Treasury forecasts show weak economic growth will keep the Crown accounts in deficit until 2028 and add $50 billion to the national debt

Did you actually read the article above ?

"...the New Zealand economy achieves an annual average growth rate of 2.9% during the last three years of the forecast..."

Orr is ready with the next OCR increase to combat the inflation this expansionist budget will sure bring.

Growth, how do we fund growth after the last money tree was chopped down to stimulate massive inflation in everything over the past 3 years. Borrow more to stimulate more inflation and a massive multi generational debt we will never be able to pay off.

Where indeed...perhaps milk powder or logs will double their return in the next year or two, but i wouldn't risk any money on it, and nor do I think anyone else will.

Maybe, like always?

The wealthy will be seeing interest rates coming down, they'll be cashing in their TD's, buying up destressed assets and then finally! investing in future production?

Same as last time?

Then factor in these:

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/05/21/reaching-the-end-of-offshored-ind…

https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/04/30/a-world-without-growth/

https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2024/05/28/279-the-fiascos…

https://www.bts.gov/data-spotlight/us-trade-and-impact-low-water-levels…

The last one is capable of wiping all Budget assumptions in one hit. So few projections factor in physical-constraint feed-back loops. 

Perhaps the 12% of the working age population who are currently on a benefit could get jobs and become tax payers instead of benefit collectors?  That's usually how well run economies succeed.  

2028? Three years away?

Methinks no one will remember these vague (and largely meaningless) waffle words.

edit: "Least aspirational budget I've ever encountered.. " Yup. Couldn't agree more. Almost ZERO structural change.

Really Kate. You sound like a real doom and gloom expert. No we do not need more tax without proper control of the Country's spending. This is how New Zealand has got itself in its present predicament. But what we do need is true leadership so that all New Zealanders can life a reasonable life

4) but surely adding depreciation claims back in will reduce rent /sarc

Only government parties think that benefits and supports that go directly to large property investors like the accommodation supplement will trickle down to benefit most the poor in society who cannot afford rent.

1) Provably wrong. Most politicians are picked without any consideration as to how they favour the vulnerable and sadly most voters vote selfishly and without consideration of the actions politicians & govt depts actually take. For instance Labour massively cut the wages and incomes of the most vulnerable and cut disability support, they also denied the poorest health sector workers for the most vulnerable the required pay equity increases they won in court (delaying them for 6 years and then finally cancelling them for good against court direction).

They also added policies to keep children in violent home environments as they viewed the safety of children as mattering less then race (with Whāngai fostering one of the worse practices to keep children in families that continue the cycle of violence in hapu from grandparents, to aunts & uncles, to parents and enabling violent people to massively destabilize the lives of children leading to the children suffering greater trauma and having more MH issues in adulthood). Having family die from this it is of no surprise that most of those on OTs books now are disabled children, who are also kept in violent households, who suffer worse life outcomes and will become near 50% NEET because of a denial to access education & communities. The safety of the child & stability of home environment is now far less important when considering their support so we will always see more children at risk of violence and more children suffering from drug and alcohol abuse or from violent injuries causing disabilities and trauma. To not even consider the intergenerational violent trauma of wider hapu & risk to children when making fostering placements is exactly the carte blanche approval for yet more violence in children's lives. It is saying that the safety of children matters less then the pride & culture of the violent parents. Sadly for many disowning wider family altogether & no contact is the only way to escape the violence for themselves and to ensure their own future children can avoid it... and it can still follow them in life regardless. We were lucky as many of the violent family members that were older left for Australia, but sadly not the wider family, gang affiliations and Whāngai fostering lead to many lost generations (they lost their opportunities, their future to trauma and some lost their lives).

Are we really surprised that the behaviour of National would be not much different. All political parties have devalued the lives of the most vulnerable in NZ and those with the worse wellbeing and no party leads with a priority to change that as those at the bottom of the heap on every metric, those disabled, are never much more then a footnote in actions taken by political parties.

Even the Greens & TPM did far more to harm disabled people and removed their access to housing and communities then any action taken by previous governments. It is pretty shameful.

So lets be clear. No political party prioritizes the lives of the vulnerable over their marketing appearance and their real self serving priorities. The NZ public mostly does not care one iota either when they go to vote and will not hold any politician to account (with memories shorter then a goldfish). All political parties act in the worst interest for the most vulnerable currently.

2) energy increases were always going to happen as power companies would have to increase the costs massively even to maintain the existing network. Because of massive increases in demand and more renewable sources we also need massive infrastructure development in the generation & transmission networks and storage which also requires massive cost increases in your bills. Assuming they would not increase or that the govt could subsidize private businesses to the tune of billions of dollars considering our current financial state as a country is ignorant at best. 

I am actually surprised the difference is so low compared to when Aurora was forced to stop pocketing the money and instead do the essential emergency maintenance so failing power poles don't kill their own staff (when they found all the money they had pocketed had unsurprisingly gone into investors pockets and C level bonuses and could not be recouped again when sht hit the fan). They pushed up the power bills so much as the public had to pay for all the private profits they had been stripping from the company years before. It is a good case to learn about in engineering as the engineer whistleblower who came forward after his friend was killed ended up being blacklisted from the industry. He came forward knowing that would happen because his ethics & morals were stronger then those being silent (but then again it did take a close friend being killed first).

In comparison the power increases are actually good news as they are far less then they should be and far less then inflation. I was expecting much more damage to the pocket from bill increases considering the state of NZ networks and the very rubbish design we use that is so susceptible to both weather and even people stealing the cables & equipment for metal.

3) Protip the govt is not in the business of making or selling food, they cannot direct your local supermarket at what prices they are able to set so the supermarkets will increase prices according to both logistics inflation & lacking competition.

There is a lot more support for kiwiharvest though which if you are not aware is how most foodbanks in the country are able to source the food they give away.

So if you want more done on 3 on the supply side then either look to regulating the private business of food retail a lot more with forcing more competition, & forcing pricing down (but you cannot go below the cost it is to purchase and transport the goods to stores) and looking at the massive cost increases on logistics which the govt can control as a significant amount is tax gathered.

Here is a pretty big clue on 3 there is nothing much that can be done unless incomes increase massively (the foodbank demand side) and most of those using foodbanks are on benefits... yeah don't see any government making a significant difference there because none of them actually do consider the cost of living necessities in setting benefits and considering we just passed a massive global mass disabling event we will see a huge spike in the numbers of families needing food bank support... oh look we did.

4) Seriously this is a joke what did you expect here?

Rent controls? would not be able to be enacted at all because of the massive shift (see below as to NZ investment culture) and so all private rentals increase (very rarely decreases) regardless of what any government does.

Subsidies & benefits? Only increase rents overall and so only serve to increase the rental costs for everyone.

More social housing? We already have no available social housing places and a demand that would take decades longer to build to cover. Social housing sets rent to around 30% of the income being taken, the measure touted as affordable but is often far from (as it never accounts for the cost of living for other goods increasing at rates larger then income increases). So building more social housing currently would not decrease the rents for most of the public one bit as it would take years for even current waitlists to drop much.

Capital Gains Taxes? Is not going to make much difference, (some but not what you are calling for) as investment in housing is such a cultural touchstone people expect it to fund a nice retirement lifestyle regardless of the harm it does to society or the debt risks they take up (after all they could always increase the rent they charge if their repayment rates & bills increase).

In fact given that buying investment properties for renting out is such a factor in our culture we really would need to have significant blocks and restrictions on buying investment properties in the first place yet we allow any person or company currently to buy (it is trivial to get around the foreign buyer bans).

The government cannot enact laws that push for massive divestment in housing & cause more competition to reduce rents because that would be the end of whichever party was in power considering it is so tightly tied to the entire country's retirement wealth portfolio. They have the baby boom generation to look out for after all who are just reaching retirement age. Hence not even the most far sided in the opposition suggest that either. Because what truly would enable affordable rents is something so distasteful to all political parties they would need to have rock solid ethics and balls of titanium to enact and none of them actually want rent decreases to affordable levels. None of them are willing to consider living costs in benefits either so there is always going to be massive rise in inequity.

In short you seem to not know what a government budget is or does:

1) A society is not judged on how it treats its most vulnerable. Most societies are judged on other factors. Take politicians for instance and their actions. Most of society does not even know what their politicians do or put their names to even in the departments they face. Yet they will vote more on behavioral and marketing factors then real tangible effects. Even when politicians have deprioritised the most vulnerable in their actions and targeted them for denial of access to living needs and communities they can still market themselves as being more socially conscious then others.

There really is no reaction when politicians perform actions that heavily harm and discriminate as we saw in the last govt. The public did not even look up and even now most the protests are ignoring and discriminating against those who have worst wellbeing metrics and the most deprivation in NZ. The protestors make out they are for poor kiwis while perpetrating more harm and discrimination against the most vulnerable kiwis. With slogans directly targeting vulnerable kiwis who are destitute and poor with maximum levels of discrimination. And you think society judges them on how they treat the vulnerable. Fat chance; even the protestors celebrate their actions against the vulnerable and call for even greater denial of living needs from those who are truly vulnerable. It is mob mentality. Society can do all sorts of horrific harmful things so long as they have a group to egg them onto it. That is one true common element throughout human history. It is much harder to actually do good, then it is to say you are good and do bad.

2) NZ does not own all power transmission & generation. We also do not control the weather that affects those things & the cost of maintenance. Through any budget we cannot directly manage NZ power companies or direct how much they pay staff bonuses & investors in contrast to how much they spend in maintenance & investment in new necessary development.

3) The budget funded NZ leading foodbank providers. But no budget could control the supermarket pricing as we do not own or control NZ supermarkets

4) The budget funds NZ social housing to allow rents to be 30% of income (affordable by international standards) but NZ govt does not own all housing and no budget can control the rents a landlord charges.