Analysis –\u00a0<\/i>What you see is what you get. Mostly.<\/p>\n
For all the coalition haggling, culture wars and “let me be clear” obfuscation we’ve seen in the first six months of this government,\u00a0National has delivered a very National budget<\/a>.<\/p>\n It’s not so much the axe being swung in this budget as the pendulum. The centre-right is back in charge and is getting on with its core business –\u00a0shrinking the size of government<\/a>.<\/p>\n National has – as promised – knelt before its one true god: tax cuts. By changing tax thresholds, National has reduced personal income tax for the first time since 2010. A whopping $14.7 billion is going into tax cuts over four years, almost exactly the $14.6b Finance Minister Nicola Willis said it would cost during the Election 2023 campaign.<\/p>\n The main change of tack, which we’ve known about since the coalition agreements were signed, is\u00a0the scrapping of a proposed foreign buyers’ tax<\/a>, which would have helped to pay for the cuts. It was always a mythology anyway. Instead, cuts have been made – “savings” and “reprioritisations” if you prefer the government’s language – to deliver on National’s promise. And it will borrow more.<\/p>\n Willis promised an operating allowance of $3.2b, lower than Labour’s promised $3.5b. She delivered it, relishing the fact it is the lowest in real terms since 2017. She noted that in 2023, Labour’s operating allowance had reached $4.8b. For this government, size matters. The smaller the better.<\/p>\n What little new money there is<\/a>\u00a0goes to\u00a0health<\/a>\u00a0(more security, maintaining hospitals),\u00a0education<\/a>\u00a0(more buildings) and law and order (more police, more pay), although most of that will do little more than maintain the status quo.<\/p>\n rnz<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Analysis –\u00a0What you see is what you get. Mostly. For all the coalition haggling, culture wars and “let me be clear” obfuscation we’ve seen in the first six months of this government,\u00a0National has delivered a very National budget. It’s not so much the axe being swung in this budget as the pendulum. The centre-right is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":10047,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10046"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10048,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10046\/revisions\/10048"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}