Steph Lewis and Soraya Peke-Mason during a meeting at Frank Bar in Whanganui this week. Photo / Bevan Conley
Political candidates in Whanganui and Te Tai Hauāuru have painted vastly different pictures of the Budget, as their campaigns for October’s election begin to ramp up.
Labour’s Steph Lewis, the MP for Whanganui, and Soraya Peke-Mason, current list MP and Te Tai Hauāuru candidate, hosted breakfast events and Q&As on the Budget last week.
“We have started door-knocking and phone-calling,” Lewis said.
She currently spends three days a week in Parliament, with the other four split between Whanganui, South Taranaki and Stratford.
“Would I love to be on the ground here every single day? Absolutely, but then I wouldn’t be doing my job properly.”
National’s Whanganui candidate, Carl Bates, is also on the campaign trail and said he wasn’t taking anything for granted.
“As I’m talking to people around the electorate, there’s definitely a feeling coming through that people are finding it tough.”
Lewis said one of the key Budget announcements – removing $5 prescription co-payment fees – would ultimately reduce the demand on hospitals.
“Instead of somebody being treated by their GP, picking up their prescription and going home to get better, they’re not picking up their prescription, [they’re] going home and getting sicker.
“Then they are needing hospital-level treatment, which of course costs the taxpayer a lot more.”
She said there was always room for improvement when it came to hospital wait times.
“I wouldn’t be doing my job if I was happy with where things were sitting.
“There is money specifically in this Budget to go towards reducing wait lists and to go towards supporting primary health services.”
Bates said getting rid of the fees was an example of a blanket giveaway.
Because he had been a business owner and entrepreneur, he knew “the value of a buck”.
“Any relief we provide will be targeted to those that need it the most and not to people who are able to afford it and have been willing to pay that $5,” he said.
“If you’re going to put a significant amount of money into something, we’re talking $618 million, a lot of that could be spent on where we really need it – frontline health and disability services.”
Whether implementing more targeted approaches could cost more to achieve would be investigated, Bates said.
Green Party Whanganui candidate Marion Sanson said providing untargeted support such as zero prescription fees was probably a good idea.
“Often, working out whether a person qualifies or not can chew up more administrative time than is a good thing.
“Maybe we could target the over $20m asset people. We have an incredibly unequal society in terms of wealth.”
Lewis said the Government wasn’t “spending up big” with the Budget. That would drive up inflation and hurt the people it was trying to support.
“Grant [Robertson], the ministers and Chris Hipkins have walked a very fine line to ensure that the support we’re providing is very targeted and it doesn’t drive up inflation.
“Treasury, which is independent of the ministers, has run the numbers and they show we’ll get back to our target rate of inflation by the end of next year.”
She was proud of the funding towards rebuilding Hāwera’s Te Paepae o Aotea, Lewis said.
Bates said the Budget would keep the country under pressure.
“We’ve seen a huge increase again in spending, above what Labour forecast they would be spending.
“There’s no tax relief for the average New Zealander, for mum and dad Kiwis who are working hard and trying to get ahead. They are finding they’ve got a Government that’s not supporting them.
“You can work 42 hours on the minimum wage and you’re in the next tax bracket. That’s madness.”
Sanson said there were some good things in the Budget for green initiatives but not enough.
“The Climate Response Fund didn’t get as much funding as we’d hoped for. It did get $300m but I think more had been promised earlier, which didn’t eventuate.
“I heard an engineer say that the $6 billion [National Resilience Plan] would really only do repairs from recent damage. It’s not really going to make the change that’s needed.
“Given that we’re probably going to exceed 1.5C warming in the next three years, it really is urgent. We are just not getting the urgent funding where it’s needed.”
Free bus fares for under-13s were really important and a way families could move from car dependence to becoming used to public transport, Sanson said.
“In Whanganui, while we don’t have great public transport, we now have the Tide. I’m seeing more people using that.
“Hopefully the reduction in fares for under-25s will get people thinking ‘Yep, I can use the bus for that trip’.”
Te Pāti Māori co-leader and Te Tai Hauāuru candidate Debbie Ngarewa-Packer said the Government hadn’t used its opportunity to redistribute wealth and ease the pain on the most vulnerable communities.
“We would like to have seen a capital gains tax and a ghost house tax,” she said.
“If we had applied capital gains tax from the moment they [Labour] got in, in 2017, that’s $220b that we’ve lost opportunities of having to circulate in our economy.
“The writing is on the wall. Whether the race is close or not is not the issue, the fact of the matter is MMP will work and we won’t see a government with a strong mandate like Labour had.”
Ngarewa-Packer said she was disappointed the Government had not provided certainty that seabed mining would be ended and banned.
Removing GST from food would also have eased pressure on communities.
“The Government needed to be bold but they took the safe road,” she said.
Peke-Mason said she was delighted by the $35m going into Te Matatini, the national kapa haka competition.
She said that money, distributed across 12 regions, would build, lift and strengthen youth as they grew into adults.
“There is a lot of work and commitment and resourcing that goes into getting them there.”
She was confident the funding would make its way to the Te Tai Hauāuru electorate. “We are a strong region for kapa haka so they [the Government] would miss us out at their peril.
“What’s really important is the mauri of Te Matatini currently sits at Rātana Pā. I understand it will go from there to Te Awa Tupua before it makes its way to Taranaki, where the next Matatini will be hosted.”
Ngarewa-Packer said her party had worked hard to ensure a good investment in Te Matatini.
“They gave the exact amount of money we have in our policy so I’m going to give them credit for reading page 17.
“[We are] concerned that the Budget is only for two years but we’ll keep that pressure on.”
National Party list MP and Te Tai Hauāuru candidate Harete Hipango could not be reached for comment.
Chris Hipkins agreed to meet him in Wellington after the Prime Minister said 'no'.