There I was, minding my own business — well, as much as Granny ever does — when Labour’s Kieran McAnulty popped up in my social media feed giving the Government a fairly enthusiastic serve.
He was speaking during the third reading of the Appropriation (2026/27 Estimates) Bill.
National, he argued, had promised New Zealanders lower taxes, disciplined government spending, less debt and balanced books — but the arithmetic wasn’t adding up.
Now, political speeches are rather like supermarket specials. The large print gets your attention. Granny likes to check the unit price.
So out came the calculator.
And, for reasons that will become apparent, six eggs.
Granny’s six eggs
Suppose Granny has six eggs.
I can eat them. Sell them. Give some away. Save them for later.
I can even borrow some eggs from the neighbour, although that introduces an entirely different conversation about interest rates and why the neighbour now owns part of my omelette.
Or I can invest in more chickens and hope they produce more eggs in future.
But there is one thing I cannot do.
I cannot promise the same six eggs to seven different people and pretend the missing egg doesn’t matter.
Governments have more sophisticated tools than Granny’s egg basket, but the basic problem remains.
They can collect more revenue. Borrow. Spend less. Move spending from one place to another. Invest in things that might grow the economy and therefore produce more revenue later.
But when you promise lower taxes, more or protected spending in important areas, lower debt and balanced books, eventually the eggs have to come from somewhere.
So: did Kieran have a point?
Mostly.
But there are some important wrinkles.
What did National actually promise?
Before the 2023 election, National’s fiscal plan used a very tidy little phrase:
“Disciplined spending, lower taxes, less debt.”
It also forecast a return to surplus in 2026/27 and debt $3.4 billion lower in 2027/28 than the PREFU forecast.
National said it would work towards returning core Crown expenditure to around 30 percent of GDP over time, while increasing spending on health and education and finding savings elsewhere.
That’s important.
National didn’t simply promise to slash everything.
It promised to make the numbers work.
So let’s check them.
Lower taxes — yes. But for whom?
National did deliver personal income-tax relief.
The income-tax thresholds changed from 31 July 2024, and Treasury estimated that most households would receive something from the wider tax package.
But the average weekly gain wasn’t evenly distributed.
Treasury’s estimates by household-income quintile were roughly:
$13, $24, $32, $38 and $39 a week, moving from the lowest-income fifth of households to the highest.
There were targeted measures as well, including changes to the In-Work Tax Credit and FamilyBoost, so it would be unfair to pretend the whole package simply handed money to the wealthy.
It didn’t.
But it is equally fair to ask:
Who received the largest dollar benefit — and who needed every dollar most?
National also restored full mortgage-interest deductibility for residential property investors from April 2025.
Again, that is a policy choice.
And it reminds us that tax policy isn’t merely about whether taxes go up or down.
It is also about who the Government chooses to collect the money from — and who it chooses not to.
Did the Government actually spend less?
Here we encounter one of politics’ favourite tricks.
The ruler.
Core Crown expenses were about $127.6 billion in 2023, $139 billion in 2024 and $141.7 billion in 2025. Budget 2026 forecast about $147.2 billion for 2026.
So in actual dollars, Government spending increased.
But measured as a share of GDP, the story looks different.
Core Crown expenses were around 33.6 percent of GDP in 2024 and about 32.6 percent in 2025, with a similar percentage forecast for 2026.
So National can reasonably say it has restrained spending relative to the size of the economy.
And Labour can reasonably point out that the Government is still spending more dollars.
Both statements can be true.
Imagine the farm.
If our expenses rise from $80,000 to $90,000 while farm income rises from $200,000 to $250,000, our spending has increased by $10,000.
But it has fallen from 40 percent to 36 percent of our income.
Did spending go up?
Yes.
Did spending fall?
As a proportion of income, also yes.
Welcome to politics.
This is why Granny has acquired a new rule:
Never ask simply, “Did it go up or down?”
Ask:
What measure? Compared with what? Over what period?
Two ledgers
And this brings me to something rather more important.
There is the Government Ledger.
Tax. Spending. Debt. Deficits.
Then there is the People Ledger.
Jobs. Housing. Food. Healthcare. Income. Security.
And between them sits the economy — businesses, wages, investment, construction and growth.
They are connected.
But they are not the same thing.
Fiscal ratios matter. Governments have to pay their bills.
But fiscal ratios don’t house and feed people.
They don’t put dinner on the table.
They don’t build the house.
And they don’t give somebody a job.
So whenever a Government tells us an outcome has improved, perhaps we should ask whether the thing being measured is actually the outcome people experience.
The spreadsheet isn’t wrong. It just isn’t the whole story.
What happened to “less debt”?
This one is harder to wriggle around.
Net core Crown debt was about $182.2 billion in 2025, or around 41.9 percent of GDP.
Budget 2026 forecast it at about:
$191.8 billion in 2026.
$216.5 billion in 2027.
$232.4 billion in 2028.
The debt-to-GDP ratio is forecast to peak at about 46.1 percent before declining.
There is some genuinely better news within that.
The forecast debt peak improved compared with the previous forecast, and by May 2026 net core Crown debt was about $2.8 billion better than Budget forecast for that point.
That deserves acknowledgement.
But:
Reducing a forecast of future borrowing is not the same thing as reducing the debt we already have.
National promised less debt.
The debt stock has increased and is forecast to increase further before it falls.
That isn’t political spin.
That’s the ledger.
And those balanced books?
National’s 2023 fiscal plan forecast a return to surplus in 2026/27.
Budget 2026 now forecasts an OBEGALx deficit of about $11.4 billion in 2026/27, with surplus forecast for 2028/29.
Two fiscal years later.
Perhaps it will happen.
I hope it does.
But forecast chickens lay an awful lot of eggs.
Granny would quite like to count them after they’ve hatched.
Now let’s open the People Ledger
Because if the recipe is working, surely something should eventually appear on the plate.
Jobs
In the June 2026 quarter, unemployment was 5.6 percent, with about 171,000 people unemployed.
Underutilisation — which captures a broader group of people wanting more work — was 13.8 percent.
There are signs of improvement.
Employment increased during the quarter. More than 40,000 new homes were consented in the year to June, up 19 percent on the year before.
So I am not going to tell you nothing is improving.
It is.
The recovery may have started, but a lot of New Zealanders are still waiting for it to reach them.
And that matters when we talk about beneficiaries.
At June 2026, about 218,500 people were receiving Jobseeker Support.
But around 98,000 of them were in the health-condition or disability category.
And of those people subject to benefit obligations, roughly 98 percent were in the Green category under the Traffic Light System.
More than 21,000 people exited benefits into employment during the June quarter — an improvement on the year before.
Good.
We should want more of that.
But it leaves Granny with a fairly basic observation:
You can’t sanction somebody into a job that doesn’t exist.
Food
During the June 2026 quarter, MSD made 542,766 hardship payments worth $176.6 million.
More than 312,000 were Special Needs Grants for food, worth almost $31 million.
Those aren’t 312,000 different hungry families. A person can receive more than one grant.
But food grants were still up on the same quarter a year earlier.
The Government itself acknowledges that demand for food support remains elevated, largely because of continuing cost-of-living pressures, and Budget 2026 provided another $15 million for food-support programmes.
That’s necessary help.
But surely the measure of a successful economy isn’t how efficiently we fund the ambulance at the bottom of the grocery bill.
The goal must be fewer people needing emergency help to eat.
Again:
The spreadsheet isn’t wrong. It just isn’t the whole story.
Housing
Here’s another measurement problem.
The Government has achieved a substantial reduction in households living in emergency housing.
There were 3,141 households in emergency housing in December 2023.
By June 2025, that had fallen to 501.
That’s a significant result.
Through Priority One, more than 1,000 households, including more than 2,200 children, had also been placed into social housing.
Those are real people getting homes.
That deserves a tick.
But:
Emergency housing is a programme. Homelessness is a condition.
Access to emergency housing was tightened in 2024, and MSD’s own policy analysis warned that tightening access before enough alternative housing was available could increase rough sleeping, people living in cars and overcrowding.
Meanwhile, Auckland City Mission reported more than 800 people sleeping rough in Auckland, almost double its September 2024 count.
That doesn’t prove Government policy caused the increase.
It does mean we should be very careful about declaring homelessness solved because one administrative number has fallen.
If far fewer households are in emergency housing, but organisations on the ground are seeing more people sleeping rough, have we solved homelessness — or have we partly changed where we count it?
That’s the Measurement Stick Rule again.
There was never only one recipe
This is where my politics come in.
I lean left.
Not because Labour is always right.
It isn’t.
Not because every public programme works beautifully.
They don’t.
And certainly not because Labour gets to hide its own inconvenient numbers behind a nice red sign.
It doesn’t.
I lean left because I believe government has a responsibility that goes beyond balancing its books.
People need to be housed.
Fed.
Healthy.
Educated.
Able to work.
And given a reasonable chance to build a life.
We have heard repeatedly that New Zealand had to make difficult decisions.
Perhaps we did.
But there was never only one recipe.
There wasn’t.
Governments choose their priorities. And, just as importantly, they choose who is asked to carry the burden of those choices.
A tax cut is a choice.
A public-service cut is a choice.
Restoring mortgage-interest deductibility to landlords is a choice.
Tightening access to support is a choice.
They may be defensible choices.
They may even produce benefits later.
But they are choices — not unavoidable laws of economics.
But was all that pain inevitable?
This is the question I keep coming back to.
National says difficult decisions were necessary to restore fiscal discipline and create the conditions for growth.
Maybe some were.
But were these particular decisions necessary?
Was the disruption to employment and construction unavoidable?
Was squeezing public services the only route?
Was restoring full mortgage-interest deductibility for property investors while other New Zealanders struggled the only sensible allocation of those eggs?
Or were these political choices about where the burden should fall?
Difficult decisions don’t happen in a vacuum.
Governments decide where the difficulty falls.
When someone on a low income is choosing between food, rent and the doctor, a policy decision isn’t merely sitting inside a spreadsheet.
It lands in somebody’s kitchen.
Fiscal responsibility matters.
But so does fiscal humanity.
And if we are going to be asked to judge this economic experiment by the recovery it eventually produces, surely we are also entitled to account for the full cost of getting there.
How many jobs were lost?
How many businesses disappeared?
What happened to construction?
What happened to people’s health, housing and ability to feed themselves?
Which services were diminished?
Which costs simply moved from the Government’s ledger onto councils, charities, families and individuals?
And then comes the question I don’t think we ask nearly enough:
Could we have reached the same destination by a less damaging route?
Because the casualties belong in the accounts too.
So, was Kieran right?
Mostly.
National did cut personal income taxes.
Government spending has fallen from its recent peak when measured as a share of GDP.
Emergency-housing numbers have fallen dramatically.
Some fiscal results have come in better than forecast.
And there are early signs that parts of the economy are recovering.
Those things deserve ticks.
But they do not erase the rest of the ledger.
Debt has increased, not decreased.
The surplus National forecast for 2026/27 is now forecast for 2028/29.
Unemployment remains high.
Food hardship remains substantial.
And some of the better outcomes we’re now being promised remain exactly that — promises and forecasts.
We cannot count tomorrow’s recovery as payment for yesterday’s pain until it actually arrives.
There is one part of Kieran’s speech that remains in Granny’s question-mark column.
He said the Government had borrowed more than the previous Labour Government did if COVID borrowing was excluded.
That may turn out to be defensible.
But “borrowing” can mean several different things in Crown accounts, and COVID comparisons depend heavily on the period and measure chosen.
Until I can see the working behind that particular claim, it doesn’t get a tick.
Being broadly right doesn’t give anyone — Labour included — permission to chuck an attractive number into a speech without showing the homework.
But after doing all this homework, I find myself less interested in which politician won the argument than in the choices underneath it.
National didn’t inherit an easy economy.
Something had to be done.
But “something had to be done” doesn’t mean there was only one thing that could be done.
National chose its recipe — and its choices helped determine where the burden would fall.
On public services.
On people who lost jobs.
On beneficiaries facing tighter rules.
On families already struggling with food, housing and healthcare.
At the same time, it chose tax relief and restored full mortgage-interest deductibility for residential property investors.
National will argue those decisions were necessary to restore fiscal discipline and eventually produce growth.
Granny is entitled to look at who was hurting while we waited and say: I don’t think that was the only choice. I don’t think it was a fair one.
And I’m angry.
I’m angry that so much of the burden appears to have fallen on people who had the least room to carry it.
I’m angry that hardship can become another line on a fiscal spreadsheet while we wait for forecasts of better times to come true.
And I’m angry because, after doing all this homework, I still haven’t found evidence that this particular distribution of the pain was inevitable.
Maybe National can make that case.
But “we had to make difficult decisions” isn’t the same thing as proving these were the right decisions — or that the right people were asked to bear them.
Labour is offering another recipe.
Among its proposals are free GP visits and prescriptions, apprenticeship and small-business measures, a New Zealand Future Fund, and a 28 percent capital gains tax on gains made after 1 July 2027 from covered residential investment and commercial property when sold. The family home, farms, KiwiSaver, shares, businesses and inheritances are excluded.
I prefer quite a lot of that because it asks a different question about where the burden should fall. It asks more from some of those who gain from investment property, while putting more into healthcare, skills and the things that help people participate in the economy.
And that isn’t necessarily a one-way transfer from those at the top to those further down. A healthier, better-skilled population with secure jobs and money to spend creates customers, workers, businesses and opportunities. The benefits can travel back up the economic ladder too.
To me, that isn’t simply spending. It is investment in people — and people are part of the economy too.
But preference isn’t proof.
Can Labour raise what it says it will raise? Can it deliver what it promises? What happens to debt and the books along the way?
Labour still gets the calculator.
A different recipe still has to add up.
So the calculator stays on the table.
Who are you collecting the eggs from?
What are you spending them on?
What are you borrowing?
What are you building for tomorrow?
And, perhaps most importantly:
Who is carrying the burden today?
Six eggs.
Two ledgers.
A great many promises.
And somewhere in all those billions, percentages, forecasts and fiscal ratios are actual New Zealanders trying to live their lives.
So before we congratulate anybody on the recipe, Granny has one final question.
Who got breakfast?