A new report has been released by New Zealand Initiative, looking into the Labour Government’s fiscal record over the past six years. 

The report found that Labour’s fiscal projections before the 2017 election were too optimistic, resulting in an $18 billion discrepancy between intended and actual expenditure by the end of 2019. 

Executive Director Oliver Hartwich told Mike Hosking that they were spending beyond what they planned before Covid, $29 billion more by 2019. 

He said that Covid opened the floodgates in terms of spending, but once the pandemic was over they kept their spending levels at the level it was at in 2020. 

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