More than 110 days after the 2025-26 Budget was released, Parliament has been finalising the spending approval. This week, that included the scrutiny of the Estimates Debate, before the Budget passed in its third reading. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Parliament spent most of this week clearing the final hurdles to it approving the government's 2025-26 Budget. The greatest hurdle was the Estimates Debate, an 11-hour-long public grilling of ministers on their budget plans.
The Estimates Debate is a follow-up to select committee inquiries after the budget was announced. In this finale, not every minister was involved, but quite a few were.
Such a lengthy Q&A on policy and spending across so many portfolios is not easy to report on. Rather than attempting to tease out the finer points of many debates and disputes, this article touches on one aspect: the varying degrees to which ministers and MPs approach it as politics or governance. The examples will come from just three of the twelve portfolio debates; two early on, as well as the last.
Politics over governance
While parliamentary oversight is all about governance, politics creeps in. It can even take over and quickly turn reasoned discussion into a shouting match.
It's not just ministers and the opposition getting political. Each of the portfolio sections of the Estimates Debate is introduced by a committee chair. Each chair is reminded to speak for their whole committee and to not get political. Some do that very well. But sometimes governing-party backbenchers find it impossible to remember that they are not in the government.
The same range of approach exists between government ministers. They are not all equally combative or political, but some seem to relish the fight.
The very first minister up is always finance, because this is the Budget. Nicola Willis spent an hour answering questions. The interactions were very political, for example this brief interchange from early on:
Labour's finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds wanted to know how Willis and the Treasury had come up with a job creation figure of 240,000 for the forecast period.
"It's sad, isn't it," responded Nicola Willis, "when Opposition Members want to quibble about job creation - a thing that I thought both sides of the House could agree is one of the positive things that comes from a consistently growing economy, which is what the Treasury is forecasting and is the basis of that number."
Quibbling with governments is the job of backbench MPs, opposition or not. That is the point of responsible government, and of this debate.
Barbara Edmonds tried again. This was her third attempt.
Edmonds: "It's, again, very interesting to see the modus operandi of this particular Minister of Finance. Instead of providing the detail - because, actually, that's the most important thing: if you want to make a claim that your Government is going to create 240,000 jobs, back it up. …The question is, the number of people in work has dropped by 36,000 since you took office. Why should Kiwis feel confident about job growth when the number of people in work gets worse and worse?"
Willis: "That member may take economic growth for granted. I don't, particularly when I think about what would happen if we had a Labour-Te Pāti Māori-Green Party government that was targeting higher inflation, higher interest rates, and lower growth. There would be less job creation under that policy mix…"
Nicola Willis delivering the 2025-26 Budget Speech. Photo: VNP / Phil Smith
The Estimates Debate is inevitably political, but it is also meant to produce information from ministers for Parliament, so Parliament can vote on the budget fully informed.
Ministers of whatever stripe often forget or ignore the fact that, constitutionally speaking, they are not in charge. Parliament is sovereign.
When government ministers are asked questions by backbenchers it is the equivalent of a senior manager being called before the board of governors to account for themselves. Some directors may not be in the ascendancy within a board's dynamics, but they are still in charge.
Our system of government is combative by nature. There is a continuum though, and that continuum exists across the House. Many of the questions ministers get asked are equally political.
Among the more combative questioners is Green co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick. She was the very next questioner after presiding officer, National's Deputy Speaker Barbara Kuriger, gently prodded the Minister of Finance in the governance direction.
"I have a direct question for the Minister of Finance, after having gone through all of the documents that have now been released over the past week that the Government was advised on with regard to this Budget. What do you call it, Minister, when the Government makes decisions that it is told will worsen homelessness, deepen child poverty, generate more crime, reduce the quality and quantity of higher education, and increase climate-changing emissions and then you decide to go ahead with all of those things anyway?"
"Well, Madam Chair," replied Willis, "I'd just simply call that the Green Party's characterisations of the Government's policies."
That question was political. That is not to say that Swarbrick was wrong, but that the question is constructed not to require an answer, but to stand alone as an attack.
Governance over politics
When MPs and ministers spend time digging into the policy, the data, and the strategy and are less combative, it becomes much harder to quote, summarise, or capture in a segment of audio.
Taking the exercise seriously often requires discussing issues and policy in depth, because things are complicated. It requires giving fuller context because root causes can reach back across multiple previous policies and administrations. It can even require - heaven forbid - admitting you can't solve everything, or even solve simple things, quickly.
National's Chris Bishop Photo: VNP/Louis Collins
Some ministers do actually answer questions, even if they don't necessarily answer them to the liking of the questioner. One minister who took the governance of this event seriously was Chris Bishop. He was one of the early contributors to the Estimates Debate - both for transport and then for housing. Both portfolios were interesting and educative.
The change in tone was pretty obvious. The minister said a lot of things like…
"The member makes a really good point around that stuff, and I want to acknowledge that…"
"There is a challenge that we are looking at, at the moment, around how to…"
"Yeah, the member makes a really good point, and I appreciate her advocacy for her constituency."
"I'm happy to arrange a briefing for the member if she'd like one on this." - "I would" [Opposition MP] - "Sure, I'm happy to arrange that."
"I'm happy to keep the member informed around that…"
"Well, I was going to say he is right, in the sense that the system is under pressure. There's no question around that."
"So the regional picture is different - that's true. I absolutely accept that. But nationally…"
"Rapid Rehousing is Housing First, except just a different name. And it's for people who are not quite as badly homeless as people in Housing First, which I know sounds like a ridiculous thing to say, but it's actually true and it's how the system is designed. Part of the problem in this space, if we're honest about it, is we have too many programmes, too many contracts, too much complexity. So we have Housing First and we have Rapid Rehousing. They are largely the same programme. They have different Budget appropriations, different funding lines, different contracts, different providers."
It's not that Chris Bishop is unable to give devastating ripostes. He can and does, but he was leaning into the governance intention of this event and away from the politics. As a result the questions were less aggressive than they can be, and the information gleaned by MPs was much greater.
Of course, even a governance-style approach is not without politics. A discursive and discussive style can wend its way around touchy topics less obviously than a frontal attack.
National MP and Minister of Climate Change Simon Watts Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Playing for time
There is a third approach, and possibly it was seen in the very final portfolio to be addressed - climate change.
The Estimates Debate is time-limited, but every political party has its own time limit as well. Each minute they speak is taken off their total, and that includes the ministers. Party whips shepherd their party's allotted minutes carefully to ensure they have time left for questions or answers when they need them. Or possibly you might try to not have time left for answers when you don't want them.
When the climate change topic began there was an hour and 41 minutes left. National had only 21 of those, for use by the minister Simon Watts and the select committee chair Catherine Wedd. Obviously they would need to be economical with that time.
Catherine Wedd introduced the topic comprehensively, leaving about 18 and a half minutes for the minister. For Simon Watts to give considered answers he would need to be particularly short in his own introduction. These can extend up to five minutes.
Watts' sprawling introduction took eight minutes, leaving just ten minutes to answer questions - ten minutes to stretch across the eighty minutes remaining. It was clear that this limitation was not lost on him.
In response to Green co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick almost goading him to answer her questions: "Minister, your job is to be accountable to this House. Minister, your job is to be accountable to New Zealanders. …So perhaps, Minister, if you would be so willing to maybe, charitably, engage in answering some questions, which I might note, you're actually required to…"
Simon Watts began "for those who are watching at home, the limitations on the ability and the time that we have to speak is constrained. I have about 10 minutes of total time to respond to questions during this 90-minute period, so it is not for the sake of not answering; it is simply to acknowledge that…".
Watts' initial answers were not brief. That first response used about a third of his remaining time. His second was largely to attack the question, leaving him about five minutes. Before long, Watts' lengthy considerations became very short answers to lengthy queries.
The frustration in the chamber was palpable. Climate change is about as complex as any portfolio can be - a nexus of scientific, social, environmental, agricultural and economic considerations with vast far-reaching implications.
With about two minutes left to speak, Watts again began an answer by attacking the questioner. The actual answers to individual questions were now about a sentence long. With forty minutes of debate to go, he was down to a single minute.
His time expired with about 20 minutes to go and a log-jam of unanswered or barely-answered questions. At that point, Labour's chief whip Glen Bennett stood and asked permission to give five minutes of Labour's remaining time to National with the proviso that the minister would spend that five minutes answering as yet unanswered Labour questions.
Why only Labour questions? The cynic might suggest the proviso would prevent the minister from using the new gift of time to answer a friendly query.
And so, the end of this very long inquiry into the budget and the policy behind it ended as it began; with something resembling a to and fro.
Unsurprisingly, the Budget survived the committee stage, and completed its third and final reading on Thursday afternoon. It takes a very long time and a lot of discussion and inquiry to push a government budget across the finish line. This one has made it.
* RNZ's The House, with insights into Parliament, legislation and issues, is made with funding from Parliament's Office of the Clerk. Enjoy our articles or podcast at RNZ.
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