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I want to talk a little bit more about Nicola Willis’ tight budget - I haven’t changed my position from yesterday and I'm impressed at how little she’s giving herself to play with.

But the truth is, it doesn’t go far enough - at all.

Because understand this - that $1.3 billion that she’s given herself in her operating allowance is new spending. As in, take last year’s budget and now increase it by $1.3 billion.

For context, Nicola Willis spent more money last year than Grant Robertson ever did in any of his budgets - and now she’s adding another $1.3 billion to it.

Now I understand that this is conventional politics - budgets increase every year.  

The last time it didn't, the last time we had a zero budget where we didn’t add any more money was Bill English's 2011 budget - because we’d had the earthquake.

But what that tells you is it’s possible to not increase the spending - and I would argue that is exactly what we should be doing at the moment. Because we are in big financial trouble as a country.

We are running structural deficits - that means we are spending more every year than we make.

If it was a household, we’d be talking about a family spending more than they earn and running up the difference on credit cards every year - but still deciding every year to spend more. That’s what we’re doing.

I think we need to cut big things.

Now, I don’t want to be accused of being a racist, so I'm reluctant to say publicly that we should cut the Ministry for Māori Development or the Ministry for Pacific Peoples - but I am a woman, so I'm very happy to say we should cut the Ministry for Women.

Why do we need it? Why do we need a Ministry for the Environment and also a Department of Conservation? I could go on.

But if we don't get real and start running smaller budgets where we spend within our means, something will have to give.

And the thing every commentator out there seems to want to cut is your pension - because it's very expensive to the country.

Now if I had a choice, I'd keep the pension and cut out nonsense like ministries we don't need and stop spending more every year than we did the last.

Like I said, I'm impressed.

Nicola Willis is going further than I thought she would - but not far enough if we're actually going to fix the country's books.

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