The Government could face a deficit of up to $11 billion this year but it still aims to reach surplus by 2015, Finance Minister Bill English told Parliament today.Mr English was answering questions from Labour's finance spokesman David Cunliffe, who asked
The Government could face a deficit of up to $11 billion this year but it still aims to reach surplus by 2015, Finance Minister Bill English told Parliament today.
Mr English was answering questions from Labour's finance spokesman David Cunliffe, who asked how he could claim to be improving the Government's net financial position when the deficit had increased by almost $2b more than forecast in the last quarter.
"The member does make a fair point -- the Government can't continue to run very large deficits," Mr English said.
"This year it could be somewhere up to $11b and we've set out a path to reach surplus by 2015.
"That will take some very significant fiscal discipline... but it's the only way we will get there."
Mr Cunliffe asked Mr English whether he could confirm annualised real GDP per capita had fallen in every quarter since the Government came to power, meaning average New Zealanders had "consistently gone backwards and are still earning less on average today than the day he first took office?"
Mr English said that in a significant recession it could be expected that real GDP per capita would drop, and the Government had a plan to turn that around.
"We are dealing with a legacy of a government which managed to have negative growth in real per capita incomes even when the rest of the world was growing," he said.
