Greg Dixon’s Another Kind of Zoo: Chaos reigns as country comes to town for Budget Week

Greg Dixon’s weekly satirical column Another Kind of Politics runs a sharp eye over local and international politics.

Critics have labelled Finance Minister Nicola Willis election-year Budget a disappointment, saying it was neither a horse-sized duck nor one hundred duck-sized horses.

The political commentariat had been arguing all week over whether Willis’s third Budget would deliver one extremely large duck or lots of tiny horses to placate an electorate struggling with a cost-of-living crisis without end, high petrol prices due to the Iran war and record levels of ennui.

Instead Willis’s Budget did neither. Following drinks at the Pint of Order, late-night sambuca shots at the Green Parrot and chicken shawarmas from Habibi Kebab, the growing consensus was that Budget 2026 was both a horse-faced duck of indeterminate size and a duck-faced horse of indeterminate size that had fallen between two stools of indeterminate size.

An animal expert said that the best means to work out what the Budget might be was to remember that if it neighed like a horse it was probably a horse no matter what the size, and if it quacked like a duck it was likely a duck no matter what the size.

However, one commentator said after a chaotic week that saw large ducks, tiny horses and a huge crayfish turn Parliament upside down, the Budget was neither a duck or a horse nor even a crayfish.

“If I were to give this Budget a name, and there’s nothing more than political commentators love than giving Budgets a name, I would call this the Animal Farm Budget,” the commentators said.

“As promised, Willis hasn’t thrown any bones to struggling New Zealanders. But by increasing income-related rents for those in social housing and using that money to boost the accommodation supplement for those in private rentals, she has made private housing renters better off at the expense of social housing renters.

“And in do so she is dividing many thousands of struggling New Zealand families into the deserving poor and the undeserving poor. It’s positively Victorian, but that’s Willis’s New Zealand for you: we are all equal, though some are more equal than others depending on who you’re renting from.”