Summarised by Centrist
Left-leaning commentator Max Rashbrooke frames the Green Party’s proposal to triple the government debt threshold to 60 percent of GDP as “carefully calibrated radicalism.”
Rashbrooke notes Chlöe Swarbrick’s tax-and-borrow rebrand to fund infrastructure and climate resilience is pitched as “real economic responsibility.”
Fiscal restraint, previously backed by Grant Robertson and former Green co-leader James Shaw, is described as “peculiarly constrained” and an outdated “orthodoxy” rooted in the 1980s.
The Greens argue that fears of over-borrowing are exaggerated, and that the real risk lies in spending too little on infrastructure, public services and climate readiness. Swarbrick described Treasury’s debt-averse approach to fiscal resilience and its planning for economic shocks as “unnecessary insurance.”
The proposal follows the Greens’ “alternative budget,” which included $25 billion in new taxes on the top one percent.
Rashbrooke relays the Greens’ view that international markets will reward their approach, provided the money is well spent. He concedes, however, that decades of public investment in education, transport and health have delivered mixed results.
“How to get the machinery of the state working better is, in short, an entirely separate question,” he writes, and one he admits the Greens “have not yet fully confronted.”
