Unfunded policies and commercially sensitive fiscal risks that weren’t included in the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update total billions of dollars over the next four years, Finance Minister Nicola Willis said on Monday.
Within a day of being sworn in, Willis warned that the state of the Government’s books was far more dire than had been forecast before the election. At Monday’s post-Cabinet press conference, she came with a few more details, though the country will have to wait until December 20 to hear the full extent of the allegations.
Fiscal cliffs – where policies that are expected to continue, such as free school lunches, aren’t budgeted for beyond a certain date – and fiscal risks which weren’t publicly quantified because of commercial sensitivity are to blame for the nasty surprise that Willis said she received after becoming the minister.
“In some cases, this practice is extremely disingenuous. This is because it makes the books look better in future years even though it is highly unlikely ministers genuinely intended to stop funding those programmes,” she said.
The man in charge of those decisions, Grant Robertson, rubbished Willis’ claims.
“This is a desperate diversion from a Government that cannot pay for its tax cuts,” he said.
“For the time I’ve been around in politics, governments have used different types of funding. Some funding gets baselined, some becomes short-term time-limited funding, some of it’s for a specific project and then it lapses. All...
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