Behind the Budget: Unsung heroes behind the ‘operation that never ends’

Thursday, 30 May 2024

They know the Budget inside out, they’ve kept details secret for months, they’ve spell-checked hundreds of pages of documents and are preparing for every question Press Gallery journalists will throw at the Government on Budget Day.

But the days before the Budget are usually, surprisingly, the quietest for political staffers.

CTU chief economist Craig Renney worked for Labour over two Budgets in opposition, and three for former Finance Minister Grant Robertson in Government. He said Budget day was a bit like a big exam.

“Where you've crammed so much information into your head, so that on the day, you can go into the room and talk to the journalists and say, ‘Oh, that's on page 62’.

“On the day, your job is to be to make sure that you're the eyes and ears of a Minister of Finance if you’re the advisor … to assist them in helping them to deliver a great Budget.

“Like a good theatre production, it's all done long before anyone turns up on the night.”

Political commentator David Farrar was a staffer for the National Party between 1996 and 1999 and said at this stage, “it is all over, in fact, probably last week the planning and execution and sign off” would usually be done.

“All the press releases are written, the publicity documents done and printed and everything pretty much lined up … I think it's three weeks before the Budget, they have to sign off final policy decisions.

“During that time though it is quite frantic, even though you start quite early. There can’t be mistakes.”

Farrar recalled working for former Finance Minister Bill Birch and being in the Beehive “at 10, 11 at night, early hours of the morning”.

“Not so much the couple of days before the Budget, it’s actually quite a bit further out.”

Between his first and third Budget in Government, Renney said he “learned a lot more about politics than I did economics … what people care about will be very different from an economist than it is from a journalist or from a public presentation perspective”.

“It's a huge operation. And it's also it's an operation that never ends. The day after the Budget, you start the next Budget.”

A former Labour staffer from the Helen Clark Labour government said from a workload point, it could be gruelling.

“There’s the Treasury work which is huge and they start from October, November. Media plans could start about three or four months prior.

“A lot of it is closely held, actually you can't talk to the other offices until you know which bids have been successful and new spending initiatives have been agreed, a whole lot of Budget secrecy.”

Farrar said in the week before Budget, it was a bit like Christmas. “Decision are made, a bit like you’re Santa in that you know what’s in the sack.

“Finally you get to see, how do people react to it? How does it go down? What's the news coverage like?

“Regard it as a huge privilege. The Budget is one of those things that has more impact on public life in New Zealand than almost any other thing.”

Renney’s advice: “You’re involved in history.”

Labour leader Chris Hipkins’ 2024 Budget will be different from last year. In 2023, he was delivering his first Budget as prime minister. The previous years, he was a minister.

This year, Hipkins will be locked up in a small room with opposition parties to read the hundreds of pages for just an hour, with fellow MPs Barbara Edmonds, Ayesha Verrall and Megan Woods and staff, including people who worked for Labour in government, “just to make sure that we're capturing their institutional knowledge of previous budget processes”.

“I've been in both opposition and government when on budget days over the last 16 years,” he said.

“I can tell you that actually a lot of the analysis is done in the days and weeks after the Budget. You don't identify everything on Budget Day, in many cases, actually significant changes made by government that have been very controversial, sometimes have taken days or even weeks to identify.”

Hipkins and finance spokesperson Edmonds have “already got a bit of an idea about you know, what are the key areas where to look for in that limited one hour”.

“I’ve kind of got a list of numbers that I'm going to want to look for…”

He said a lot of arguments could be guessed before the Budget, “but then you actually need to be able to check whether the arguments that you're potentially going to make actually stack up with the numbers that are in the Budget”.

Asked how many hours and how much work he and his staff put into the Budget, Health Minister Shane Reti laughed, “see my eyes”, saying he had “very little” sleep recently.

“I'm sure all my colleagues are in the same situation. How many hours are there in a day, is probably your best answer and we've been applying ourselves pretty much from the day we came in…”

Housing Minister Chris Bishop said a “huge amount” of work had gone into the Budget.

“I've played a small role as an Associate Minister of Finance, alongside David [Seymour] and Shane [Jones].

“It's like the equivalent of Rex Manning Day at Empire Records. It’s an exciting day.”