Email Nicola Willis

Prior to the election, Nicola Willis, rightly called out the previous Labour Government for its excessive and wasteful public spending. Under Grant Robertson’s watch, public spending increased by 80% from 2017 with little or no improvement of public services like health and education.

Now, as Minister of Finance, Ms Willis is barely trimming the sides. Despite inheriting an enormous deficit and ticking time bomb Ms Willis is asking just some government departments to cut a measly 6.5 to 7.5%. She's tasked the CEOs – they very people who presided over these bureaucratic blowouts – to suggest where these savings could be made.

We say Ms Willis needs to go further and faster and cut the bloated bureaucracy back to down size to stop New Zealand's government debt continuing to blow out of the control.

Send an email to the Minister of Finance (you can customise our suggested wording below).

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Please do more to cut wasteful overspending

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Dear Minister Willis,

In the lead up to the election, National promised New Zealanders that you would rein in the astronomical increase in public spending that happened under Grant Robertson and stop wasteful spending.

As you put it in your own pre-election Fiscal Plan: “Labour inherited a very tidy set of books from National in 2017. But since then, Labour has increased spending by 80 per cent and seen debt blow out from $5 billion in 2019 to $104 billion in the latest forecast.

Similarly, Christopher Luxon talked throughout the campaign about the significant growth in back office bureaucracy with an increase of over 15,000 more core public servants under the last Government.

Some of the government departments you identified for savings have more than doubled in size since 2017, and as you pointed out on the campaign trail, the collective operational expenditure of those agencies has grown by 60%.

Ms Willis, 6.5 to 7.5% simply is not enough.

What’s worse, you appear to be having departmental CEO’s lead the process and deliver ‘proposals’ on how best to reduce their budgets.  That is tasking the foxes to guard the hen house and is politically dangerous.

We need only see recent news reports to see how bureaucrats can (and will) threaten politically sensitive frontline services to understand how they will protect their patches – and the empires the same CEOs have created.

It should be Ministers going line by line through the statements of every public department to find the back office savings that can be made.

Minister, the official New Zealand Debt Clock ( www.debtclock.nz ) is rocketing ahead. Already, the average Kiwi household owes more than $86,500 thanks to the last government. It’s our kids and grandkids who will be paying it back. I urge you to stick to your word, go harder, and reduce government spending back to an affordable level in order to balance the books and stop the Debt Clock.

Yours sincerely,

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