Source: Green Party
Mr Speaker, the Greens want every New Zealander to feel proud of our country.
Not just for our history; for granting women the vote, standing against the United States for a nuclear free Pacific and splitting the atom.
We want New Zealanders to feel proud of the country they live in today.
We want New Zealanders to be able to swim in their rivers.
To be able to grow food in healthy soil.
To catch abundant fish from the ocean to feed their families.
To be able to afford their groceries.
To be housed. To heat their homes.
To have the right to a good education and secure job.
To innovate. To create. To have fun.
We want New Zealanders to be happy, healthy and safe. Unified.
But this Government is telling us “computer says no”.
Today, they have released a Budget that tells us that they have no hope, no plan, no ambition and no vision for our country.
Unless, of course, that hope, plan, ambition and vision is just what we see here: allowing corporations to profit handsomely off the misery of regular New Zealanders. Subsidising and supporting the very fossil fuels that Treasury’s BEFU tells us are the major vulnerability in our economy.
This isn’t a cost-of-living crisis. It is a cost of greed crisis.
Christopher Luxon, Nicola Willis, aren’t you sick of pretending?
Pretending that there is no money?
‘Cause the National Party can find money when it wants to.
And I’m not just talking about their rich-lister donations.
In the past two years, they’ve found billions in their budgets in tax cuts for landlords, tobacco companies and the wealthy and sorted.
There’s been billions for fossil fuel production.
Billions and billions to meet Trump’s request to spend up large on new military equipment.
So they’ve taken billions and billions from the poorest New Zealanders, cutting access for the homeless to emergency housing and cutting access to benefits while thousands of New Zealanders are being pushed out of their jobs by this same Government to the highest number since 1994 – the year that I was born.
And the books today show us that unemployment will in fact be higher in the next few years as a result of the decisions that this Government was just clapping for than were forecast in December. That means another 6,500 New Zealanders will lose their jobs thanks to the decisions of Christopher Luxon.
These books also show us that Christopher Luxon’s ‘responsible fiscal management’ has resulted in further downward revisions of GDP growth forecasts. Treasury today has also warned that his obsession with fossil fuels will raise costs for households and businesses, which can slow spending, investment, and the very growth that they love to grow about, ultimately reshaping the economy’s structure, and lowering our output and economic performance.
It’s dressed up in a heck of a lot of fancy language, but today the Government is effectively choosing where our collective resources go, and who gets to be in charge. Who really gets to make decisions.
And this week, Christopher Luxon has shown us – albeit kicking and screaming – into broad daylight, who he sees as his job to serve.
We have seen laws stripping people’s right to hold big polluters accountable, originally drafted by the country’s largest climate polluters – Fonterra and Z Energy – were introduced by this Government with glee.
The Greens have exposed that the Government is taking on one and a half billion dollars more in debt to try and quietly cover the tracks of their failed climate policies.
This is why it’s so important to understand that every time this Government makes decisions to push more of our country’s wealth up to those at the top, they are also damaging our democracy.
Fewer and fewer people get more and more money and more and more influence, while more and more people are left with scraps they’re told to fight over – and told, don’t look up.
Let’s run through some important facts.
Because despite this Government’s best efforts to starve our economy, New Zealanders are slugging away and working hard, and we’ve been lucky with global commodity prices, so our economy is growing in size.
But more and more people are getting poorer and poorer.
And the Government is cutting away investment in our basic, collectively owned and operated public services.
So: our economy is growing, but regular people are getting poorer, and our Government is shrinking, while taking on more debt.
So, where is New Zealanders’ money going?
Well, last year, the 100 odd households on the NBR’s rich list increased their wealth by almost 8 billion dollars. In just one year.
Supermarkets are making $1m a day in excess profit. Power companies’ net profits were $557 million in the second half of last year. Banks raked in profits of almost $7b in 2025. That’s $1,248 in profit for Australian banks for every single New Zealander.
Our economy is worth $445 billion dollars. It’s bigger than it’s ever been.
But our hospitals and schools and our nurses and our doctors and our teachers who staff them are struggling. Our firefighters are striking twice a week because the fire trucks meant to save lives are falling apart.
Our public services don’t fail overnight. When we don’t invest properly in them, those services get slower, more stretched and further away for every year that passes.
There is a word for that. Austerity. It’s how you break a country in slow motion.
Luxon’s Government has boasted about new money for health and education. But once you count inflation, a growing and ageing population, and what it really costs to deliver these things, much of that ‘record investment’ is a cut in everything but name.
This Government will do anything in order to avoid taxing the mega-rich.
They’ll take school kids’ lunch money. They’ve made real terms cuts to our schools and our early childhood education – meaning higher fees for parents. They’ve cut $300,000 from programmes that help New Zealanders with energy hardship, when record numbers are struggling to pay their power bill. They’ve raided millions of dollars from food banks, and taken away almost $700m from public housing tenants.
I guess just some of us are entitled to our entitlements.
Their decisions will close down sexual violence prevention services.
Christopher Luxon promises growth means more money in our economy. And he is right about that.
What he’s not being straight up about is how he knows that growth is not shared.
He knows that under his economic rules, that wealth goes straight to the top.
But maybe I’m being too generous.
Maybe he truly still believes in trickle down economics, like some believe in the tooth fairy.
Maybe he believes his own shtick about ‘hard choices’ as he entrenches an economy that’s been designated as a speculator’s tax haven by Australians.
The same Australians from the same Australia where higher tax rates on those who can afford to pay mean there’s more Government revenue to invest in better public services and infrastructure. The same Australia that this Government is sending so many of our best and brightest to, because under this Government, New Zealanders are having a really hard time imagining a better tomorrow here at home.
I know politics is hard. I know that changing your mind and doing something differently in this environment opens you up to all kinds of attacks that you’re u-turning, or backtracking, or whatever we want to call it.
But I would like to think, if I was privileged enough to be sitting in those seats over there making the decisions about where our country’s collective resources are used, if I had spent two years making decisions that were hurting regular people, I would like to think that I would pause and re-evaluate.
That I would listen. To the chanting of our emergency service workers on strike for the longest industrial action in a generation. To the cries of babies this Government knows are being born into unnecessary, entirely preventable poverty. To the New Zealanders down at the RSA who just want some leaders with a spine.
Instead, this Government ploughs ahead with their economic doom loop.
They’ve decided to mercilessly cut back on spending without any idea of how the market they worship would fill the gap. That shocked business confidence they said they cared about and private sector investment also contracted by 2%.
They cancelled thousands of new state house builds, and hundreds of infrastructure projects, which meant the loss of 15,000 construction sector jobs.
Each job lost isn’t just devastating for that person or just for their family. It’s devastating to their local community, and their local economy, and the small businesses where they bought a morning coffee, or went on a date, or did their home renos through.
And what’s the Government’s response to the doom loop of their own creation?
It’s not to stop and think, maybe this thing isn’t working.
Because maybe, instead of a plan, they’re running on instinct. A well-documented, well-exercised National Party instinct to hand over our collective wealth and control to a few people at the top.
Former National Governments sold off state housing, which now means we hand out billions to line the pockets of private landlords.
Former National Governments sold off our state-owned power companies, despite an overwhelming referendum in opposition, and now we all pay for an energy system driven by profit at the expense of innovation and renewable generation.
Former National Governments shut down and amalgamated Ministries and Departments, closing factories and putting a wrecking ball through the regions.
This National Government is no different.
New Zealanders deserve so much better.
And the Greens have consistently shown that better is possible.
If we dared to tax multi-multi-millionaires and billionaires so they contributed fairly to the country that helped them build that wealth, we wouldn’t have to rely on charity to get new ambulances on the road.
We could use this big old economy democratically, to achieve the things that no one of us could achieve alone. Very few people have the individual wealth to build a hospital or refurbish old classrooms, but together, we have more wealth than we’ve ever had.
We can create jobs. We can build the things we need. We can protect the natural environment we rely on for life on earth as we know it. Or are we going to keep pretending that megalomaniac billionaires are going to solve our problems?
I actually agreed with the Prime Minister when two months ago, as the fossil fuel crisis was just hitting, he boldly said that hope is not a plan.
However, at exactly that same time, his Minister of Energy was quietly cancelling the long-awaited Energy Plan.
The fossil fuel crisis has put a spotlight on the ticking time bomb sitting at the centre of our economy.
And while Luxon’s Government seems intent on finding new ways to lace this timebomb into the fabric of everything we do. The Government hopes and prays for new fossil fuel shipments, and every time one is confirmed, they hope to restart the countdown timer.
But if the counter gets to zero, our entire country, our entire economy, grinds to a halt.
It’s not sensible to spend all of our resources fixated on feeding the beast in hopes to just reset the clock.
We need to defuse the time bomb.
The next step is rewiring our economy and country around something that will not blow up in our faces.
We don’t get affordable, secure energy from expensive fuels that need to be hauled in from the other side of the planet.
We get it when we tap into the abundant water, wind and sun and the geothermal activity beneath our feet. We get it when we electrify everything.
That’s what it means to build resilience.
It’s what it means to insulate ourselves against imported inflation.
It’s what it means to build our country.
But it’s not just nation building. It’s common sense.
It’s taking control over the things that we have control over.
But this Government is giving up control.
Not to regular New Zealanders –
But to corporations, off-shore shareholders and the fewer and fewer people who are getting more and more of our resources.
Funnily enough, if our country were actually the business Christopher Luxon seems to think it is, it would also be a failing business.
In business, you don’t succeed by firing all of your staff, cutting off your sources of revenue and then begging rich out-of-towners to maybe pop over because they can avoid paying tax, closing your eyes to the crumbling infrastructure.
If things aren’t going right, you get a new business plan. You find a new strategy.
But a country is not a company, and a Prime Minister is not a CEO.
Prime Minister, I’ve spent two years inviting you to come and walk the streets of Auckland Central, to meet the people, including the children, who your policies have made homeless.
I invite you to go and stand in the middle of Bendigo in Central Otago, and tell New Zealanders with a straight face that you want to poison the local waterways and churn our pristine biodiversity into a mine to make a quick buck for an Australian mining company.
I invite you to come sit with me with regular people at Mt Smart during a Warriors game, to meet the couple from Hamilton who sit next to me, who drive up every other week for the game, who tell me your Government has been a wrecking ball for small business because you’ve sucked all of the money out of customers’ pockets.
Prime Minister, I invite you to go outside.
To touch grass.
To breathe the air.
To look at New Zealanders you’re supposed to serve in the eye.
Those things are real. Those things matter.
And when your made-up economic rulebook is destroying those very real things, those silly rules have got to change.
Mr Speaker, here’s the hardest truth. And it’s not for the theatre that is this place. It’s for the New Zealanders beyond these walls.
No one is coming to save us.
New Zealanders are going to have to do this ourselves.
And on November 7th, New Zealanders can resign this Government to the history books.
But we are not going to spontaneously end up with a government that is willing to take on the well-resourced lobbyists in the country, and to work actively in the interests of regular people.
So we are going to need a new kind of coalition.
I’m not talking about the boring, circular talk-back talk of which politician will negotiate with which.
I’m talking about New Zealanders coming together with a common, intentional idea of who we are as a country, and where all of us want to go.
Because when everything feels complicated and chaotic, I believe we can agree on some basic things.
Every New Zealander is entitled to a safe home. A good education. Affordable food. A secure job. Reliable transport. Renewable energy.
These are the non-negotiables that every New Zealander is entitled to. And they can be the building blocks to help us rebuild our country for all of us.
These are the things that we should fight for not just for ourselves, not just for the people we know and love, but even for the people we don’t know, and even the people we don’t like.
To anyone and everyone listening, I’m asking you not just to believe in the Greens. I’m asking New Zealanders to believe in themselves, to believe in each other, and to believe in the country we can build if we are willing to work together to make it a reality.
And I’m asking NZers not just to believe. I’m asking you to act.
Because if New Zealanders are feeling powerless right now, it’s kind of by intent. That is exactly the strategy and the plan of this Government. To have regular people switch off so that power and wealth get concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. But I promise New Zealanders, they will find their power when they go out there and they talk to other New Zealanders about these basic things we have in common that we are willing to fight for, for each other.
New Zealanders can do more than vote this election. They can join the campaign to rebuild this country.
Original source: https://nz.mil-osi.com/2026/05/28/chloe-swarbrick-budget-speech-2026/