Government Debt Trajectory

Well, you would have done well to heed Nicola Willis's warnings ahead of this budget that there would be no spend up because there is no spend up. There is no money for the well, well, there is money for the important stuff. You've got the schools and the classrooms and the hospitals and the Waikata Expressway and Winston Peter's pet projects, more on that lately. But everywhere else there is just no new money. It is tight. Now that is exactly how it should be. And in fact, I would say this still doesn't go far enough for the third Nicola Willis budget in a row. It isn't tight enough because we haven't even hit our debt peak yet. Right? We are still going up on that peak mountain. That is still two years away, which means that interest payments are nearly are already a nine billion dollars and they're only going to go up. It's going to take us to about 2040, roughly, before debt is back to where Bill English left it as a proportion of GDP. And that is just the most optimistic scenario. The rest of the scenario see it basically never getting back down to be where Bill English left it. Nicola Willis is making a virtue today of the fact that she's getting the books back in black by 2028-2029, which she she says is earlier than expected. But that is a little bit of game playing that's going on because it was always going to be 2028-2029 until December. And in December it changed, then it became 2029-30. Now it's just been brought back again to where it was about six months ago. And that is only, by the way, because Nicola Willis is using up uh a made-up measure, Obergell X, which makes surplus a year earlier than the standard old measure, which was basically would have had surplus arriving only in 2020 or thereabouts. And by the way, all of this is a broken promise. Because Nicola Willis promised the country that if that if you voted for national at the last election, she would have the books back in the black.