We asked the political parties what their Budget would have focused on? Here’s what they told us
Tuesday, 16 June 2026
After the Budget 2026 Stuff asked each of the political parties what their budget would look like if they were solely in charge.
Typically, reaction to the budget is mostly along the line of ‘that was crap, we’d do better’.
That’s not very constructive is it? We wanted the parties to tell us what they'd actually do without just having a pop at the incumbents.
We asked everyone… Only ACT, Te Pāti Māori and the Greens replied. This is what they said. (We’re still happy to publish the replies of the other parties btw.)
What would the Green Party’s budget have focused on?
By Chlöe Swarbrick
OPINION: Last month the Government delivered their third budget in as many years. The lack of any real plan or direction for New Zealand was eminently apparent. But a budget is not fait-accompli; it’s a political choice. It’s a choice about where we are going as a country, what we value and what’s important to us.
With many New Zealanders struggling right now with the cost-of-living, more climate- charged severe weather events and imported inflation from the fossil fuels imported from half-way across the world, the budget could have been a plan to address these huge problems.
A budget delivered by the Green Party would put these issues first. It would choose an economy that puts our people and the planet we live on above short-term corporate profits and climate polluters.
It would say loudly and proudly: this country belongs to all of us. The wealth we create together should be put towards the common good, not feeding corporate greed.
A Green Budget would start by making the super-rich pay their fair share (currently, they pay half the effective tax rate that you do), so that we can invest in the things that actually make a real difference in people’s lives.
This means building thousands of warm, affordable homes, creating jobs, reducing homelessness, and caring for the environment that underpins it all. It would mean properly funding healthcare and education and restoring community services, so no one is left behind.
Grocery prices, power bills, and transport costs should not be a major source of stress for families trying to make ends meet. A Green Budget would ease pressure on households by ensuring these essentials were essential, not a balancing act.
That means expanding public transport and making it cheaper and easier to get around. It means rapidly electrifying everything that we can through wind and solar so that Aotearoa is not vulnerable to volatile fossil fuel markets.
It means ensuring everyone has access to a warm, secure home. Upgrading our infrastructure and creating job opportunities for people across the motu: urban or in the regions.
An economy should not treat our environment as an infinite resource to be fast-tracked away. A healthy environment underpins a healthy economy and sets the basis for a good life for all of us. This means making investments to restore our nature, not extract endlessly from it. This means cleaning up our rivers, planting forests, and protecting our native biodiversity.
New Zealand's economy is the biggest it’s ever been. So, economic growth isn't the problem. The problem is a system rigged for inequality. Wealth, generated by the hard work of everyday people, is being concentrated into fewer hands, while child poverty grows and homelessness reaches record levels.
Meanwhile, supermarkets, banks, and power companies are making record profits. While the Prime Minister argues for growth, growth, growth, less and less reaches those who work for a living.
A Green Budget would flip that. A Green Budget would feed our children instead of corporate greed. It would fund a health system that cares for everyone, instead of tax cuts for the rich. It would build climate resilient communities, not accept a future filled with climate-change-charged floods and fires.
This Government has shown you in black and white what they care about. The Greens would choose differently, and we’ve shown that better is possible. We even published a full alternative budget last year to show just how we could do it.
We could steer our economy democratically, to achieve the things that no one of us could achieve alone. Very few people have the individual wealth to build a hospital or refurbish old classrooms, but together, Aotearoa has more wealth than we’ve ever had.
We can create jobs. We can build the things we need. We can protect the natural environment we rely on for life on earth as we know it. Or are we going to keep pretending that megalomaniac billionaires are going to solve our problems?
But we are not going to spontaneously end up with a government that is willing to take on the well-resourced lobbyists in the country, and to work actively in the interests of regular people.
All of us together have the power to recreate a world that puts the right things first. But we need to show up for it. Because when everything feels complicated and chaotic, I believe we can agree on some basic things.
A Green Budget would put at its centre the idea that every New Zealander is entitled to a safe home, a good education, affordable food, a secure job, reliable transport and a healthy environment. When we uphold those basic, non-negotiables for all New Zealanders, we have a real pathway to support everyone in this beautiful country to thrive.
What would the ACT Party’s budget have focused on?
By David Seymour
OPINION: When Stuff asked what an ACT Budget would look like, free of coalition partners, ACT is in a unique position to answer. While in Opposition, ACT did exactly that. Every year we showed voters what our priorities were with a fully costed Alternative Budget.
Look at our 2023 Alternative Budget and you get a pretty good idea of what ACT stands for. It was titled End the Waste, Fix the Economy. The prescription was to cut corporate welfare, shrink the public service, and use the savings to make essential investments in health, education, prison capacity, and defence. It also included ACT’s policy of sharing GST with councils to fund crucial infrastructure, which is now being delivered in the form of the Government’s Incentives for Growth Fund.
ACT’s Alternative Budget returned the books to surplus in 2026/27 and proposed a flatter, fairer tax system in 2027/28. The illness we diagnosed was that Wellington takes too much from the people who earned it, churns it through bureaucracy, and sends too little back in value.
Fast forward to 2026, and ACT’s prescription is still just what the doctor ordered.
Last month’s Budget does not balance the books as quickly as ACT would. But it maps a credible path back to a stronger economy, faster than the country was heading before. Spending growth is restrained. The public service headcount is coming down. The return to surplus is brought forward. The Government has not reached for new taxes. Nor has it allowed a fresh wave of corporate welfare.
None of that happened by accident. It happened because ACT held the line on fiscal discipline and worked with our coalition partners to deliver a sensible Budget in difficult times.
There are only two honest paths to balancing the books: tax more, or spend less. As a coalition we made the right choice.
It is true that an ACT Budget would reduce more waste, faster, and return to surplus sooner. This Government is also not progressing ACT’s policy of a flatter tax system where nobody is worse off. But to meaningfully cut taxes we need to return to surplus, otherwise the Government is taking with one hand to give with the other.
There are also still programmes and areas of spending we would rather see ended altogether – ACT wouldn’t be using taxpayer money to fund concerts, and in previous budgets ACT wouldn’t have introduced a $1.2 billion regional fund at a time when the rest of the country is trying to cut its cloth, nor would one Ministry be exempt from making essential savings.
But Budget 2026 is also a sign of the Coalition being able to incorporate each party’s ideas and deliver a coherent and measured budget. In the areas of cutting waste, restraining spending, and restoring the economy, ACT’s fingerprints are all over it.
Previous governments have treated Budget Day as an opportunity for a lolly scramble. A subsidy here, a bit of corporate welfare there. It inevitably gets boiled down into who the “winners and losers” are on the day.
ACT has never seen a budget that way. The only winners on Budget Day should be taxpayers and victory is a government that spends less of your money while delivering the public services you need. That is why ACT’s Alternative Budgets have always focused on protecting frontline services while reducing the back-office bloat that grew so quickly under Labour. Reductions should not fall on the nurses, teachers or police officers who deliver real value in their communities. They should fall on the layers of bureaucracy and low-value spending that became so common under Labour.
The path back to surplus matters because of what it unlocks. Lower pressure on interest rates. More room to reduce taxes. A stronger foundation for the wages, jobs, and investment that make New Zealand worth staying in. Every dollar not spent on debt servicing is a dollar that can go back to families, or into the frontline services voters are rightly asking about.
As we’ve been saying for years in our alternative budgets, excessive Government spending shows up in higher taxes, higher mortgage rates, higher inflation and less efficient services.
An ACT Budget would go further. It would end more corporate welfare. It would reduce the central bureaucracy faster. It would return the books to surplus sooner. It would keep investing in core services, but it would ask a harder question of every dollar: does this spending deliver value for the taxpayer who earned it?
Corporate welfare is one clear example where ACT would go further. Taxpayers spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on industry grants and economic development subsidies directed at specific companies. Government does not have a good record of picking winners. The businesses that actually drive jobs and wages do not need a grant from Wellington. They need competitive conditions, lower costs, less red tape, and a government that gets out of the way.
Coalitions mean compromise. ACT accepts that and compromise works in both directions. The evidence of ACT in this year’s Budget is visible in the restraint it contains.
Budget 2026 is not the Budget ACT would have written alone. No coalition Budget ever is. But it is a Budget with ACT influence where it matters: restraint, discipline, and a clearer path back to surplus.
What would Te Pāti Māori’s budget have focused on?
By co-leaders Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer
OPINION: A Budget reflects choices and values. If Te Pāti Māori were in government, our Budget 2026 would be built on a simple principle: everyone in Aotearoa should be able to live with dignity. Te Pāti Māori will treat you the way we would treat someone on our marae, we will welcome you, we will house you, and we will feed you.
Our priorities would be clear: a fair tax system, warm and affordable housing, strong investment in whānau wellbeing, and Māori-led solutions that deliver better outcomes for everyone.
For us, Budget 2026 would be about building an Aotearoa where wealth is shared more fairly, where rangatahi can see a future for themselves at home, and where Māori solutions are recognised as essential to the future strength of this country.
That means using the Budget not just to manage hardship, but to create the conditions for people and communities to thrive.
This starts with an overhaul of the tax system. The top 10% own half of all wealth in Aotearoa, while the bottom 50% own just 6.7% between them. We have enough resources in this country to ensure that everyone’s needs are met, but it’s all concentrated at the top.
Our wealth tax would bring in $11.8 billion annually, and this revenue will be directly redistributed to all hardworking whānau through the income tax system.
We will remove income tax for the first $30,000 that every person earns every year, and we will adjust tax rates so that all people earning up to $180,000 annually will take home more of their pay. 97% of people in Aotearoa will be better off under a Pāti Māori budget.
Our tax policy will not only redistribute wealth, it will also make housing more affordable and accessible.
More than 112,000 people in Aotearoa are either homeless or on the brink of homelessness, including 35,000 Māori. Home ownership has become a distant dream for rangatahi, and rents have more than tripled since 2000.
People are suffering while property investors continue to make millions of dollars in untaxed capital gains, the government is selling off thousands of state houses, and there are almost 112,000 vacant homes nationwide.
The solutions to the housing crisis are simple. A ghost house tax will encourage landlords to put their vacant properties on the market, and a capital gains tax will put downward pressure on house prices. We will reinvest all revenue generated from these initiatives into building more whare on our ancestral lands and building more social housing. The combined effect of these policies will reflect our view that housing is a right, not a business, and ensure that all tangata whenua and tangata Tiriti are housed.
Fixing the tax system will create a more equal Aotearoa, empowering Māori solutions across all government agencies will create an Aotearoa where tangata whenua can thrive.
We will never solve the inequities in our society if we continue to ignore Māori solutions. A “one-size-fits-all” approach to public services has gotten us to the point where Māori die over 7 years earlier than non-Māori, and our people are overrepresented in every single negative statistic.
This is why we will ensure that at least 20% of the total budget is invested in Māori solutions, as Māori make up 20% of the population. By Māori, for Māori, to Māori is the only way forward. We will establish a Māori Health Commissioning Agency, a Māori Education Authority, a Māori Justice Authority, and a Mokopuna Māori Authority to take serious and urgent action to address the treatment of tangata whenua across our most crucial institutions.
When Māori thrive, Aotearoa thrives. These policies will not only benefit Māori, they will ensure that all people who have been ignored by the system are able to access the support they need.
No matter how hard the government tries to convince us that Budget 2026 was the only way forward, they will never succeed. We know that they had a choice to make, and they chose billionaires, war and prisons, over equality, homes, and our collective oranga.
Te Pāti Māori has the solutions, this one-term-government does not.
We need to ensure that this is their last budget. The first step toward creating an Aotearoa we can all be proud to call home is to register to vote, get on the Māori roll, and vote them out.
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