Joyce, who chairs the board of New Zealand Herald and Newstalk ZB owner NZME, also told Hosking it was clear ahead of tomorrow’s Budget there was “no money this time, and probably the next two times”.
“It’s all about reprioritisations. That will be the story of the week, and clearly it already is because the Government’s sought to clear the decks by announcing some of the tougher stuff last week.”
Among that was Finance Minister Nicola Willis’ pre-Budget speech outlining Government plans to save $2.4 billion in an overhaul of the public service, including reducing the number of departments, increasing artificial intelligence (AI) use, and cutting public servants by nearly 9000.
Joyce told Hosking he expected tomorrow’s Budget would be focused on “bread-and-butter things, like education and health”, because that’s what the public would support.
“I think they’d be a bit sceptical of too many gimmicky things, and this is not the time for that … they’ll be wanting to know that their core public services – education and health, public safety – are being looked after.
“And you’ve got to add defence in these days, right? That’s a big one that we hardly ever talk about, but that’s going up and it has to go up. So once you’ve taken those three or four out of the lot, there’s less than none left.”