Greg Smith

That's what you have in a budget.

It's not after the fact.

It's before the fact.

So there's a bunch of assumptions that go into it.

Perhaps it was a little bit surprising about, you know, obviously going into surplus a year earlier than expected.

I think the other really, you know, for a nerd, for sort of a finance nerd like me, the other big headline was that the amount of borrowing over the next four years is reduced by $6 billion.

Wow.

the first downgrade since 2021.

And that's all wrapped up into these assumptions about how the economy is going to grow.

We're going to get to sort of 3% plus growth by end of that forecast period.

So perhaps a little bit surprising and particularly for everyday people sort of looking at going, God, things are tough.

We've talked about cost of living pressures before on the podcast.

They're still here.

In fact, they're here even more, aren't they, with what petrol's doing.

Somehow we've got this position where the budget's going into surplus sort of a year earlier than planned.

So there's a lot of assumptions there about higher tax takes and the like.

But yeah, look, as we're talking about the growth slant last year, and of course going into late February before the conflict started, yeah, New Zealand was...

in a getting better sort of position.

There's probably sort of budding recovery, and we talked about green shoots and getting a little bit greener and a little bit taller maybe.

And then, yeah, obviously we had the conflict started.