A Treasury report has criticised the amount of Covid spending by Dame Jacinda Ardern (centre) and Grant Robertson (right). Photo / Mark Mitchell
A new Treasury paper has criticised the last Government for overspending during the pandemic, leaving the country with a high level of public debt that makes it vulnerable to future shocks.
The paper calculated the total cost of the pandemic at about $66 billion. It put the total fiscal contribution to the pandemic – measured by additional spending and foregone tax revenue – as about 20.4% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), making the response “one of the largest among advanced economies“.
By Treasury’s estimation, this was the second-largest fiscal intervention amongst advanced economies, behind only the fiscal interventions of the Trump and Biden administrations in the United States, whose spending was calculated to be about 25% of GDP. New Zealand’s level of intervention was similar to the UK, Singapore and Australia.
The figures come from Treasury’s final Long-Term Insights Briefing for 2025. Departments are legally required to write the briefings at least every three years on topics they think may be important to their particular patch.
Treasury’s last one was on the sustainability of public services and the tax base.
This year’s is on how fiscal policy – taxing and spending – should be used to respond to economic shocks.
Its main finding, learning from the Covid-19 pandemic, was that fiscal policy should be used sparingly, with the Reserve Bank taking the lead on managing the economic cycle using its monetary policy tools like the Official Cash Rate.
The report lands in the midst of a protracted economic downturn, with both the Government and the Opposition pointing the finger at each other over who is responsible.
The Government blames Labour for excessive, inflationary and unsustainable spending that prompted the Reserve Bank to plunge the economy into recession with high interest rates.
Labour blames the Government for cutting spending and axing infrastructure projects.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis said the report validated the Government’s concerns about Labour’s spending.
“Treasury’s language is spare and polite, but its conclusions are damning,” Willis said. “The report makes clear significant errors were made in the fiscal response to Covid.”
Willis pointed in particular to Treasury’s criticism of the last Government for spending the Covid-19 fund on things that were only tangentially related to the Covid response, such as the school lunch programme.
The report said the fund was established in May 2020 to “support a timely economic response and public confidence”.
However, it added that “as the economy recovered, the then Government was advised against further stimulating, in favour of more targeted support”.
Willis said the Government “ignored” that advice, favouring “undisciplined spending that pushed up inflation, eroded New Zealand’s previously low public debt position, and fuelled a cost-of-living crisis that many families are still suffering from”.
Labour has been approached for comment.
Just ahead of Budget 2022, the then Finance Minister Grant Robertson said the Government struck the right “balance”.
“There were and are no costless decisions. Doing less would have seen unemployment grow, or put people’s health at risk,” Robertson said.
Treasury outlined a history of its advice during the pandemic.
It said that initially, it had encouraged the Government to spend money to support the economy through things like the wage subsidy.
However in late “2020 and into 2021 ... Treasury started to move away from recommending broad-based fiscal stimulus to support the economy towards more targeted and moderate fiscal support”.
After the 2020 election, Treasury said it informed Robertson that there was “adequate” fiscal space to support the economic recovery and space for “further temporary support if the economic or public health situation deteriorated”.
However, officials also “highlighted the importance of controlling ongoing spending and ensuring it was high value to meet the medium-term fiscal challenge”.
By August 2021, the beginning of Auckland’s long lockdown, Treasury warned that any support to businesses should “take account of macroeconomic trade-offs”.
By Budget 2022, Treasury said it was recommending “against any further stimulus”.
The briefing noted that five years on from the beginning of the pandemic, spending is still close to its pandemic-era peak and has only been partly offset by higher revenue.
Higher debt-servicing costs are weighing on the Government’s balance sheet and lower GDP has “contributed to the deficit both directly, by leading to a smaller tax base and lower revenue than anticipated, and indirectly, as spending plans were based on revenue expectations that did not eventuate”.
The Covid fund was closed in 2022, ending that era of stimulus and Budget 2023 ended up being more stimulatory than planned thanks to the Auckland Floods and Cyclone Gabrielle.
The briefing made an unlikely comparison between the Labour Government of Dame Jacinda Ardern and Chris Hipkins and the fiscal policy of National Finance Minister Ruth Richardson.
Treasury noted that fiscal policy can be counter-cyclical, which means it tries to counter and blunt the business cycle by, for example, spending money during a downturn to stimulate an economy, or saving during an upswing to cool an overheating one; or fiscal policy can be pro-cyclical – this means exacerbating a business cycle by spending money when an economy is hot or cutting back when an economy is shrinking.
Treasury noted that the responses to the Asian Financial Crisis and the GFC had been accidentally counter-cyclical thanks to pre-promised tax cuts, however, fiscal policy was “pro-cyclical in the early 1990s and during 2021-2023″.
It said in the 1990s, “pressures on fiscal sustainability motivated fiscal consolidation even as the economy was in recession”.
In the case of the Covid response, the Government thought it was engaged in a counter-cyclical response to a “severe economic downturn”, however “from late 2020, the economy turned out to be much stronger than expected (perhaps, in part, caused by the strength of fiscal stimulus itself)”.
“Combined with expenditure that was enduring rather than temporary, this resulted in large fiscal deficits while the economy was overheating.”
The current Government is facing similar criticism for being pro-cyclical. Much like the Governments of the 1990s, it is trying to pull back spending to rebuild the balance sheet at a time of economic weakness.
Of the 20% of GDP spent on the pandemic, about half was spent on direct pandemic economic and health initiatives.
Thirty-five per cent was spent on wage subsidies “and similar schemes during lockdowns” and a further 18% “arose from health-system costs such as vaccination and contact tracing, along with managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) costs”.
The parties that now form the Government broadly agreed with this spending at the time – National, at some points, called for spending on wage subsidies to be even greater.
The remainder of the response was “made up of a wide range of initiatives with varied objectives”, Treasury said. Some initiatives were “aimed at more directly responding to the impacts of Covid-19 and others aimed at providing fiscal stimulus or achieving social or environmental objectives”.
These included tax changes, training schemes, housing construction, shovel-ready infrastructure projects, increases to welfare benefits, the Small Business Cashflow Scheme, Jobs for Nature, additional public housing places and school lunches.
The then Opposition disagreed with much of this spending.
In a foreword to the report, Treasury Secretary Iain Rennie noted that increased use of fiscal support during shocks had “contributed to public debt ratcheting up over time”.
Rennie warned that if nothing changes, “this leaves future generations with less financial capacity to respond to shocks”.
The recommendations from the report note the Government needs to get better at saving money when the economy is booming to ensure there is fiscal space to support the economy when times are grim. When times are grim, the Government should allow the “automatic stabilisers” to kick in, spending money on increased benefit payments.
Managing the ups and downs of the economy should mostly be left to the Reserve Bank – a conclusion reached in Treasury’s draft report, published earlier.
“Monetary policy changes can be reversed more readily and can often be implemented faster. The Government’s spending and taxation decisions should generally seek to optimise long-run value for money rather than moderating economic cycles,” Treasury said.
This does not mean there is no role for the Government. If monetary policy is constrained or at extremes – as it was at points during the pandemic – Government spending can kick in.
Or, if interest rates can fall further, the Government could restrain spending to “help moderate booms that would otherwise result in interest rates or the exchange rate becoming extremely high”.
Treasury also said fiscal policy could be used to ease some of the distributional impacts of monetary policy, which can be blunt. Monetary policy during the pandemic was largely responsible for the housing boom and bust.