Businesses in New Zealand have shown "resilience, adaptability and determination", Opposition Leader Judith Collins said today in response to yesterday’s Budget.
Despite the "grit" shown through the Covid-19 fallout, Collins said businesses did not see solutions to issues such as supply chain problems in Budget 2021.
However, the Prime Minister pushed back on the claim, saying supporting businesses and job creation was in Budget 2021.
Collins said there was no plan in the Budget "to get the economy going and firing on all cylinders".
"We were hoping for a Budget that finally took New Zealand’s productivity crisis seriously," Collins said.
"We were hoping for a Budget that proposed measures that generate step change in our economic performance and turn this once in a generation crisis into the opportunity that some businesses have been able to make it.
"We were hoping for aspiration and ambition and we didn’t get it. We got a Budget that looked down, not up."
When asked today why businesses did not receive anything in the Budget, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she would "argue that there is".
"One of the things we heard through the course of Covid is the need to support businesses to pivot and response to the environment Covid has created. There is funding in there to access digital support and training."
She reflected on the work they had done since Covid to help keep businesses operating in "tough times", such as the implementation of the wage subsidy.
On what middle-New Zealand received, Ardern said that "the best thing we can do for New Zealand as a whole is make sure that we have jobs being created".
"I hear constantly from New Zealanders that they want to see everyone doing well, and so people from all walks of life have often raised with me the issue of poverty."
Collins said the New Zealand public could expect before the next election "very big" promises from National around capital injections into companies and tax write-offs.
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