Imprest Supply (First for 2026/27) Bill

Imprest Supply (First for 2026/27) Bill Second Reading Hon NICOLA WILLIS (Minister of Finance) (21:28): I move, That the Appropriation (2025/26 Supplementary Estimates) Bill and the Imprest Supply (First for 2026/27) Bill be now read a second time. It was only a few weeks ago that I stood here to deliver Budget 2026, and now the House turns once again to dealing with the approval of Government expenditure. The imprest supply bill provides for the first three months of the 2026-27 financial year, providing authority for Government spending until the appropriation Estimates bill is passed. As its name reveals, this is the first imprest supply bill for the year. There are, of course, two bills we are debating here today. The second bill is the Appropriation (2025/26 Supplementary Estimates) Bill, which looks backwards at Supplementary Estimates for the year that’s been. Can I thank the members of the Finance and Expenditure Committee for their prompt scrutiny of and report back to the House on the Supplementary Estimates—great committee; excellent chair of that committee. There is not much to say about these two bills other than, once again, an opportunity to remind members of this House from whence the funding for the decisions that we make comes. There does seem to have been quite a break-out in recent times of a belief that when Parliament appropriates money, it can appropriate it from the ether. In fact, when we, in these bills, appropriate money, we take it from one place, and that place is the back pockets of hard-working New Zealanders. When we make decisions to spend money, we have a solemn duty to those New Zealanders to ensure that the way we are spending it is not only maximising outcomes today but is also proportionate to what may be required tomorrow, and that is to remind everyone that the country is in deficit. To get out of deficit and to climb over the debt mountain that we are in, it is essential that we spend very carefully indeed, but it’s also essential that we grow the economy. Growing the economy requires us to make this an easier place to do business and for work and effort to be rewarded—and that is a particular message for Julie Anne Genter, whose party seems to think that the way we will make ourselves wealthier is by saying goodbye to all those who have created jobs, incomes, and opportunities for the rest of us. The two bills stand as they are. They reflect this Government’s ongoing approach to fiscal discipline, to managing taxpayers’ money wisely, to growing our economy, and to ensuring that New Zealand can be a more affordable country and a place where people can get ahead with rising incomes, with wages that rise faster than prices and in a sustainable way, with public services that they can rely on, and with a Government that takes very careful care of their precious dollars. DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is that the motion be agreed to. Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour) (21:31): Madam Speaker, thank you for this opportunity to speak on this legislation, which is the two bills that we are discussing tonight. They’re actually, in many ways, highly technical bills. Of course, imprest supply, as the Minister of Finance has just told us, enables the Government to actually pay its bills for the next few months, until the official Budget bill is passed, and so that’s a very technical thing to do. The Supplementary Estimates are a little different. The Supplementary Estimates come from last year’s Budget. Last year, the Minister of Finance set the Budget, the House debated it and passed her Budget—albeit with some of the House voting against it, as is usually the case—and that Budget was what gave the Government the authority to spend money and it was then what gave, from Ministers through to departments, the capacity for the departments, ministries, and Government agencies to engage in the work that they’re supposed to engage in. But as it turns out, in setting a Budget in May 2025 for the year ending 30 June 2026, things come up and things happen. Stuff changes and the Government does need to respond to events, and also people make mistakes and sometimes those need to be corrected. At other times, it just simply can’t be forecast exactly what money might be spent and how it might need to be spent, and some of that money is not actually the sort of money where there can just be put a cap on it. This bill, in a sense, is the House authorising that expenditure in arrears, instead of doing it in advance. Now, again, there’s no problem with doing that. This House is entirely capable of doing that, and this is a regular process that happens every year. But for those at home to get a real sense of what might be going on, what we’re doing in this bill is thinking of a circumstance. Say, for example, there might be a budget for an overseas trip of $33,000 and the Minister might in the event spend $63,000, and this would be a way of authorising that expenditure and ensuring that it was actually authorised by the House. There are other sorts of bits of information that we need to go through that I will go through at present. The Minister made a very interesting point, and I do want to address it before going into some of the detail in the imprest supply bill. She said that Governments take money out of the back pockets of hard-working New Zealanders, and so it is the “solemn duty” of the Government to spend that money carefully and seriously and to take very due regard for it. Well, yes, I do agree with that sentiment, but I think it is a very thin sentiment as to what Governments do. It is a very narrow construction of what Governments are doing when they ask New Zealanders to contribute to the common pot and when they spend that money for the common good. Another way of thinking about what goes on with the imprest supply bill and with the Budget bill is that it is about us, as representatives of New Zealand and as representatives of New Zealanders, trying to work out how best to work together as a country to achieve the goals we want to achieve as a country and how best to raise the money and engage in the activities that further those goals. There’s a real sense—I guess that I’m going to characterise the two positions. There is the position—the rather thin position set out by the Minister of Finance—that New Zealanders pay for services from their Government. I think the rather better way to think of the Budget, and the rather better way to think of what it is we do as a Parliament, is to think in terms of us as all being in this together and to think that New Zealand does better when we look after all of us, and not just the payment for services. What we are doing here is looking after all the citizens of New Zealand. There are two quite different conceptions as to how we’re going about this budgeting process, and I guess the reason that this side of the House prefers the conception that we’re all in this together, that we’re all trying to look after all New Zealanders, and that we’re working out the best ways to do that is because New Zealanders can’t be fired. Every single New Zealander is the object of our concern. From the smallest child to the eldest great-grandfather, these people are all the objects of our concern. Whether they pay tax or not, they all matter to us, and so we do our best for all New Zealanders. It’s a rather richer concept of what we’re doing in this House. I want to turn to the imprest supply bill and some of the actual numbers sort of sitting in here, because the Supplementary Estimates of Appropriation is some 900 pages. It’s quite a lot of detail. We spent some time at Finance and Expenditure Committee having a look at some of that detail and going through some of the issues and asking for explanations. Now, the way that that is achieved, as is usual with the examination in the annual review process for each Government agency, is that some very senior people from various agencies came through to discuss what was sitting in this with us. It was a disappointing process. On the Opposition side, we had some pretty serious questions to ask about some of the items that are included in this imprest supply bill, and, unfortunately, the people who were there, even though they were quite senior people from the various ministries, weren’t really able to give us explanations. So it does suggest that, as a committee—and you’ll see this in our report—we do need to think about how we can do this better in order to give a bit more time for officials to actually come up with some answers to questions, instead of saying, “Ah, we’ll get back to you.” So we’ll see how that goes. I want to talk to the particular issue that we really felt was not addressed, and that is that some of the extra money that has been spent in a particular area, and extra money which was not really all that discretionary for the Government—because it’s money that’s legislated, and it has to be paid. I’m talking about the extra $72 million that was spent on accommodation assistance, the extra $85 million that was spent on New Zealand superannuation, the extra $86 million spent on sole parent support, the extra $41 million spent on student allowances, the extra $69 million spent on the supported living payment, the extra $24 million spent on the winter energy payment, the extra—if I can find it; it’s a little hard to find it in these reports—quite a substantial amount more spent on jobseeker, and so on. We asked the obvious question: why? Why was this extra money being spent? Now, the explanation we were given—actually, it was from the Ministry of Social Development—was that they rely on Treasury estimates and forecasts; once Treasury gives a forecast of job numbers and so on, then they can work out the amount of money that needs to be spent in each area; Treasury did not necessarily forecast the state of the economy and the state of the jobs market and the state of people needing assistance as well as they might have; and once they’d got an updated forecast, they just pumped the numbers through their model and out came the extra spending. Well, that was a very technical answer, but it didn’t get to the “why”, as to why there was extra money being spent on assistance for our fellow New Zealanders—for the people who are in this, together with us. The “why” is actually quite damning of this Government. The “why” is because the economy is not doing well. The “why” is because 20,000 jobs have been lost in construction. If it were only the 20,000 jobs in construction, perhaps we might have managed, but the trouble is that those jobs in construction supported the small businesses in their communities, and so jobs were lost in the small businesses as well. At this stage, we have the highest rate of business insolvencies there has been in 15 years. Why? Because that side of the House undercut the economy. Because they took away some of the mechanisms that were supporting our economy. Now—sure, some changes could have been made. They nevertheless have done it too hard, too fast. They’ve cut too deep. They say that we’ve got to get Government expenditure under control. The trouble with cutting and cutting and cutting is that, sooner or later, cutting and cutting and cutting cuts to the bone, and that Government has cut to the bone. Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green—Rongotai) (21:41): Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I am really glad that the Minister of Finance specifically shouted out me and the Green Party’s recently released tax proposals, because I think it gets to the heart of what’s going on with this Government, which is that fundamentally they don’t understand that what we invest in together is actually what enriches us. They’re totally ideologically committed to a system that enriches a few and that is coming at the expense of the rest of the country. We don’t have to have this trade-off. I don’t know if they genuinely believe what they’re saying, if Nicola Willis genuinely believes she’s doing the responsible thing or whether she’s just so practised at the lines, but I think she fundamentally misunderstands what is going on. Public services, public infrastructure—all of that is fundamental to what we are able to develop as a country economically. She’s saying we can’t afford to invest in these things because we have to rely on some billionaires and the jobs they create. That’s not how this works. Billionaires don’t create jobs. They’re siphoning off the surplus that is generated by all of the workers and the resources of this planet, which, frankly, everybody should have some right to. Simon Court: Who pays the workers’ wages? Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: I think it’s just a paradigm shift. You just have to back up and understand that this current economic system doesn’t need to be like this. It’s not the billionaires that are gifting us jobs. The billionaires are siphoning off a surplus that has been created by all of the people doing the various work they do, some of which is paid and some of which is unpaid. If we go back to former National MP Marilyn Waring, who wrote a really important book—and I still don’t think most of the people on that side of the House have read it or understood it—our GDP, our Government accounts, the whole lot of it, isn’t counting a whole bunch of important work that actually supports the wealth and wellbeing of the country, that supports the commercial economy. It’s the unpaid work, which has predominantly been done by women, and a lot of the caring work that is through the funded sector, which deserves to be paid more, has been underpaid. That was about to be rectified through the pay equity process that the last Government put in place, which National MPs like Nicola Willis and Erica Stanford voted for but then ripped out because they said we couldn’t afford it. They’ve just got it backwards. Government is just what we’re doing together because it’s in our common interests and good. If we want to be better off as a country, we have to invest in our people. We have to invest in our infrastructure. This whole line about how in debt we are is ridiculous because most of the countries we would aspire to be like have more debt relative to their GDP than New Zealand. They’re using some of that to wisely, hopefully, invest in infrastructure that then supports the ongoing activities and livelihoods of the people in those countries. Just look at Japan, for example. The other thing in the Minister of Finance’s speech that I have to point out here is that she claimed we have to be fiscally responsible, that the Government’s being fiscally responsible. It’s just not true. That is factually inaccurate. The Government is proposing to take on even more debt for projects that will not generate growth, that will not do anything to improve the productivity of our country. The Warkworth to Te Hana four-lane expressway, which they’re going to sign us up for in a public-private partnership, which is just a more expensive version of borrowing to deliver a project that will cost—I mean, we already have roads up there, and we need to improve them. We need to make sure the Brynderwyns stop getting closed. Warkworth to Te Hana won’t do that. It’s not going to do anything about that. DEPUTY SPEAKER: Can we bring it back from—you’ve outlined your general theory around policy. Can we actually bring it back to the bill. Thank you. Hon Simeon Brown: She just hates roads. Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: I will respond to the little person over there who’s interjecting, because that’s the best this Government can do: make these weird accusations about hating something, when all I am saying is it’s not worth the money that you’re going to borrow to pay for it. There are better uses of that money to get the outcomes we want for people driving on roads, the outcomes we want for moving people and goods, and the outcomes we want for the people of Northland. If we took the entire four-lane roading project to Northland, it’s the equivalent of $250,000 per household in Northland. We would get much better economic returns from just giving people $250,000, which they could use to pay down their household debt or invest in education and other things that are going to benefit them. The lines that are coming from the Government cannot be taken seriously. I will refer specifically, in the Supplementary Estimates, to the fact that it is evident their “economic plan” is not working, because they’ve had to adjust the funding levels to pay more for jobseeker support because they made decisions. They cancelled a bunch of high-value projects, which meant that public home builds weren’t going to be built. That affected the construction sector. They cancelled a lot of really high-value, low-cost transport projects that would have improved walking and cycling and public transport. All of those things in our towns and cities are actually fundamental to productivity, because the more we can move around without having to pay for cars, and the oil and diesel to run them, that’s a direct productivity gain to New Zealand, not to mention the cleaner air, not to mention the benefits in terms of reduced crashes and fewer emergency department admissions. I think it’s up to 50 percent of emergency department admissions that are related to motor vehicle crashes. Here in the Government’s books, it is obvious that their plan isn’t working, that their ideology has failed, that they are more in touch with extremist, right-wing politicians overseas than they are with ordinary New Zealanders who are trying to make ends meet. When I go out and talk to businesses, they are struggling, and it’s because of decisions made by this Government. In Wellington, business owners certainly know that. They know—they can see the difference since the Government came in—what impact it has had on local business here in Wellington. As much as the Government might mean well, and some of them probably do, and some of them don’t, they’re fundamentally mistaken about what it will take to ensure that every New Zealander has what they need to thrive. Most people know that our tax system is at the heart of that. Our tax system isn’t distributing the benefits of economic growth—when we have it—to enough of the people. The more we distribute it to everyone, the more everyone has a chance, everyone has an opportunity, the better off we’re going to be as a country. We can’t do that if our tax system is funnelling and concentrating wealth in the hands of a smaller and smaller group of people. Those people are not creating jobs; they’re taking the wealth out of the country. DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member has drifted away from the bill again. Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: Madam Speaker, I think what I’m saying is far more relevant to the ordinary people— DEPUTY SPEAKER: Yeah, but it’s not a general debate. Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: Well, it was for the Minister. The Minister did not speak to the specifics of this bill. The Minister attacked me, attacked our tax policy, gave her theory of economic growth— DEPUTY SPEAKER: Yeah, and the member has done that, and, now, I’m asking the member to finish with some details around the actual piece of legislation that she’s got in front of her. Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: This legislation is about the changes in funding relative to what was budgeted, and it’s also enabling temporary authorisation of spending until the Estimates bill is passed. What it will do is nothing for the country, because this Government’s economic ideology is failed, and that’s reflected in the polls. Every time I go out and talk to ordinary New Zealanders out there, they can see more and more that the National Party, the ACT Party, and the New Zealand First Party are speaking for corporate interests, for the very wealthiest people, and they have a blind ideology which is taking us in the wrong direction in almost every area. I am really, really looking forward to seeing the end of this Government. SIMON COURT (ACT) (21:51): The ACT Party supports these bills, the appropriation and the imprest supply bills. These bills finalise spending for the year, and they provide authority for Government to continue operating into the next financial year. You don’t want to be spending money that you don’t have or that you’re not authorised to spend, do you? Now, for ACT, what matters even more is what that money is being used for because for too often in New Zealand, it takes longer to get permission to build something than it takes to build it—whether that’s a house, a road, a power project, or other essential infrastructure. Delays and compliance costs end up being paid for by households and businesses. That’s why I’m proud—as well as being an ACT MP—as the Under-Secretary to the Minister Responsible for RMA Reform, the Minister and I have secured almost $300 million to deliver the implementation of the resource management reform. It’s one thing to stand up in this House and announce policies and say you’re going to tax and say you’re going to spend and signal intent. Well, that’s not what this Government is about; we’re not signalling intent simply by saying we’re going to replace the Resource Management Act with a system based on property rights. We’re putting money down to make sure that the national direction that will tell councils how to plan and how to resolve conflicts between the environment and people who want to build things is funded and in place so the system can begin operating immediately in 2027, and be completed in the next couple of years. It’s also really important that these appropriations support housing infrastructure and energy security. There is significant allocation of capital and other allowances in these bills to major projects. What we’ve seen, over the past decade or so, is that significant infrastructure deficit continued to grow across New Zealand’s public sector infrastructure. If you think about Defence housing, I remember going to visit a friend on the Waiōuru army base in the 1990s, living in what looked like a fairly reasonable, three-bedroom timber house, not too different from any State house you’d see anywhere around New Zealand. But it turns out that Defence personnel and their families are still living in those homes that have been patched up time and again, and it’s no place to bring up a family, particularly in a cold place like Waiōuru, also known as Waiberia, I understand, to people who’ve served there. It’s not really sending a good signal for New Zealand that when we invite the Singapore armed forces, the Australian or the US armed forces, or from Britain or from Fiji—God bless them—to come and live in some draughty barracks with rusty water flying out of the shower head. That’s why I’m proud we’re part of a Government that’s putting significant capital investment into our Defence assets. Now I just want to refer back to the previous member’s speech. Julie Anne Genter, Green MP, said that billionaires are syphoning off a surplus. That member is engaging in the diabolical populist politics of envy. The messages coming from that member—I wouldn’t say that’s unparliamentary language but sadly it’s to be expected from a party which has lost its way and is no longer the primary advocator of environmental values in this country. In fact, that is the coalition Government— Francisco Hernandez: Ha, ha! SIMON COURT: —that is advocating; to reinvest in the conservation estate while that Green member cackles maniacally. We’re going to be reinvesting in the conservation estate, we’re going to be allocating capital—I’ve got it here, I’ve got it here—to the Hump Ridge Great Walk, because one thing that this Government, and particularly the ACT Party supports, is access to our conservation places, and in building infrastructure that makes New Zealand an attractive place for tourists to come and spend money, and for Kiwis thinking, “Should I go overseas on my next trip or should I go to the Hump Ridge Great Walk?” They can hump a backpack on a new track and good on them. Now, billionaires syphoning off surplus. Who are these people, these billionaires that member accused of essentially stealing from New Zealanders? Well, I tell you who they are: they’re people who create jobs. Graeme Hart is one of those billionaires; started work as a tow truck driver, a good sound blue collar job—not that any Green member would have ever had one of those. Having left school at 15, completed an MBA at the University of Otago. His approach was to buy poorly performing businesses; strip out waste and inefficiency. You know, this coalition Government is doing that every day in the public sector, but of course the private sector has to do this to survive. They can’t just rely on taxing people more as the Green Party’s advocated this week. Stripping out waste and efficiency, consolidating the assets that had value and refinancing the business and either selling it or actually scaling up that business to produce more and hire more people. I tell you the businesses that Graeme Hart has not stripped or syphoned a surplus from: Whitcoulls, a business that he saved and has reinvigorated and you’ll still find in every shopping mall. In fact there’s one down here on Lambton Quay I’ve been into recently. Carter Holt Harvey: it was a forestry company with some packaging assets that wasn’t doing that well and he purchased it, reinvigorated that business, closed a whole lot of old sawmills that were a liability. I know this because, in my time when I worked as a remediation engineer cleaning up some of New Zealand’s most hazardous sites, we worked to remove the timber treatment equipment, removed the contaminated soil, and cleaned up those sites so they could be repurposed as industrial and commercial facilities. In fact, there’s one of those facilities in Mount Eden which now has a residential building honour. What about the Mowbrays?; built up a toy business from scratch. What about Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, those darlings of the left who built an intellectual property and film infrastructure business? In response to Julie Anne Genter’s comments: those billionaires are not syphoning off surplus; they’re building businesses that hire people that pay wages, they pay taxes to the Government so that a responsible Government like this coalition Government can reallocate those taxes collected from successful businesses into really important infrastructure and social services. Now, that I’ve disabused members and those listening at home of any notion that billionaires syphon off surplus, I just want to return to my conclusion. What this Government is funding through these two bills are practical measures that deliver economic growth, reliable energy, housing infrastructure, and a planning system that will say yes, far more than it says no. New Zealanders currently need more than 40,000 consents a year. Where I live in West Auckland, the council will demand a consent for a retaining wall more than a metre high. That’s lower than the bench that I’m speaking from. Can you imagine that: you just want to do up your back garden, you might want to fix up the front of your property, and council says we need to consent for that retaining wall, there’s some environmental risk; absolute rubbish. In the new system, those types of demands will be gone. Minister Bishop and I intend the number of consents that are required every year will be not much more than 20,000, initially, and I can envisage with the use of digital planning tools and AI that tells us how we’re really managing risks—that’s part of what we’re investing in—that over time, the number of consents that actually should be needed by Kiwis might get back to what they were in the 1990s, maybe 5,000 a year. Now, New Zealanders expect their Government to focus on the basics and spend money carefully. That means prioritising projects that make the country grow, rather than just expanding the bureaucracy like the previous Government did. These bills continue that work. They support the infrastructure, and energy and planning reforms needed to make New Zealand a place where people want to build, want to invest, and want to raise a family. That is why I commend this bill to the House. DEPUTY SPEAKER: This debate is interrupted. The House is suspended, and I will resume the chair at 9 a.m. tomorrow for the extended sitting. Debate interrupted. Sitting suspended from 10.01 p.m. to 9 a.m. (Wednesday) Extended Sitting