Budget 2026: David Seymour pushes for more cuts while Shane Jones has it out with the PM on industry support
Friday, 22 May 2026
The associate finance ministers from ACT and NZ First are bringing very different things to next week’s Budget, with one giving up on new cuts and the other having fiery conversations with the prime minister over the need to support businesses.
ACT’s David Seymour and NZ First’s Shane Jones both have associate finance portfolios which give them formal input into the months-long budget process led by Finance Minister Nicola Willis.
Their roles keep them across every major budget decision on behalf of their parties and carry some responsibility to find savings.
Both Seymour and Jones talked to The Post about how they and their parties were contributing to this year’s Budget.
Seymour admitted that he had stopped looking for specific savings after having just 3% his suggestions accepted last year, while Jones said he often had fiery conversations with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon about his desire to “stand up industry” with funding.
Read more:
Budget 2026: Where might the public service cuts fall? The big and small ministries facing the knife
Nicola Willis accuses ‘hysterical’ PSA of 'misleading' members over job cuts
Seymour: I’m Nicola’s ally
Seymour said he saw his role as being a force supporting Willis to save more money.
“I see my role as being an ally for Nicola [Willis] whenever she wants to save money. I always argue to spend less. I’m generally pretty modest in my demands to spend more in things I’m responsible for,” Seymour said.
He said the $130 million in savings from his controversial school lunch programme reform had paid entirely for the Ministry of Regulation and Charter School Programme.
“I see my role as being a force for saving. I just think the wider prospects for New Zealand if we don’t control our spending are not good.”
However, Seymour said he had given up on an exercise he undertook last year to find and recommend specific savings as his ministerial colleagues had rejected the vast majority of them.
“I identified about $3b of spending that I thought was at the very least questionably needed. I had just $115m of savings accepted, of which the lion’s share was thanks to one minister, Louise Upston - so credit where credit is due.”
To critics from the right calling for a “zero budget” with absolute no spending increases he said the current economic and political context made that impossible.
“It’s fair to say that the last time there was a zero budget [the early 2010s] the forces of rising interest rates, the level of public indebtedness, and the ageing population, were all having a slower effect than now,” Seymour said.
“There’s no question that ACT would go further. We should have been getting rid of many Government departments, we should be changing the age of Super, we should be rationalising our debt by changing our ownership in many State Owned Enterprises.
“Those sorts of options are not within the Overton Window of the current coalition.”
Jones: Hard to convince PM
Jones - who is known for the Provincial Growth Fund in the last Government and a similar but smaller fund in this Government - was clear that he would rather t more was spent on nurturing economic growth.
Putting these proposals forward often got him in hot water with Christopher Luxon himself.
“If there's one area that's hotly contested, it's: ‘To what extent should taxpayer money be used to stand up industries?’ Yeah, I don't mind openly admitting it's very uncomfortable territory when I take those cabinet papers forward. The leader of the National Party does not like it,” Jones said.
He suggested that Luxon was the often the most opposed of all ministers to this kind of spending but this was “too bad”.
“In fairness to [Chris] Bishop, he's the arch-pragmatist, Nicola [Willis]. She, you know, she's got to watch all the pennies, so by and large doesn't like it, but respects the fact that we've got an intellectual mandate to try and stand up industries, to salvage industries - but the PM always gives a strong level of gross discomfort, but that's too bad. He shouldn't have formed a government with Winston [Peters] if he doesn't like it.”
Jones said he was pleased to see an uplift of $2.2b for the capital allowance - money intended for one-off spending on things like infrastructure - but his party was not as enamoured with four-lane highways as National.
“It's the Tories who have always been hotter than we are on four-lane highways. We've always been very keen on coastal shipping. We've always been very keen on railway moving more freight off roads onto rail,” Jones said.
He had some sympathy with the recommendations from the Infrastructure Commission to focus spending far more on maintaining and renewing existing infrastructure.
“It's not that we don't want to support a set of roads rivalling autobahns, but at the same time, with the volatile weather and the destruction of our roading system, we have to maintain what we've got, and it's not only the State Highway. Look at all the byways and the one-lane bridges we've got in [Northland].”
He hoped that in the next term of Government a standing capital allowance would be set up with some of it always going towards flood protection.