Finance Minister Grant Robertson admits some numbers in Budget leak 'are right'

May 28, 2019

National’s Simon Bridges says he’s stolen a march on the Government by exposing some details from Thursday’s Budget. (Source: Other)

The National Party's large release of details from Budget 2019 "is not the real Budget", Finance Minister Grant Robertson said, however he admitted "some numbers that are right and some numbers that are wrong". 

The Finance Minister ruled out any leak from the Beehive, and said Treasury were also "looking to find out what happened".

This morning National claimed it released parts of the 2019 Budget , the highly secretive details of which were to be released this Thursday. 

"The major new spending initiatives... are not listed in the material you see here," Mr Robertson said today. "The kind of numbers in here are not aggregated in a way that has been in the Beehive."

Mr Robertson said he had confidence in the Treasury, "this is something we will investigate to see whether or not that confidence is maintained".

He had spoken to Secretary to the Treasury Gabriel Makhlouf, who said it has launched its own review of the incident.  

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"As far as the Treasury is concerned, the release of Budget 2019 will proceed as planned this Thursday", Mr Makhlouf said.

Mr Roberston said of the 22 pages of details of funding National claim were from Budget 2019, "there are some numbers that are right and some numbers that are wrong".

"It's also not even a fraction of what the real Budget is."

He did not know whether the detail release was a deliberate or an accidental leak.

National would not label the details obtained by them as a 'leak'.

He said work would be done to work out what happened after the release of the Budget and was still looking into the "veracity" of the numbers. 

"I found out in caucus and have been looking into it for the last little while." 

He said Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern wanted to know "whether or not the numbers were accurate, what they meant, where they'd come from". 

"But our focus is on the Budget, on Thursday."

The Opposition claim to have released parts of the secretive Budget. (Source: Other)

He was not embarrassed by the leak, he said. 

Party leader Simon Bridges said the Government were set to put $1.3 billion into defence, an extra $139 million into forestry, $744 million for district health boards, $740 million for international aid.

National say they have released key details of Thursday’s Budget two days early. (Source: Other)

Mr Robertson said in terms of the spending details for defence, it reflected the cost of the  four Boeing P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft from the United States, which was announced in July. 

The Budget is to be released at 2pm Thursday. 

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