Budget 2026: Punching Down.
Kieran McAnulty and Chris Bishop go head-to-head.
Way down deep and in my heart
Lies a soul that's torn apart
Tell me, tell me what you're after
I just want to get there faster
Song: Billy Corgan.
We’ve had the Black Budget and the Mother of All Budgets. National says this will be a Tough Love Budget, while Labour’s Barbara Edmonds has called it the No Love Budget.
There have been a Chewing-Gum Budget and the Block-of-Cheese Budget. If anything, this is the Ambulance-at-the-Bottom-of-the-Cliff Budget.
It’s great to see Hata Hone receive more funding, although it’s still farcical that they depend on donations and aren’t fully funded by the government, unlike other emergency services.
The problem is that there is nowhere for the Ambulance to go, as our Health System is overloaded, and this budget will probably fail to even maintain per-capita funding, let alone improve services so we can help people before they’ve fallen off a cliff. Undoubtedly, there will be individual ad hoc investments announced that sound like progress.
For example, you might have seen an advertisement on TV featuring a Pacific Island family who discuss how the age for bowel screening has dropped, and so off they toddle to get screened. But it’s absolute garbage as the eligibility age for both Māori and Pasifika people actually rose from 50 to 58 during this term, with the government so set on eliminating anything that favoured one group, regardless of the fact that their need was higher, that they accepted people would die as a direct result.
If anything, this is the Punch in the Face Budget. Certainly, if you’re a public servant or a social housing tenant, this one is hitting you right in the mush.
