Focus areas for Budget 2022
This will be our fourth Wellbeing Budget. The wellbeing approach is designed to drive investments to improve New Zealanders' living standards by tackling long-term challenges as well as addressing the pressures immediately in front of us. Wellbeing means giving people the capabilities to live lives of purpose, balance, and meaning to them.
The Public Finance Act 1989 also requires the Government to outline the overarching goals that will guide its Budget decision-making, and the policy areas it will focus on in that year. These goals and focus areas will support the Government to make the choices and trade-offs required to produce a Budget that achieves our wellbeing objectives.
Overarching goals
This Budget will be aimed at continuing to make progress against the goals the Government set at the start of the current Parliamentary term. These are:
- Continuing to keep New Zealand safe from COVID-19
- Accelerating the recovery and rebuild from the impacts of COVID-19
- Laying the foundations for the future, including addressing key issues such as our climate change response, housing affordability, and child poverty.
These overarching goals have informed the design process for Budget 2022. The core of this Budget will focus on continuing to make progress on meeting the Government's manifesto commitments and addressing critical cost pressures facing key public services. We have already made significant progress on meeting these funding needs in the past year, and this Budget will continue this trend.
Alongside this, Budget 2022 will make a step change in how the Government invests to address long-term challenges. This Budget embeds new multi-year funding approaches in the areas of health and climate change. It will also pilot changes to our public finance system by establishing Natural Resources and Justice clusters, which will enable increased coordination and collaboration in these sectors.