You know it’s getting to the Budget time of year because the signs have begun weeks in advance.
Pre-announcements, breakfasts with business, articles speculating what should be or what will be in the budget by people who may have no idea either way. In the legislature, the annual review debates are reaching a conclusion, and Question Time hammers on even more than usual about the state of finances.
A well worn series of traditions around the delivery of the Budget is in play, and the person at the centre of it all, Finance Minister Grant Robertson, took time out of this procession to talk to Phil Smith about it.
Finance Minister Grant Robertson fields questions from reporters during the bridge run at Parliament, 1 September 2022. Photo: Johnny Blades / VNP
Much of the tradition is based around the convention that the material in the Budget remains secret until its official release on Budget Day.
“We’ve had examples in history where Ministers of Finance have had to resign, or offer to resign anyway, because something has leaked out of the budget process,” Robertson explained.
“Famously, Roger Douglas once had to send his resignation letter, which of course David Lange rejected, although I suspect he regretted that in later years. Myself, in 2019, I had the situation where material was put up accidentally on a website that could be found and was found, and it was released. So there’s a lot of sensitivity.”
A lot of the sensitivity, he said, harks back to the days where business people with advance knowledge of a government budget’s contents could put their prices up or corner a market unfairly. Of course, these days pre-Budget announcements are the norm, a kind of political version of pre-loading before a big event, a way to tease out the experience for everyone invested in this major fiscal unveiling.
So while the Budget was finalised last month, the Government has begun making pre-announcements of specific material from the upcoming Budget. At the weekend, it announced a new spend on commuter rail in Kapiti and Wairarapa. The minister said they’d have one or two more announcements before Budget Day but that overall there won’t be as many pre-announcements as have been seen in preceding years.
Opposition National Party finance Spokesperson Nicola Willis applies pressure on the Government over its management of the economy. Photo: ©VNP / Phil Smith
Robertson admitted that pre-announcements were partly for promotional reasons - every government does it - and sometimes partly for specific reasons of timing. A lot is unveiled on Budget Day and some details get lost in the flood of information, so it makes sense to drip a bit out in advance. But not too much.
“There’s a balancing act because Budgets ultimately are packages. They’re the result of a lot of different trade-offs and a lot of different inter-related decisions. And if you take too many things out of them and announce them before the package you put out on Budget Day (it) doesn’t make much sense.”
‘Boring and predictable’
Robertson knows he and the Government are to get plenty of questions from the Opposition about what’s in the Budget, during Question Time in the next three weeks.
“I’ve taken to various ways of answering that over the years, including counting down the number of sleeps that people have until they get to see the Budget. But I would have been as guilty of that in Opposition as anyone. It is part of the exercise. Because there are pre-announcements, it does open it up to the fact that, you know, ‘you’ve announced that so why can’t you announce this’?
“But that’s the prerogative of the Government and so, yes, those questions will be asked and my answers will be boring and predictable.”
A Budget tradition which previously saw the Finance Minister going to a printing press for a photo opportunity with the Budget physical copy, has been tweaked slightly. What they do now, Robertson said, is to no longer go all the way out to the printing press, and also to use a ‘dummy’ copy of the Budget.
“It’s the cover (of this year‘s Budget) although what’s on the inside tends to be last year’s Budget so we don’t have any risks of people taking photographs of things that they shouldn’t.”
Other traditions include Finance Ministers enjoying a grass-roots snack (a pie and more recently a cheese roll), and giving a speech to the Wellington Chamber of Commerce, part of the usual business breakfast format which Robertson is also taking to Auckland, “in order to get a little bit broader audience interested in the Budget”.
Parliament today commences a three-week sitting block which culminates in the delivery of the 2023 Budget on 18 May. Over the course of the week prior to that, Robertson will do a flurry of pre-interviews with media outlets.
The tradition is set, and we mostly know where this thing is heading; not the size and shape of the numbers but the signs and portents, the process of the delivery and the inevitable response.
