Claire Trevett is the NZ Herald’s political editor, based at Parliament in Wellington. She started at the NZ Herald in 2003 and joined the Press Gallery team in 2007. She is a life member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.
OPINION
A snap poll to gauge reaction to the Budget will have given Finance Minister Nicola Willis some confidence that it landed bang-smack in the Goldilocks zone she was aiming for.
That Taxpayers’ Union Curia snap poll, published in the Herald today, cannot be taken as gospel because of its smaller sampling size and quick turnaround after the Budget was released.
However, it indicates on first impressions voters saw the Budget as solid – without being an absolute banger or a flop.
About half of the 500 polled said the Budget was “okay”, while the numbers of those who said it was good or bad were about the same.
The results showed again why tax cuts are electoral gold once they land, despite protestations that the money should have gone into public services or entitlements instead.
Forty-one per cent said the size of the tax cuts was about right, and 48 per cent thought money from spending cuts should have gone to tax cuts rather than spending in other areas. More than half wanted more tax cuts in the years ahead.
However, when Willis does her post-mortem examination on how the Budget was handled, one issue that has left a sour taste should be noted.
That was around the question of National’s campaign promise to fund 13 new cancer treatments.
The mistake was not only that those treatments were not delivered in this Budget, although that was very far from ideal.
The mistake was in making a promise on an issue that is a life-or-death one, and giving hope to people in desperate circumstances. If you can deliver on that hope, that is great.
However, if you cannot, you should not let hope linger any longer than necessary.
Yet Willis and PM Christopher Luxon let it linger rather than reveal before Budget Day that the treatments would not be funded.
They had vaguely signalled it was at risk, fobbing off questions by saying not everything could be done in one go and some promises would have to be delayed or cut. That was not clear enough to draw a firm conclusion.
Willis pointed to the need to put more money than expected into Pharmac’s funding and to the complexities of Pharmac’s drug approval processes.
So when that Pharmac funding was announced, why weren’t those hoping for the cancer treatment policy told the price was the new cancer drugs?
Such a promise should not be part of the tease-routine governments play in the lead-up to Budgets, telling voters they will have to wait to see if their favoured policy has made the cut.
In National’s case, this was not just a bullet point in its health policy. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon had unveiled the plan to ring-fence $280 million for the drugs during the election campaign.
It was to be paid for by scrapping Labour’s newly introduced free prescriptions policy.
He took aim at Labour, saying National’s goal was to ensure New Zealanders could get the same treatments as Australia and put an end to the days of having to resort to Give A Little campaigns.
Now the free prescriptions are gone (or at least, back to being targeted for low-income people, children and the elderly) but the cancer treatments are not here.
It illustrated once again that promises to provide specific drugs or treatments is a fraught area, given Pharmac is the decision-maker and deliverer on such things and not politicians.
It’s also a bad precedent: leading to pressure to do the same for other drugs.
This is not the first time – in 2008 National promised to fund breast cancer drug Herceptin. It overrode Pharmac to do so. In 2015, it admitted it was wrong to do so when it came under pressure to do the same with cancer drug Keytruda.
At least that National Government delivered on the Herceptin promise – although it was a more modest promise than 13 cancer drugs.
This National Government knew it would create a problem with Pharmac when it made the promise but decided to promise it anyway.
National is now scrambling to assure people it is a “very high priority”, although Health Minister Shane Reti told the Herald it would be at least a year away.
That will be too long for some.
It is a bitter lesson in being careful with people’s hopes.
As for the poll on the Budget, if its findings are backed up by subsequent polls, Willis could also take it as giving her licence to pursue the rolling maul of spending cuts she is planning for the next two years.
Two-thirds of voters supported spending cuts as a way to address the deficits – much higher support than there was for increasing taxes or borrowing.
It won’t all need to be done by spending cuts. Willis still has some revenue raising measures up her sleeve to deploy if she wishes, in the form of taxes.
For example, she and Luxon have previously voiced some enthusiasm for a tax on charities.
However, this year’s Budget was just the start of Willis’ great decluttering exercise - hunting through the shelves for programmes gathering dust and costing money.
The accumulation of “programmes” is part and parcel of being in government. All of them come up with great ideas, a programme is duly set up and then left to bubble along while the Government comes up with new ideas requiring more programmes.
Willis will have one champion urging her to go ever further in her Marie Kondo routine. It is Act leader David Seymour.
Among the swathe of ministers’ press releases trumpeting Budget spending in various areas was one from Seymour that had a distinct air of being a markedly dissenting opinion.
Seymour’s release did not trumpet spending. It trumpeted spending cuts, applauding the early cuts and urging more of them in the years ahead.
To be fair, Seymour has had a fair chunk of funding for initiatives from charter schools, his new Ministry of Regulation, Pharmac and even the trimmed-down school lunch programme.
However, he cannily opted to announce it all in the pre-Budget period. This meant he could sit there looking virtuous and parsimonious while NZ First and National were announcing their pots of money, and instead campaign for more spending cuts.
Seymour’s favourite number in the Budget was the tiny $2.4 billion operating allowances in the next three years.
Given more than $1b is already allocated for health, it doesn’t leave much for anything else. It will be eaten up by inflation. It is a much happier number for him than the $3.4b in this year’s Budget, which was similar to Labour levels.
As for the verdicts on the tax cuts, on Friday even Labour was showing some enthusiasm for them, albeit not in the same way as voters.
The party sent out a letter to its supporters that slagged off National for giving tax cuts instead paying for public services – and then asked people to do just that by donating their tax cuts to the Labour Party.
