Лейбористы обещают создать Парламентский бюджетный офис в Новой Зеландии по австралийскому образцу

Similar questions are likely to arise here too. So far the limited debate on the structure of a potential PBO has focused on whether any PBO would sit within a government agency or as an Officer of Parliament. If legislation to implement a PBO is introduced, choices also need to be made on what information it can require from agencies and when political parties should be able to seek advice confidentially. While getting there wasn’t pretty, the experience of working on the establishment of the Australian PBO convinced me that New Zealand needed to follow suit. This has been reinforced as every Australian state and territory has established some form of election costings mechanism. In 2016 I wrote for the Herald supporting the case for an independent election costings unit. Ten years later, the case has become stronger. Predictably, as we get closer to the election, the commentary about fiscal holes is heating up yet again. National attacked Labour’s costing of its public transport fare cap. Labour and the Public Service Association attacked National’s costing of its proposed increases to KiwiSaver contributions. Although the election is still more than two months away, the campaign already risks devolving into competing assertions of fiscal black holes that the public cannot hope to resolve. One reason for independent election costings is the imbalance between Government and Opposition access to public service advice. More important for our democracy than fairness between parties, is the quality of information available to voters. An independent costings unit can check calculations, identify the assumptions on which they depend and help voters weigh the trade-offs involved in competing promises. It is sometimes said that New Zealand is too small for the expense. But if the Australian Capital Territory, with a population comparable to Wellington and the Northern Territory, which has about as many residents as Dunedin can provide election costings so their voters have greater clarity, there is no reason New Zealand could not. New Zealand has been debating some form of independent election costings unit or Parliamentary Budget Office for at least a decade. In 2019 Grant Robertson and James Shaw proposed the creation of a Parliamentary Budget Officer as an Officer of Parliament. Nicola Willis later reversed National’s previous opposition and included contingency funding for an election costings unit in Budget 2025. The proposal did not survive Cabinet, with Act and New Zealand First opposing it. Labour has now made the establishment of a Parliamentary Budget Office an election commitment. The model National took to Cabinet was a relatively narrow election costings service. Labour is proposing a Parliamentary Budget Office drawing on the Australian model as set out in Barbara Edmonds’ Member’s Bill. The Australian PBO was part of the agreements negotiated after the 2010 federal election that allowed Julia Gillard’s minority Labor Government to govern. Australia’s PBO does not just cost election policies. It publishes medium-term economic and fiscal projections using current policy settings, undertakes distributional analysis of major Budget measures and produces long-term fiscal sustainability reports. Those wider functions give a PBO a role well beyond election campaigns, providing independent fiscal analysis throughout the parliamentary term. A costings unit would not resolve every dispute described as a fiscal hole. It could estimate what a policy will cost but cannot weigh in on the value judgments implicit in what other spending should be displaced, whether projected savings will be delivered or how much of a future operating allowance a party should commit. But simply making it clear where the disagreement lies, distinguishing between an error in arithmetic and differences in assumptions, priorities or future fiscal choices, would be an improvement on the present exchange of increasingly large and largely untestable numbers. Fifteen years after those late-night fights in Canberra, the Australian PBO is simply part of the institutional furniture. It’s now time for New Zealand to follow the example. Marcus Ganley is a public law specialist with firm Franks Ogilvie. He was previously a ministerial adviser to the Helen Clark Labour government and held senior roles with Labor ministers in the Australian and South Australian parliaments. Catch up on the debates that dominated the week by signing up to our Opinion newsletter – a weekly round-up of our best commentary.