Venu Menon
Wellington, March 21,2024
Once he got past the banter and the funny moments of his long parliamentary journey, outgoing Labour MP Grant Robertson got down to the grim business of examining his legacy as finance minister under the previous government in his valedictory speech in Parliament on March 20.
It became clear that he was taking aim at the present three-party coalition government for dismantling the very legacy that he was obliged to uphold in his farewell address to the House.
But first, Robertson established his intent to lend his gravitas to a cause close to his heart. He urged every New Zealander to realise that the “abuse, bullying, and cruelty experienced by young people who were supposed to be cared for by the State and churches is horrific beyond any measure.” That systemic abuse “cast a dark shadow over our history.”
The speech he gave in the final debate of the marriage equality legislation remains his proudest moment in Parliament. Robertson’s was a commanding, but never strident, voice that addressed discrimination against rainbow communities, and the “increasing hatred” directed at the trans community.
Then he rolled up his sleeves and set about the scrappy business of defending his management of the country’s economy whilst he was minister of finance.
While the winter energy payment remains the policy that he thinks got him “the most positive correspondence about,” Robertson appears to set much store by his posting a surplus and keeping “net debt below our self-imposed limit of 20 per cent of GDP.”
Robertson cites Labour’s 2019 Wellbeing Budget as “world leading” because it looked beyond GDP growth and took a holistic view of people, the environment, communities and finances. Child poverty, climate change and “overall wellbeing” became focus areas.
Robertson piloted an approach to fiscal management that did not see the economy as “an end in itself” but as “a means to an end.”
But his critics might argue that his approach of putting “faces to the numbers” likely led to reckless spending on schemes aimed at cushioning the economic effects of Covid-19.
The wage subsidy, for instance, was designed to keep people in jobs when Covid hit businesses. It was welcomed by the business sector and the financial markets, but has drawn flak since.
Robertson liked to measure government activity in terms of “percentage of GDP,” rather than dollar figures. It went up from 27% of GDP in 2017 to 34% of GDP under Labour during the pandemic period, and is currently averaging at 30%. “Anything less is, in my mind, austerity.”
The new coalition government, by contrast, appears to prefer crunching the numbers to get “the economy back on track” after an era of what it sees as unbridled spending.
Finally, Robertson falls back on retelling the Covid- 19 story and how it played out in New Zealand. He recalls the dramatic moment when then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern decided to shut the borders.
This, in the end, serves as Robertson’s unique vantage point of history. He invokes the apocalyptic gloom of protracted lockdowns, when as the minister of finance, he found himself alone on the seventh floor of The Beehive, “roaming the office in search of food.”
The only statistic that matters to Robertson and Labour from the pandemic era is the “number of lives saved.”
With borders reopened and the pandemic a national memory, perhaps Grant Robertson saw it was the right time to sign off.
Venu Menon is an Indian Newslink reporter based in Wellington
