Duncan Garner: Nicola Willis’s Budget is wishful thinking - but for all our sakes, let’s hope she’s right

If you see Treasury officials around Wellington this week, they’ll be easy to spot. They’ll all be wearing rose-tinted glasses.

Because buried underneath Nicola Willis’s carefully crafted “back to surplus” Budget is a set of forecasts so optimistic they read like wishful thinking: inflation falls faster than economists think likely. Growth rebounds stronger than expected. Oil prices settle. The Middle East calms down. Global instability fades. Households recover. Businesses start investing again. And New Zealand suddenly roars back to life in 2027 and 2028.

Sure.

And next up, I suppose this is finally the Warriors’ year. Stacked against some of Treasury’s assumptions, the Warriors might be the safer bet.

Conveniently, the forecasts are rosy because – surprise, surprise – this is an election-year Budget, despite Finance Minister Nicola Willis saying this year’s would not be a lolly scramble. National was hardly going to wheel Treasury into Parliament to announce: “Brace yourselves everybody, things are probably going to stay pretty rough for the next three years.”

No government does that, especially in an election year, and Nicola Willis understands politics better than many give her credit for. She understands the power of a headline. The symbolism of surplus.

“Back in surplus.” That is the holy grail for National-led governments, the headline they crave and the proof point they live for. The sentence they want repeated around BBQs, workplaces and kitchen tables: “They got the books back under control.” That’s the political objective. Even if the actual work required to get there is still largely sitting out in the future.

Announcing savings is easy. Governments announce things all the time. Labour once announced KiwiBuild,100,000 houses in 10 years. Remember that?

I’m not saying the surplus is KiwiBuild, but forecasts are not facts, they are educated guesses.