For the past five Budget days, someone has carefully dressed Grant Robertson and made sure he was well fed before the centrepiece speech of every finance minister’s year.
But this year Jacinda Ardern will not be buying Mr Robertson a new tie, nor will she be making sure that a plate of cheese rolls is delivered to sustain him for the task ahead.
The months-long series of briefings and meetings, funding bids and rebids, remain the same, but a new prime minister with new priorities will be at Mr Robertson’s side this Thursday.
"It is different," Mr Robertson said.
"The former prime minister and I had got ourselves into a bit of a rhythm in the way we did things, and Chris [Hipkins] will bring his own style to it.
"But he has been a part of our government right the way through, he is a friend of mine and I was best man at his wedding, so I am looking forward to him sitting there. We will have a couple of new rituals, I think, but we will save those for the day."
This is the sixth Budget Mr Robertson has presented. Originally this Budget was intended to have a strong focus on climate change — and given recent weather events it still might.
But in his pre-Budget speech Mr Hipkins made it clear the ever increasing cost of living and helping as many New Zealanders as possible to ride out the economic storm were to be the government’s priorities.
"We want to do a Budget that supports people through these cost of living issues, funds the public services that we all need and does things which will move us ahead in terms of us being the kind of society that we want to be, which takes us to higher-wage jobs and more productivity and so on," Mr Robertson said.
"But we also have to be fiscally sustainable, coming off the back of some really big-spending Budgets ... that made this document hard, with lots of hard trade-offs to be made."
All ministers were told cuts would need to be made if they wanted to fund new initiatives. To that end, $4billion in savings over the next four years have been made, which sounds a not inconsiderable amount but which is dwarfed by the multi-billion dollars spent annually to keep New Zealand running.
"The prime minister was very clear about us focusing on the core issues that matter and that is what we are trying to do in this Budget," Mr Robertson said.
The other major constraint on any pre-election spending splurge which Mr Robertson might have wished to indulge himself with is the carnage wrought by Cyclone Gabrielle and other recent weather events.
Mr Robertson had already spent many millions on helping businesses and households hunker down through Covid, and millions more have had to be spent on cyclone recovery.
That unplanned-for emergency means we are unlikely to see many election year sweeteners announced on Thursday.
"Budgets have to be done in the context of the times that they are and I’ve certainly learned that over the past five or six years," Mr Robertson said.
"We’ve had everything from Covid to March 15 to Gabrielle now, and we are also clearly in tough economic times, individually for New Zealand households and more broadly across the world. A Budget which was a ‘lolly scramble’ just would not be the Budget for these times, whether it was election year or not."
Whether such austerity means the government will be able to stick to its projections of returning New Zealand to surplus in two years was a topic Mr Robertson would not be drawn on.
"Those announcements are for Budget day, but as I have been saying for some time there is no way that the New Zealand economy is immune to pressures outside such as the global supply chain, other inflationary pressures, and now Cyclone Gabrielle.
"That has put pressure on the economy as a whole and we will talk about what that means for the surplus when we get to the Budget."
Just as Mr Robertson has had to produce "Covid" Budgets, the 2023 Budget may well be the "Gabrielle" Budget — well-laid plans did have to be redrafted after the storm settled.
"We have to be preparing for these weather events to be happening more often" he said.
"We will, I believe, be seeing them on a more regular basis and it does point to the fact that our resilience as country needs to improve. We certainly have our minds on that — we have to deal with the here and now of the emergency response but we also have to work out what does a long-term response to these issues look like and how to maintain core infrastructure — road, rail, water, telecommunications — things that we are responsible for in large part , in the longer term.
"I am seeking a balance, but that requires a sequence of tough decisions ... After six Budgets, they don’t get any easier."
