Editor’s note: This one is going to be a little longer than usual. There are a lot of numbers, and honestly, if you’re not really a numbers person like me, some of this can very quickly go straight over your head and leave you thinking, huh? How does all this actually work?
I’ve tried to keep it in normal-person language and explain things as I go. If scrolling is your thing, please do so. I won’t be offended. If you make it all the way to the end, congratulations, you probably know more about the Government’s books than you ever wanted to.
I thought this would make voting easier
I started looking properly into the political parties this election because I genuinely wanted to understand why I should vote for them.
I’ve interviewed candidates, read their answers, gone through policy announcements and looked behind some of the numbers being thrown around. I thought doing all of this would make my decision easier.
Honestly, if anything, it has made it more confusing.
This election is increasingly starting to feel like one giant political version of “pick me”, or perhaps a competition to see who can climb the biggest mountain of promises before somebody asks how we’re actually getting back down.
Free doctor’s visits, tax cuts, new investment funds, cheaper transport, more infrastructure, more spending, less spending and, apparently, buying supermarkets. Everyone has something they want to give us, change for us, cut for us or build for us.
And don’t get me wrong, some of these policies sound great. Of course they do.
If you’re struggling to afford a doctor’s appointment and somebody offers you free visits, you’re going to listen. If your grocery bill is ridiculous and somebody says they’ll make food cheaper, you’ll probably listen to that too. If somebody promises to leave more money in your pocket through tax cuts, that’s obviously going to get your attention.
That’s where I started wondering whether some election promises are becoming less about presenting a complete plan for the country and more about finding the thing most likely to make an individual voter think, yep, I want that.
I don’t want to vote for whoever can offer me the nicest present. I want to know who can actually run the country.
What can we afford? What can’t we afford? What are your priorities? What are you prepared to say no to? And when you’re promising another billion dollars for something, where exactly is that billion dollars coming from?
The more policies I looked at, the more I realised I was probably looking at this backwards. Before I could judge any of these promises properly, I needed some context on what New Zealand actually has to work with.
Unfortunately, that meant looking at Government financials.
And honestly, Government financials are incredibly boring. Absolute snore fest. There is a reason nobody is sitting around on a Friday night reading Crown financial statements for fun.
But they matter.
They’re the context election promises are supposed to be made within. Before somebody promises another billion dollars for something, surely there should be some thought about what we already earn, what we already spend, what we owe and what that new promise might take money away from.
A policy can sound fantastic on its own. The problem starts when you put twenty fantastic-sounding policies together and discover they’re all trying to use the same money.
So I’m not going to turn this into an accounting lesson. I just want enough of the boring stuff to give everything that comes afterwards some context.
I’m also not trying to prove that New Zealand can’t afford anything. Governments have choices. They can raise taxes, borrow money, cut spending, move existing money around, sell assets or invest in things that might produce a return later.
What I want to know is whether the promises have actually been thought through as part of the whole picture, rather than individually costed ideas that all sound good on their own.
So let’s make the boring bit as painless as possible and answer four fairly normal questions: how much money comes in, how much goes out, what do we own and what do we owe?
So, what are we actually working with?
During the 2024/25 financial year, the Crown recorded about $169.8 billion in revenue, excluding gains, and about $183.5 billion in expenses, excluding losses.
Now that’s a lot of 000000000s, and this is where numbers that big can become slightly meaningless. It is very easy to look at $169.8 billion coming in and think New Zealand must have an enormous amount of money to play with.
We don’t.
That $169.8 billion isn’t sitting in an account waiting for the next Government to decide what to spend it on. It is money flowing through the country and already paying for the things Government does.
In that same year, social security and welfare expenses were about $57.6 billion, health was around $29.9 billion and education was approximately $22.3 billion. Finance costs were another $10.4 billion, and then there are roads, police, prisons, housing, defence and everything else we expect to somehow keep functioning.
So when we hear a politician casually announce another $500 million here or another billion dollars there, I think we sometimes lose sight of just how much money that actually is. A billion starts looking weirdly small when everything else has eleven zeros attached to it, but a billion dollars is still a billion dollars.
Then there is debt. Net core Crown debt was about $182.2 billion in 2025, and Treasury currently forecasts it rising to approximately $246.1 billion by 2030. That doesn’t mean the country is about to go broke, but it does mean we’re not starting this election with a clean slate and an enormous pile of spare money either.
This was when I found the number that initially confused me even more.
At 30 June 2025, the Crown had almost $598 billion in assets.
For about five seconds I thought, well, we’re loaded then. What am I worrying about?
Unfortunately, I kept reading.
Around $292.6 billion of those assets were property, plant and equipment. That included about $83.1 billion of land, $76.2 billion of buildings, $64.3 billion of state highways, $25.5 billion of electricity-generation assets and $14.3 billion of rail assets.
When you dig further into the land and buildings, you find schools, hospitals, state housing, prisons, Defence property, conservation land and transport corridors. Technically the country owns all of it, but we can’t exactly pop State Highway 1 on Trade Me every time somebody comes up with another election promise.
The financial assets aren’t simply spare cash either. The NZ Super Fund had around $87.3 billion in financial assets, but that exists to help meet the future cost of superannuation. ACC had around $60 billion in assets, but it also had around $74 billion in liabilities because it has future accident claims to meet. Kāinga Ora owns houses people live in, while NZTA’s enormous asset base largely consists of the transport network.
Basically, owning $598 billion worth of stuff doesn’t mean we have $598 billion to spend.
There was also approximately $408.8 billion in Crown liabilities sitting on the other side of those assets.
That was enough financial statements for me. I wasn’t trying to become an accountant. I just wanted some context, and by this point I had it. New Zealand owns a lot, owes a lot, brings in a huge amount of money every year and already has an equally enormous list of things that money needs to pay for.
Which brings me back to the election.
Now we can go shopping
Labour was the first party I properly dug into because it has already made some fairly substantial promises while confidently saying its policies are fully costed and funded.
There are free doctor’s visits, free prescriptions, free maternity scans, a public transport fare cap, graduate nurse jobs, apprenticeship support, SolarSaver, small-business policies and a proposed New Zealand Future Fund.
Labour has packaged all of this under “Better Starts Now”, which amused me because Citizen watches have been using “Better Starts Now” as a brand statement since 2014.
Personally, I think “Better Shorts Now” would have been more creative. Although that probably requires a disclaimer: consumption of alcohol may leave you wondering where your trousers are.
Anyway, back to the money.
Some of Labour’s funding is reasonably straightforward. Its proposed capital gains tax on certain investment-property gains would create new revenue, and a substantial part of that is intended to pay for its health policies. In basic terms, that’s fairly easy to understand. New tax, new revenue, new spending.
But then I started coming across phrases like existing funding, reprioritisation, cost-pressure funding and refocusing existing programmes.
In normal-person language, some of the money already exists somewhere else in Government and is being moved.
That doesn’t automatically make it a bad idea. Governments change priorities all the time. What I want to know is what happens to whatever that money was supposed to do before.
If you take $500 million from one place and use it to pay for a new policy, you can quite correctly say the new policy is “funded”. But you haven’t magically created another $500 million. Something somewhere has changed.
National comes at the same problem from almost the opposite direction. Rather than introducing a large new tax, its pitch is much more about keeping taxes down, controlling Government spending, finding efficiencies and cutting waste.
Again, I can understand the argument. What I struggle with is the word “waste”, because waste isn’t actually a bank account.
If you say you’re going to save a billion dollars, something has to happen for that saving to become real. Maybe a programme disappears, staffing is reduced, a project is cancelled or something gets delayed. Some of those things might be completely justified, but tell us what they are. Otherwise we’re counting savings before we actually know what is being sacrificed to create them.
TOP is much harder to mistake for tinkering around the edges. Its Citizen’s Income and land-tax proposals would make substantial changes to both what people receive and how the Government raises revenue. Whether you think that’s brilliant or completely bonkers is a different argument, but at least the trade-off is sitting there in front of you. If you’re proposing something enormous, you need an enormous way of paying for it.
Then, while I was already buried in spreadsheets and questioning why I’d decided politics was a fun thing to write about, the Greens arrived with supermarkets.
Their KiwiMart proposal involves bringing at least 120 supermarkets into public ownership, with a reported cost of around $2.8 billion.
My first thought was basically, um, what money?
To be fair to the Greens, buying supermarkets isn’t the same as spending $2.8 billion and receiving nothing in return. The Crown would acquire assets and a commercial business. But the $2.8 billion still has to come from somewhere before we can own it.
If it’s borrowed, that’s more borrowing. If it’s paid for through new taxes, show us the revenue. If existing Government money is being used, tell us what it was doing before.
I will also admit the whole thing gave me a slight Soviet Pak’nSave moment, although I couldn’t find that particular term anywhere in Treasury’s financial statements.
NZ First doesn’t exactly make the spreadsheet headache disappear. It is talking about major long-term investment, including a very large New Zealand Future Fund, while also campaigning on the idea that citizens should come first.
That sounds simple enough until you try to work out what “citizens first” actually means in a country where citizenship and living here are not necessarily the same thing.
There are New Zealand citizens who live overseas. There are also permanent residents who have lived here for decades, worked here, paid tax here, raised families here and built their lives here without becoming citizens.
I actually tried to find a nice simple figure for how many New Zealand citizens live here compared with permanent residents. Unfortunately, there isn’t a clean apples-to-apples number. Treasury has itself identified limitations in the administrative data around identifying all citizenship statuses, particularly naturalised citizens and citizenship by descent.
So I think we need to be careful before reducing the whole thing to citizen equals deserving, permanent resident equals not.
If somebody has lived in New Zealand since they were three, spent decades working and paying tax here and has no intention of living anywhere else, surely that counts for something. On the other hand, I can understand why people ask questions about access to taxpayer-funded entitlements for somebody with very little continuing connection to New Zealand.
That’s why I think the balancing act needs more thought than a slogan. How long has somebody actually lived here? Are they permanently settled? Have they contributed here? What particular entitlement are we talking about? And if citizenship is going to become the dividing line for more things, we probably also need to talk about how accessible and affordable citizenship itself is.
ACT then comes at the entire problem from another direction again. Its answer is essentially that Government itself has become too big, with fewer departments, fewer ministers and less bureaucracy forming a big part of its pitch.
I can understand that argument too, but I still want to know what actually disappears. If departments are merged or cut, what happens to the work they were doing? How much money does it genuinely save once you’ve actually restructured everything, and are those savings enough to do the other things being promised?
This was the point where I realised that despite all the different policies, slogans and arguments, every party eventually runs into exactly the same problem.
They all inherit the same country.
There isn’t a separate Labour pot of money or a National one. The Greens don’t get their own balance sheet and ACT doesn’t get to start again with a blank spreadsheet. Whoever forms the next Government inherits the same hospitals, schools, roads, welfare system, debt, tax base, Crown assets and infrastructure problems.
They can absolutely change what happens next. They can tax more, tax less, borrow, sell assets, buy assets, cut spending or move existing money around. But every one of those choices has another side to it, and that’s the bit I think we need to pay far more attention to.
If money is moved out of education, education no longer has it. If money intended for future health pressures is redirected, it can’t also pay for those future pressures. If welfare is cut, somebody receives less. If infrastructure is delayed, the problem may simply become more expensive later. If a profitable Crown asset is sold, we might get cash now but lose future income. If we borrow, the repayments don’t disappear when the election signs come down.
None of those choices is automatically wrong. That’s actually the point.
They’re choices.
And surely that’s what an election should really be about.
So, who am I supposed to vote for?
Congratulations, you’ve made it to the end. Sorry this turned into an essay, but unfortunately I think it needed to. I’m also not trying to be coy about who I’m voting for. In all honesty, I’m still confused about who to actually vote for.
I think part of the problem is that election campaigns make change sound much faster and easier than it really is. National inherited the much higher level of Crown debt that followed the COVID years, and whatever you think about why that money was borrowed or how it was spent, it was never going to disappear overnight. National hasn’t magically made it disappear either. Governments inherit the financial decisions of the Governments before them, just as the next Government will inherit the decisions being made now.
The same goes for ACT’s plans to dramatically slim down Government. Maybe there are departments that could be merged, reduced or removed, but it isn’t going to happen overnight without consequences either. I’ve heard Japan used as an example of a country that operates with a smaller central-government structure, but we’re not Japan. The two countries have different institutions, populations, systems and ways of delivering public services. You can’t simply look at another country’s number of ministries, copy it and assume New Zealand will suddenly become more efficient.
Maybe that’s what I’m missing from this election. Reality. Miracles don’t happen overnight, Governments don’t start with a blank balance sheet, and election promises don’t automatically become law just because the party making them wins. Parliament still has to function, budgets still have to balance over time, coalition partners may have other ideas, and the country still has to operate while all of this is happening.
I’m not anti-Labour, anti-National, anti-ACT or anti-anyone else. I just think we should think thoroughly about who we’re putting into Government rather than blindly voting for the party we’ve always voted for. If I vote for X because they promised X, I want to know whether X is actually achievable, what it costs and what else might have to change to get it.
After spending far too much time looking into all of this, I still don’t know who I’m voting for. Election day may yet involve a long walk off a short pier, straight into the political black hole where apparently all these policies have been disappearing.
At least I’ll know why I’m confused.
Stop telling me why I should pick you. Show me that you can actually govern.
Sources and Further Reading
- New Zealand Treasury, Financial Statements of the Government of New Zealand for the Year Ended 30 June 2025 — Crown revenue, expenditure, assets, liabilities, debt and asset breakdowns. Treasury Financial Statements 2025
- New Zealand Treasury, Budget Economic and Fiscal Update 2026 — debt forecasts, Government revenue and expenditure forecasts, OBEGAL and the wider fiscal outlook. Budget Economic and Fiscal Update 2026
- New Zealand Labour Party, 2026 election policies and fiscal strategy — including health, transport, capital gains tax, Future Fund, apprenticeships and other announced policies. Labour 2026 policies
- New Zealand National Party, 2026 policies and announcements — spending, taxation, infrastructure and Government priorities. National Party
- Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand, 2026 manifesto, tax policy and KiwiMart proposal. Green Party 2026 manifesto
- The Opportunity Party, 2026 policies — including the Citizen’s Income, land tax, health and economic policies. Opportunity policies
- New Zealand First, 2026 policies — including the Future Fund and citizens-first proposals. New Zealand First policies
- ACT New Zealand, 2026 policies — including proposals for a smaller Government, fewer departments and changes to Government spending. ACT policies
- Electoral Commission, information on voting and enrolment eligibility in New Zealand. Elections NZ
- New Zealand Parliament, information on how bills become law, including readings, select committees and voting in the House. How a bill becomes law
- Citizen, background on its Better Starts Now brand slogan, introduced in 2014. Citizen Watch
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