Budgets are wrapped up in a combination of mystery and tradition. The portents of the Budget to come have begun already and will only increase as it nears.
You know it's getting to the Budget time of year because the signs have begun weeks in advance.
Pre-announcements, breakfasts with business, articles speculating what should be or what will be in the budget by people who may have no idea either way. In the legislature, the annual review debates are reaching a conclusion, and Question Time hammers on even more than usual about the state of finances.
A well worn series of traditions around the delivery of the Budget is in play, and the person at the centre of it all, Finance Minister Grant Robertson, took time out of this procession to talk to Phil Smith about it.
Much of the tradition is based around the convention that the material in the Budget remains secret until its official release on Budget Day.
"We've had examples in history where Ministers of Finance have had to resign, or offer to resign anyway, because something has leaked out of the budget process," Robertson explained.
"Famously, Roger Douglas once had to send his resignation letter, which of course David Lange rejected, although I suspect he regretted that in later years. Myself, in 2019, I had the situation where material was put up accidentally on a website that could be found and was found, and it was released. So there's a lot of sensitivity."
A lot of the sensitivity, he said, harks back to the days where business people with advance knowledge of a government budget's contents could put their prices up or corner a market unfairly. Of course, these days pre-Budget announcements are the norm, a kind of political version of pre-loading before a big event, a way to tease out the experience for everyone invested in this major fiscal unveiling.
So while the Budget was finalised last month, the Government has begun making pre-announcements of specific material from the upcoming Budget. At the weekend, it announced a new spend on commuter rail in Kapiti and Wairarapa. The minister said they'd have one or two more announcements before Budget Day but that overall there won't be as many pre-announcements as have been seen in preceding years.
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Robertson admitted that pre-announcements were partly for promotional reasons - every government does it - and sometimes partly for specific reasons of timing. A lot is unveiled on Budget Day and some details get lost in the flood of information, so it makes sense to drip a bit out in advance. But not too much…