Commentators find it difficult to criticise Grant Robertson. It’s because pretty much everyone likes him.
So let’s get that out of the way. Grant Robertson is a great bloke. He is fiercely funny, generous and loyal to his mates. He’s the kind of guy you enjoy having abeer with. He will never again have a beer with me after this column, I suspect.
He’s also a very canny politician. Possibly one of the smartest of his generation. He’s enough down to earth to be liked by voters from the other side, enough of a populist to know what wins elections, the kind of rare strategic thinker to know exactly how to pull off a stunt, and the kind of brilliant debater who strikes devastating blows on the other team.
A fraction of it he spent admirably, on saving businesses and jobs during Covid. But those Covid payments cost us a total of only $20b. That accounts for only 23 per cent of the debt he racked up. What did he spend the remaining 77 per cent on?
What can we point to and say ‘Grant paid for that’?
His response to Covid was fine but no more. He pumped out money, fast. That’s not hard. It also wasn’t novel. It was an orthodox response. Australia announced its Covid support payments nearly a week before ours. Canada did it. The UK did it. South Korea did it, etc.
Grant Robertson wasn’t a great Finance Minister, writes Heather du Plessis-Allan. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Pointing to the ratings agencies as a measure of Grant’s success as a Finance Minister — as Chris Hipkins has this week — is silly. Part of what the ratings agencies measure is our debt levels. That’s what keeps them happy. Even now that Grant has blown our debt out, it’s still low by global comparisons because previous finance ministers, who were actually good at their jobs, kept it low.
Again, the crime is not that our debt went up, it’s that he blew it out with nothing to show for it. Having a moderately sized mortgage isn’t bad, as long as you have a house to show for it. We don’t have a house.
Some have tried to blame Grant’s Cabinet colleagues for the profligate spending of the sixth Labour Government. Nup. It’s still his fault. Every Finance Minister in history has had colleagues demanding dollars. Bad finance ministers say yes. Good ones say no. Robertson said yes.
He said yes to Michael Wood’s bike bridge, which is the perfect example of wasteful spending. It was a stupid idea. It cost us more than $51m in consultants and rented office space. Then it was canned. We spent money and we have nothing to show for it.
The implications are serious. We now don’t have enough money to pay the nurses their backpay or the police the pay rise they’re due. Or the GPs.
Robertson has the ignominy this week of commentators on the right asking “Who was the worst Finance Minister: Grant Robertson or Sir Robert Muldoon”?
That’s unfair to Muldoon. At least we got something for the vast amounts of money he spent. The Clyde dam, the expansion of Marsden Point, the synthetic petrol plant at Motunui.
At least we can point to an actual structure and say Muldoon bought that.
Grant left nothing. Not even an idea.
His legacy was apparently supposed to be the unemployment insurance scheme. Nothing came of it because by the time he got around to doing it, Labour had squandered public tolerance for yet another tax.
He tried at the last minute to get a wealth tax across the line. Again, it was too late by the time the 2023 election rolled around.
If he really believed the tax system needed to be fairer, he had his chance. He had the ear of Jacinda Ardern. He is one of her best friends. And he either couldn’t convince her or didn’t really try.
I suspect many commentators like Grant Robertson too much to truly call it. He wasn’t a great Finance Minister. Not even close.
