OPINION:
The Budget saw National’s Nicola Willis and Christopher Luxon reach into the greatest hits album of past National Governments for the catchphrase they are now using with abandon: the “nice to haves” line.
The first out of the blocks on the list of things National took aim at was Labour’s move to drop the $5 co-charge for medical prescriptions.
That call came from finance spokeswoman Nicola Willis, who described it as a “nice to have” and said National would restore the charge.
She may have quickly regretted using that “nice to have” phrase in this instance.
It was used by former Finance Minister Bill English when he was delivering his tightwad Budgets during the Global Financial Crisis, trying to get the books back into the black and saying no to anything he deemed unnecessary.
It has now come back with a vengeance as Willis and Luxon try to winnow out enough nice-to-haves to pay for their tax cuts programme - and to offset it.
Of the Budget 2023 offerings, National also decreed the extension of 20 hours’ free early childhood education (ECE) to 2-year-olds was a nice-to-have item, as was free public transport for children under 13.
It was, however, happy to keep the tax rebates for the video game industry. And all parties - even Act - seem happy with kapa haka festival Te Matatini getting $34 million.
As a general rule, before using the phrase a politician should weigh up whether voters – especially your own voters – would consider a specific measure to be a “nice to have.”
On that scale, it should probably not be used for a basic health initiative.
In this instance, it looked like penny-pinching, not least because most people would have seen the $5 figure rather than the overall costs of $618m over four years.
It would benefit more than 700,000 superannuitants – as well as those in rural areas or provincial towns who don’t have a local bargain chemist, where there is no $5 co-charge.
That group presumably includes a fair chunk of National voters who may not react well to being told prescriptions their city-dweller friends already get for free are only a “nice to have”.
National clearly realised that. The next morning, Luxon moved to “clarify” that National would do something to offer free prescriptions to some people – but it would be targeted to those such as community services card holders and maybe more widely.
The lack of specifics around who would be eligible shows very much it was policy on the hoof forced by the Budget.
Labour, meanwhile, were thanking their lucky stars for National’s response.
It fed in nicely to Prime Minister Chris Hipkins’ description of a National-Act coalition as a “coalition of cuts”.
And it gave Labour ammunition for its claims that National would cut important public services which people needed for the sake of paying for its tax cuts – which will benefit a lot of people who don’t necessarily need them.
Labour’s Budget and National’s response to it was a rehearsal of what is set to be the constant soundtrack of the campaign.
National’s chorus will be accusing Labour of wasteful spending and doing nothing to trim its own spending to try to dampen inflation.
Labour’s will be that National will cut into public services for the sake of paying for its tax cuts policy – and that those tax cuts will only worsen inflation.
Both National and Labour neatly proved each other’s point over the Budget.
Grant Robertson had to defend going over his own pre-set spending limit (he put it down to the cyclone and inflation absorbing most of his kitty for new spending).
He also had to defend finding little in the way of savings by scotching old things to pay for new things. Labour was never going to go too far on that latter point – it hopes voters would think maintaining services was worth the slower return to normal inflation figures.
National’s aim, on the other hand, is for voters to blame Labour in the likely event interest rates get bumped up again - and possibly again.
But National also faces questions in the aftermath of the Budget.
It criticised the prescriptions and extension of childcare subsidies to 2-year-olds for being untargeted – yet the tax cuts policy is the motherlode of untargeted moves.
National is yet to set out how it would pay for those - and how it would prevent them adding further to inflation.
That is partly because it cannot do the full exercise until and unless it gets into government. What it is planning to do is another exercise used by Bill English: a line-by-line review of government spending to decide what is worth keeping and what to shed.
Luxon is confident they will easily be able to find at least the $1.8 billion or so that they estimate the tax cuts package will cost in that. He has a point, given even Labour managed to find $1b in a similar exercise of its own books. He is also confident National will be able to do more and better with less than Labour.
Those vague answers won’t suffice in the heat of an election campaign.
People will want to know whether National does indeed plan to cut services they benefit from.
Working for Families (WFF) will be a big question for National – it is looking at whether to change the abatement rates because it believes people are turning down full-time work for fear of losing their WFF entitlements.
Even the Act Party – which does have the guts to set out where it would makes cuts (a vast swathe of them) – wants to know what National will cut.
National cannot simply accuse Labour of being “addicted to spending” when the bulk of its own policy rollouts so far have all been policies that cost money rather than save money.
So far all it has presented on that front is vague mutterings about specific projects it will scrap or defer, such as light rail, and its phony-fund from its pledge to cut consultants and contractors from government work.
That hypothetical fund is estimated at $400m a year. It has already allocated about $308m of that for its childcare rebates and policy to repay the student loans of nurses and midwives.
It remains uncertain how much it will save from its more targeted approach to free prescriptions, since that was clearly policy on the fly and it doesn’t even yet know who it will target.
Any savings it would get from halting Labour’s plans to include 2-year-olds in the 20-hours free scheme for early childhood education will also be negligible.
Labour’s move to include 2-year-olds will cost $300m a year. National’s proposal of childcare rebates for parents earning under $180,000 will cost $250m a year – and is in addition to continuing with the existing ECE subsidies.
National might want to remember that there is another catchphrase in the greatest hits catalogue which it runs a risk of having turned against it: John Key’s 2011 call to Phil Goff to “show me the money”.
The health workforce has grown by thousands in the last two years.