Budget 2020 reveals cost of Covid-19

Debt will balloon to $140 billion, that’s around $80,000 per household. Unemployment is set to skyrocket to as many as 160,000 people. These are truly sobering figures.

Despite this, we should be confident that New Zealand will bounce back. Kiwis will make new plans and find new opportunities.

But there’s no doubt the challenge before us is serious.

The two over-riding questions are - how do we avoid making the economic disaster worse than it needs to be? And how can we get back on track?

National would reduce the damage by opening up more of the economy as quickly as we safely can. We should be concentrating not so much on what we can’t do, but on what we can do.

Even now in Level Two we should be doing everything we can to open up the Trans-Tasman bubble as soon as we can, and getting international students through quarantine to sustain that important industry.

Given the scale of the problem we need to avoid low quality spending.

The Budget includes a large number of big spending items but very little detail or accountability for what it was to be spent on.

To reduce job losses, we needed to get some cash into the hands of struggling small businesses, to help with costs such as rent.

Incredibly, given the scale of the spending the budget, we saw nothing beyond the welcome extension of the wage subsidy, which will help keep people employed but that’s only a temporary fix.

Looking further ahead, the key to get on top of the debt and to bring back jobs is to get the economy firing again.

We know pragmatism around the one or two metre world will help. If we spend the next six months with our productivity hobbled by excessively rigid rules, we will struggle.

Unlocking private sector investment is the key to growth and innovation.

National won’t rely on Wellington committees to reinvent the economy; we’ll trust Kiwis to work out how to get back on their feet.

We’ll keep taxes low, we won’t regulate firms to death or keep changing the rules, and we’ll back them to succeed.

Finally, we would use the Government’s balance sheet to invest in quality infrastructure, like National did with the Ultra-Fast Broadband, in upgrading our skills, turbo-charging the innovation sector and in improving the quality of public services, such as health.

It’s one things to have grand announcements, such as for Kiwibuild’s 100,000 houses, Light Rail down Dominion Road and a host of other things; it’s another thing to deliver them.

Thankfully, we appear to have got through the worst of the health crisis – and with good testing and tracing we should stay there; the task now is get the economy back on track.

- Kanwaljit S Bakshi National list MP based in Manukau East and is New Zealand parliament's first Indian Sikh member.