That change of language was formally shown in Labour\u2019s fiscal plan on Sunday, with the document saying it is now the party\u2019s \u201cobjective\u201d to have spending and revenue \u201cbelow\u201d 33%.<\/p>\n
When the Herald sought on Sunday afternoon to check this language against what Labour had in its fiscal strategy, a webpage that previously hosted the strategy came up instead with an error page.<\/p>\n
The Herald queried this with Labour and was told the page was being updated to include the new fiscal plan. <\/p>\n
The party said the language of the fiscal objective had been made \u201cclearer\u201d as it was being reported as \u201ca target rather than a ceiling\u201d.<\/p>\n
Shortly after the Herald\u2019s questions, the fiscal strategy page went back online. However, as of deadline, it didn\u2019t include the fiscal plan and it continued to say Labour wanted spending and revenue \u201cmaintained at around 33%\u201d.<\/p>\n
Labour announced its fiscal plan on Sunday. Photo \/ Audrey Young<\/p>\n
National finance spokeswoman Nicola Willis told the Herald \u201cthese are not serious people\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust a few weeks ago, they were upfront and admitted that they were targeting increased spending and tax at 33%,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow they\u2019ve taken a different course and are saying, well, let\u2019s just hide that. That wasn\u2019t a very popular thing to say. Let\u2019s just pretend our spending promises don\u2019t have price tags. This beggars belief.\u201d<\/p>\n
The reason this matters is that there is a significant difference between spending and revenue being at the 33% level and having it even slightly smaller. A change of just one percentage point can be a difference of billions of dollars.<\/p>\n
Labour\u2019s fiscal plan shows it intends for expenses to be slightly higher than what the Government was forecasting in its pre-election economic and fiscal update (Prefu), released last week.<\/p>\n
For example, in 2031, the last year of the forecasts, Labour is forecasting expenses of 30.4% of GDP, compared with the 29.8% forecast by the Government.<\/p>\n
In dollar terms, that means Labour expects expenses that year to be about $177 billion, about $3b higher than what the Government is.<\/p>\n
If expenses were pushed to 33% that year, which Labour isn\u2019t planning, expenses would be $192b.<\/p>\n
Jamie Ensor is the NZ Herald\u2019s chief political reporter, based in the press gallery at Parliament. He was previously a TV reporter and digital producer in the Newshub press gallery office. He was a finalist in 2025 for Political Journalist of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"That change of language was formally shown in Labour\u2019s fiscal plan on Sunday, with the document saying it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":620643,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2246,103334,806,249458,14229,57023,28447,17246,5903,19959,37078,42,6721,776,700,1362,71084,43,20484,5006,73812,90,28630,4762,384,151635,7493,134833,312,1238,8262,656,40,38,41,39,13797,3114,792,102],"class_list":["post-620642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-2246","tag-ambitions","tag-as","tag-aspect","tag-changing","tag-clearer","tag-describe","tag-document","tag-election","tag-error","tag-fiscal","tag-headlines","tag-labour","tag-language","tag-latest","tag-made","tag-nationals","tag-news","tag-nicola","tag-not","tag-objective","tag-on","tag-page","tag-party","tag-people","tag-preelection","tag-revenue","tag-revised","tag-says","tag-serious","tag-spending","tag-strategy","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-used","tag-website","tag-willis","tag-with"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620642","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=620642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620642\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/620643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=620642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=620642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}