Labour leader Chris Hipkins dismisses criticism of Covid-19 overspending as ‘Treasury spin’
Labour leader Chris Hipkins is dismissing what he calls “Treasury spin” after its analysts said the last government overspent during the Covid-19 pandemic against official advice.
Treasury’s 2025 Long Term Insights Briefing, released this week, calculated the total cost of the pandemic at about $66 billion, or roughly 20.4 percent of GDP.
The report said Treasury advocated for more targeted support in late 2020 into 2021 and explicitly warned “against any further stimulus” by Budget 2022.
But responding to questions from RNZ on Friday, Hipkins was unapologetic about his party’s economic response to Covid-19.
“We prioritised keeping people alive and keeping people in jobs,” he said.
“I’m never going to claim that we got everything perfect… but prioritising jobs and prioritising lives was the right thing to do.”
Hipkins claimed other countries also spent up large with the same objectives, but Treasury said New Zealand was near the top of the chart when considering spending as a percentage of GDP.
“If you listen to the Treasury spin, then you’re going to get one view,” Hipkins told RNZ. “If you speak to other economists, you’ll get a different view.
“Our job was to support New Zealanders through the global pandemic, making sure that we saved lives and kept people’s jobs, and we were very successful in doing that: one of the lowest death rates in the world, one of the lowest rates of unemployment in the world, and one of the fastest rates of economic growth in the world.”
About half of the total Covid-19 response cost was directly tied to the pandemic, such as the wage subsidy scheme, or health initiatives like vaccination, contact tracing and quarantine.
The remainder went to a wide range of initiatives like: “tax changes, training schemes, housing construction, shovel-ready infrastructure projects, increases to welfare benefits, the Small Business Cashflow Scheme, Jobs for Nature, additional public housing places and school lunches”.
Treasury said that had “a lagged impact on the economy and proved difficult to unwind in later years”.
But Hipkins said Treasury had mischaracterised some of that spending, such as the provision of distance-learning for school students.
“Making sure that kids could keep learning while they were at home during lockdown was an essential Covid-19 expense,” Hipkins said.
The report comes during a prolonged economic downturn, with both the government and opposition parties trading blame over its cause.
Doesn’t Treasury have an altar to Milton Friedman in their basement?
What a surprise that Death Cult Capitalism had a problem with a Labour Government putting public health before profit margins.
All those companies and agencies that took the wage subsidy and complain about it now.
All the major decisions had National Party support.
Playing Captain Hindsight is tedious.
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There’s a lesson here = hindsight is so much more effective when deployed in advance.
Of course Hipkins should and has justified the Covid spend. Had they not taken the action they did, or worse still had this lame CoC been in power, every one of you would have had a friend or family member die. Again shouldn’t lives be more important than dollars – the great God Money? Then, many of those, whose businesses and jobs were subsidised and “saved”, went and kicked Labour into touch. So damn typical of today’s society. Let’s also mention the scurrilous who tried to rip off the system, incl. some large companies, and are still to reimburse New Zealand, not Labour, us the taxpayers. Can you now not see how ugly and greedy so many have become? Willis can bleat all she likes, the CoC need to ‘own’ their economic incompetence and stop playing the blame game!
National are full of it as they were calling for more funding for companies, jobs and people needing welfare during covid. And many of the middle class cried out for welfare and then said it was too hard to get and not enough money for them to survive on, so we ended up with a two-tier welfare system not ideal or fair. Now some of these jerks who got help put the boot in.
Lol. Still approximately 35% of the population want to return to “putting it on the card” and the smug hermit nation.
We are in the middle of the hangover the morning after. This is what happens when you cheer on the politics of the team of 5 million, “novid”, podium of truth and mask madness.
This is on you little Aotearoans. Call me Cassandra.
You have already admitted to being sectarian on this issue so who gives a fuck what you think you feral anti-vaxxer?
I do.
Is Frank tT Croaking Cassandra = Michael Reddell?
We need able Economists minus rudeness (which Mr Reddell was, indiscriminately perhaps worse).
There is the perfect arrangement out there for our Economy.
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