Search for fiscal holes in 1800-page budget an ‘insane’ journey for journalist

Grant Robertson, Labour's finance spokesperson, wanted to know more about the 2023 Budget he oversaw. Photo / Michael Craig

We are now near the end of 2023, the year with three Prime Ministers, an election campaign, and now a “Mini-Budget”.

In this year’s last episode of NZ Herald political podcast On the Tiles, deputy political editor Thomas Coughlan is joined by economist and chief executive of Infometrics Brad Olsen, and Herald Wellington business editor Jenee Tibshraeny, to discuss this week’s Mini-Budget and what it revealed about the state of the economy, and how the National-led Government will need to respond.

During today’s episode, Coughlan shared how he discovered more “fiscal cliffs” (areas of funding that will not stretch far enough to cover planned services) ahead of the recent Mini-Budget, than officials did. Partly because Finance Minister Nicola Willis has claimed these budgetary issues present a risk to fiscal forecasts, Coughlan gave himself an epic challenge.

“I took it upon myself to read the whole Budget of 2023. And some of the fiscal cliffs were from earlier budgets, so I didn’t find all of those ones, because I drew the line at reading one budget. It was 1800 pages, longer than War and Peace, it did drive me slightly insane.”

Coughlan found about 190 examples of what could be described as fiscal cliffs.

“Some of them are very small, like a couple of hundred thousand dollars, and some of them are really quite justified. For instance, when you have a large number of teachers coming through the training pipeline, you have to appropriate more money for their scholarships and prizes.

“The Ministry of Social Development has hired a lot of frontline staff because the unemployment rate is set to go high in the next couple of years. So MSD looks at those forecasts and pre-emptively hires additional staff to deal with it.

“So they have time-limited funding to add additional staff to MSD to deal with the higher unemployment rate, and then that funding drops off and the unemployment rate goes down a bit and they themselves get made unemployed.

“They don’t call [economics] the dismal science for nothing”.

After combing through this massive stack of information, and just as Coughlan had compiled his work, the man behind the 2023 Budget had an announcement. Labour Party finance spokesman Grant Robertson had requested that the Parliamentary Library undertake the same massive research Coughlan had tackled.

Coughlan has now made an offer to the poor unfortunate parallel researcher, who went on a similar perilous research journey.

“If the parliamentary library staffer who did that work is listening to this, I feel your pain. And if you’re ever at 3. 2 [Beehive bar Pickwicks], I’ll buy you a beer.”

Listen to the full episode of the On the Tiles podcast for Herald Wellington business editor Jenee Tibshraeny, economist Brad Olsen, and Thomas Coughlan’s take on what the Government will face in 2024.

On the Tiles is available on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.