From our credit where credit is due file, come on in Grant Robertson.
I am led to believe he has, or had, a quote framed in the entrance to his office that I made about him sometime in the past three years. I said Robertson might well be the saviour of this government.
How prophetic, given what we heard yesterday.
The government set aside about $50 billion to pay for Covid-19 and its carnage. In an update we found there is $14 billion left. The fear among many, was this was set aside for some excellent vote winning expenditure the closer we get to September 19.
Well to his credit, he will not be spending it. It will be put aside in case things turn pear shaped later. So the argument, I am sure, National had lined up that this was a spend thrift government and there was billions about to be tossed at the economy, has been pulled out from under them.
Robertson rolled out his usual comparison trick, find some useless countries and compare them to us.
His point being we started off with debt at 19 percent of GDP. Thanks National by the way.
And we will end up at about 54 percent. That, in anyone's books, is not good, it's not healthy, and may never really be paid back. But he is right, there are those that started off worse than us, and we will still end up a lot better off than many.
But if you do the math, of the $50 billion they put aside with $14 billion left, that $36 billion spent, for a country of 5 million, is a staggering amount of money. A lot of it is welfare based, it's not investment, it's not growth related, it's band-aid sugar money designed to hide the gaping wound.
Some of that will be badly exposed on September 1 when the wage subsidies end. And it's at that point the raw, stark, and brutal nature of the obsession around the health outcome will be laid bare.
But for a government that has tossed a lot of money in bad, unproductive, and politically blatant areas, Robertson deserves every credit, for at least not turning the last $14 billion into an election campaign lolly scramble.