The government will spend $1.1 billion in Budget 2023 on flood and cyclone recovery initiatives, in addition to the $890 million announced prior to the budget.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said this money would cover the basics such as rebuilding roads, rail, and schools — as well as setting aside $100 million for future flood protection measures.
These investments would help get communities back to normal, with the same infrastructure as before the extreme weather had hit.
“Cyclone Recovery is a core focus of this year’s Budget, and today’s package adds to the $890 million already provided in a rolling maul of repair works and business support”.
It is only a start on the rebuild, which is expected to cost New Zealand between $9 billion and $14.5 billion. Local and central government assets make up between $5 billion and $7.5 billion of these costs.
Finance Minister Grant Robertson said these costs relate only to damage and does not include the full cost of providing support to affected communities.
“Cyclone Gabrielle hit the country when the Budget 2023 process was relatively advanced. As a result we made the call that the response would be prioritised over other initiatives which were in the draft Budget package at the time,” he said.
Approximately $4 billion of cost savings were found for Budget 2023, largely by canning job vacancies and clawing back unspent funds from the prior budget.
The government will have to provide more support to the rebuild effort, Robertson said, but some would have to wait until recovery plans and land-use decisions were made.
Some of the largest line items in this package are a $275m top up to the National Land Transport Fund, a $160m contingency for damaged rail lines, and a $100m contingency to invest with local councils in flood prevention.
Flood protection money will be spent on stopbanks and future land-use decisions.
There will be $31m available to cover the cost of urgent repairs to the more than 500 damaged schools in the North Island, with another $85m allocated to bring them back to pre-cyclone conditions.
The plurality of damaged schools are in Auckland and another 166 are in Hawkes Bay and Te Tai Tokerau.
A total of $10 million will be spent on providing additional support for community-led mental wellbeing initiatives.
33 Comments
Surely the FM via Treasury could restrict this spending to capital items only, which would reduce wastage on consultants and bureaucrats. That is if there is the political intent to do so.
No CFO would get to keep their job for 6 years after setting aside huge chunks of the company's retained earnings/borrowings with the promise of shiny new assets, only to later admit that most of it was spent on consultants and new hires.
The new 3-waters entity recently released some figures under OIA request from Herald that included paying an executive assistant $70/hour and a JD writer $130/hour.
There are water engineers on public payroll making much less than that designing complex water conveyance structures.
Such are the state of affairs in this country as taxpayer money is being wasted without a second thought and accountability.
This announcement seems to be aimed at the soft-headed Labour voter.
Television ratings are so garbage they're seldom released. I doubt anyone is paying attention to this, let alone Thursday's budget.
Labour's credibility is shot, yet those addicted to TV will still tune in for their daily programming.
What's wonderful is that Mr Luxon only targets voters that watch these low rated TV shows - it gives smaller parties a HUGE advantage.
The National Party (aka Labour Lite) really might be in its' sunset years.. it really could be a 20% - 25% party within the next 3 years.. perhaps lower if/when ACT pulls ahead.
No compensation for the innocent, who's financial livelihoods have have been unrecoverabily destroyed. Council's "dereliction of duty" ostensibly allowed forestry logs to smash open holes in the stop-banks. Yet Rehette Stoltz (Gisborne Mayor), has come out as pine forestry's apparent Excuser. Like Nash. I wonder how many goodies have been put in her lunch box over the years, by the forestry industry?
Sure, strip the land bare of trees. It just means the metre of silt that has buried everything will be 2 metres of silt in the next event. No problem though since it won't have the topping of woody debris anymore.
Just coz the silt sinks, while the wood stays obvious floating on top doesn't make the wood the primary problem, just the more visible symptom.
Yep… trees slow down runoff in downpours and hold soil together….
problem in Gisborne east coast apart from massive long-run hill-country and friable soil…it’s the distance from CNI pulp mills that make pulpwood cartage unprofitable… here is what the foresters should be focusing on to find an alternative cashflow for pulp logs.
Would be better off investing here https://tradingeconomics.com/argentina/deposit-interest-rate
For 80+% return, and returning the $860m annual return to the people...
It would be safer 🙄🤣
I wonder if there's a new bridge over the Ngaruroro River on the Hastings to Napier Expressway planned for in that allocation.
The existing bridge approaches narrow the flood channel 28%, because they extend into the river channel by some 40 metres on each side. All the stopbank breaches in the Ngaruroro River were upstream of that bridge.
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