Ruth Richardson has called for a Office for Budget Responsibility<\/a>, like the one in the United Kingdom.<\/p>\nAcross the political divide, former Prime Minister Helen Clark agrees.<\/p>\n
Reinhardt, who has been in the role for nearly two years and previously worked at Treasury, said juggling the workload for a relatively small organisation is always a challenge.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe actually have a prioritisation framework online which parliamentarians can see,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause of the confidentiality of our work, we don\u2019t talk to anyone about any of the individual costings, but we are going to work on how do we make sure we communicate really regularly with our parliamentarians about where their particular request is up to, because as the demand has grown substantially, we have to do more of that prioritisation.\u201d<\/p>\n
They also carry out quite a bit of research and provide an educational role of sorts, providing information to MPs and Senators on how to understand the Budget, how to read the Budget and producing analytical or educational reports.<\/p>\n
In New Zealand, some of the criticism of the idea is how to ensure any costings unit is strictly independent.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe way we were set up under our legislation, we worked to a parliamentary committee, and that\u2019s a joint standing committee … made up of both Senate and Reps members from across Government,\u201d Reinhardt said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe present our work programme to that committee and I appear before them regularly to talk through the work we\u2019re undertaking.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat committee then has the ability after each election to call for a review of the PBO, and they appoint someone to undertake that review.\u201d<\/p>\n
The estimates are not shared between parties, or even individual MPs.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn some cases, we might be doing similar costings for people from the same party and they may not always be aware of it, but we treat that confidential confidentiality aspect very, very seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not compulsory for parties to get their policies costed.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt this stage for Australia, we\u2019re in the early stages of the parliamentary cycle, we\u2019ll often have very large requests … you might have 16 options in this particular area of the tax system or the health system or the education system,\u201d Reinhardt said.<\/p>\n
The unit will then work through, with parties, on why particular assumptions are being made.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a very strong, clear idea that we aren\u2019t providing policy advice, so it is just factual information.\u201d<\/p>\n
Recent costing advice to MPs includes the cost of property investor tax breaks and the cost of increasing the size of Parliament.<\/p>\n
Any advice for New Zealand?<\/p>\n
\u201cFor us, the big things are that we have really good access to data and models, from departments,\u201d Reinhardt said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re a relatively small organisation. And that kind of organisation costing everything from health, education, tax, social security, that\u2019s a huge number of areas, we couldn\u2019t do it with such a small group of people without access to the data and models from departments.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, the things to consider are what is useful for New Zealand, what\u2019s the gap, what are the things that parliament will find most useful.\u201d<\/p>\n
Katie Bradford is a Senior Correspondent at the Herald. She has been a broadcast journalist for over 20 years and was based in the press gallery for 10 years. She specialises in politics, business and Auckland issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Our closest neighbour has one, which might be a possible model if New Zealand chose to introduce a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":493717,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1443,9526,24812,11357,4187,124,193092,5903,79166,37078,82477,27277,221,117,111,43,139,3591,69,30503,18833,418,13026,14905,247275,379,80],"class_list":["post-493716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-about","tag-another","tag-australias","tag-budget","tag-cost","tag-could","tag-debates","tag-election","tag-endless","tag-fiscal","tag-gaps","tag-holes","tag-how","tag-new","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-numbers","tag-nz","tag-promises","tag-round","tag-shows","tag-watchdog","tag-whether","tag-yawning","tag-year","tag-zealand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=493716"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493716\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/493717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=493716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=493716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=493716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}