On Thursday, May 17, the Labour, New Zealand First, and Green government announced its first budget. The total amount budgeted was $102.3 billion.

In comparison, the National government allocated $94.9 billion for the last budget. So let's explore where the differences come from.

Thinking about $102.3 billion is not meaningful for most of us. Another way to approach the budget is to look at what the average allocation for each New Zealander is.

However, to compare the budgets fairly we need to consider inflation. Inflation between March 2017 and March 2018 was 1.1 per cent. So we increase the 2017 amount accordingly.

Budgets do not need to track population exactly, but budgets should grow as the population does. Population growth between May 2017 and May 2018 was almost 2 per cent. So for the sake of comparison we can adjust the 2017 budget to the 2018 population. This provides an estimate of the real increase in the budget between 2017 and 2018.

Let's start to drill down into the budget to see where the changes are coming from and what is going to be effected. The budget divided into 16 main categories. The amounts allocated to each of these categories in the 2018 budget are shown on the chart below.

While looking at the total amounts allocated to each major category is useful, it is also helpful to look at the percentage change in the amount allocated to each category.

When looking at percentage differences we can also consider inflation and population change.

When only the raw dollar amounts are considered the 2018 budget is a 7.8 per cent increase over the 2017 budget. But the real increase is somewhere between 6.6 per cent and 4.5 per cent depending on the importance assigned to keeping pace with population growth.

The next chart displays percentage changes for each of the 16 main categories in the budget. The percentage change in inflation and population growth are indicated.

While percentage changes highlight the changes in a category relative to original values, they can also increase the promenance of small categories such as Finance — the smallest category with a large percentage increase.

The final chart shows the change in the actual amounts allocated to each major category.

To see a more detailed breakdown of the 2018 budget take a look at our Tree map visualisation. You see the importance of and change in all of the 1940 items in the 2018 budget.