The Puritan Budget: Budget 2026 Punishes the Poor
The Government has shrugged its shoulders and decided: ‘You’re on your own, NZ.’
Budget 2026 cuts fall hardest on state tenants, students and beneficiaries, while the Government finds money for its own political priorities. This is not discipline. It is abandonment dressed up as virtue.
By refusing to tax the rich, the Political Right undermines confidence in public services by underfunding them. They then manufacture Debt Monsters, so the electorate give up hoping for more from their Government and a better standard of living through fully funded public services.
Take Health.
It costs $1.4 billion to fund the current system. We need $2 billion per year to fully fund it, the Government has offered $1.3 billion – The Government are trumpeting providing less than what it currently costs as a social good!
Look at Education, half a billion each year, but $100 million of that is to implement Erica Stanford’s controversial curriculum so it’s a weak boast to claim you’re putting half a billion into education when 20% of that is budgeted for an ideological ram raid!
There are a few flecks of gold: The increase in Māori media funding, the $50,000 to the Rockquest and extra funding for musical instruments at schools were brief respites, but the scale of the cuts flushes those tiny flecks of gold away.
Even the Banking Levy was a joke. The banks made between $7 billion – $8 billion in profit last year.
They will pay $70.9 million a year by 2029/30.
That’s crumbs.
The irony is that despite crying that they are paying for the borrowing of Labour’s COVID response, this Government is actually borrowing more than Jacinda and Grant did!
By the end of the decade we will be $364.1 billion in debt thanks to this Government and those numbers come from the Taxpayers’ Union, a mouthpiece for the right!
By refusing to tax the rich, we are left with ever diminishing policy options.
I say this is a puritan budget because the Government only wants to help people in work, everyone else outside of that: carers of disabled people, state tenants, beneficiaries, solo parents, anyone NOT in work gets punished.
This budget helped no one while piously punishing the poor.
And David Parker had designed a tax to tax wealth on people having more than 10 million, what did Labour do?
Every thing I predicted before the last election along with women bashing ,gay bashing ,kid bashing and brown bashing .They promised to get NZ back on track and have kept that promise by getting us back on the track in the race to the bottom of the cliff .
Sadly the lemmings,voters,will be happy to jump off the cliff with them .