the Project 2025 agenda: Trump, in contrast, 'barely won the popular vote, with just under 50 percent — hardly an electoral mandate, even for an incremental program. Indeed as a candidate Mr. Trump openly distanced himself from Project 2025.' Lacking both a clear mandate and an electorate explicitly supportive of Project 2025, Riley argued, means The reality, however, is that the abdication of power by Republicans in Congress has allowed Trump to create a mandate out of whole cloth. Where will this frightening development take us? The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@
