Stop thief!

The Herald reports:

Finance Minister Grant Robertson padded Budget 2022 with $2.05 billion from the remnants of the Covid-19 Response and Recovery Fund contrary to his undertakings that the enormous pot of emergency money be limited to direct, pandemic-related spending and over the Treasury’s objections. …

Proactively released Treasury documents show the money was tipped directly into Budget 2022, against the Treasury’s advice, and uncounted in the Budget allowance and consequently obscured from New Zealanders as new spending. …

Former deputy chief economic adviser to the Treasury, Tony Burton, said the Government’s move was an “abuse of process” as it is laid out in the Public Finance Act and that it had effectively turned Covid-19 emergency funds into “an election slush fund that will force the Government after 2023 to either put up taxes, borrow or cut spending”.

This is terrible transparency from the Government, and is fiscally reckless.

They used the one-off Covid fund to fund non-Covid activities in the 2022 budget. That was bad enough, but what is worse is that they have made no allowance for future funding of them, so have created an unfunded liability.

Basically it is a poison pill for the next Government.