Jason Walls: Newstalk ZB political editor recaps Chris Luxon's pre-Budget speech

With two weeks left to go until Budget day, Chris Luxon addressed a crowd at a BusinessNZ event in Auckland today.

Luxon reiterated that the Government won't be splashing the cash this year - and claimed the Finance Minister was right to promise it won't be a Budget lolly scramble.

Newstalk ZB political editor Jason Walls says this wasn't the kind of pre-Budget announcement that would make the nation sit up and take notice - and that was by design.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Jason Wool's our political edises with us.

Speaker 2 (00:02):
Hey, Jason, good afternoon.

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Did you find anything in that pre budget speech that
was at all interesting?

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Not really, But I honestly think that that was probably
the point of it. It wasn't designed to set the
world on fire. It wasn't designed to really make everybody
sit up and think, hang on a second, I've really
got to pay attention on May twenty second, because there
could be something big in there for me. In fact,
Chris Luxan took a bit of a page out of
Nikola Willis's book that Budget twenty twenty five won't be

(00:28):
a lolly scramble. So she said that last week. It's
not going to be a lolly scramble, and it's just
playing down expectations. The whole sort of ethos of the
government so far this year has been things are cooked.
The budget isn't going to be as good as we
thought it was going to be because of the mix
of the economy and the books not being as rosy
as they thought that they would be. So I don't

(00:50):
expect any major big ticket items. And that's exactly kind
of the message that Luxen was giving today. It's the
exact same message that Nicola Willis was is being conveying
as well. There has been a little bit more, you know,
I say, there's not a lot of money in the budget.
We all know that there's a one point three billion
dollars operating allowance, a more money coming into it. But

(01:10):
there's a slightly more wiggle room now with these pay
equity changes. But we're gonna have to wait and see
how much that actually is.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
At the budget.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
It is the case that the number of new initiatives
and this budget would not have been possible without some
of the savings we are making.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
Jason, it's more than ten billion, isn't it. Have you
managed to confirm that yet?

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Well? I read Audrey Young's piece this morning, and those
are the numbers that she was doing. What she was saying, well,
she was basically looking back into previous budgets and talking
about how much it costed in previous years in terms
of what was against sort of the pay equity claims there,
and how much it would be going forward. I'm just
looking at the numbers now from Audrey and she says

(01:51):
that the numbers going forward are in Just give me
two seconds here, Audrey. She says, right, She says that
in last year's budget, the figure for the current year
was three point seven billion, followed by four point six
billion for the next year, four point three for the

(02:11):
following and then four point three. That's about seventeen billion
dollars over four years, is what she said.

Speaker 1 (02:17):
I mean, that is huge, isn't It's a.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
Lot of change.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
I take your point about lux and doing boring economic
speeches and that that it's designed to kind of, you know,
underwhelm and stuff. But surely, surely he wants to do
Surely today was an opportunity to say something to take
the headlines back from the pay equity thing, which continues
for day three and which is going to kick off
tomorrow with protests, right, wouldn't you Yeah?

Speaker 2 (02:40):
I mean yeah you could. There could have been something
in there that would help shift the narrative. I think
that he thought that that was what was going to
happen with the social media ban, which was absolutely a
dead squib because obviously it was a members bill rather
than a government bill, which ultimately has got what one
in forty five one and fifty chants have actually been
pulled from the ballot. So you know, he could have

(03:01):
done something big today to shift the narrative, but he's
obviously decided that he wants to sort of keep things cool,
calm and collected as it were for the budget.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
Listen that right track wrong track thing in the Taxpayers
Union Curio poll. Do we know what's what that's down to?

Speaker 2 (03:15):
The right track wrong track? We can. It's it's an
interesting one because you know, it focuses quite a lot
on the political party. But the right track wrong track
is something that has been in focus for a while.
So we'll get those that information to you as we
have it. I think my colleague Sophie Trigger has been
about that all day or since we got the numbers
coming out. But in terms of the numbers itself, I mean,

(03:37):
Labor Party is up quite substantially. We seeing them jump
about three point four points to thirty three point two percent.
This hasn't come at a time when the pay equity
stuff has been in the news. This was for covering
April thirtieth to May fourth, So we're not going that
doesn't be it's not reflected in here. We're gonna have
to wait a little bit to see what impact it's

(04:00):
going to have. But if I was a Polster I'd
be out on the field now looking exactly at that.

Speaker 1 (04:03):
Yeah, totally, Jason, Thanks very much, mate, appreciate it. That's
Jason Wall's News talk Z'B political editor. For more from
Hither Duplessy Allen Drive, listen live to News talks 'B
from four pm weekdays, or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.