National Party's Finance Spokesperson Paul Goldsmith says the Opposition is concerned with how much debt New Zealand is set to earn following yesterday's Budget announcements made by the Government.
Mr Goldsmith spoke to TVNZ1's Breakfast this morning after yesterday's Budget and said while he was happy the wage subsidy scheme had been given more funding and more direction, it isn't enough to overlook the financial strains set to hit New Zealand in the future.
"I'm certainly concerned about the scale of the economic disaster," Mr Goldsmith said.
"I think people will be scratching their heads and wondering how this has turned into $140 billion of debt projected - that's $80,000 per household so it's like everybody suddenly got a second mortgage."
When asked if he would have invested less were he in Finance Minister Grant Robertson's shoes, Mr Goldsmith said he'd "certainly be wanting to borrow less over time".
"The critical thing is simply, are we making the problem worse than we need to and how do we get out of it?
"Certainly, we're going to have to borrow money - there's no question about that. This is the rainy day. But there's a massive difference between $100 billion and $150 billion in terms of how long it takes the next generation to pay it off."
Mr Goldsmith added what makes matters worse is that $150 billion lacks direction.
"What we saw in the Budget was a lot of spending, a very large slush fund left available of over $20 billion but no real clear plan to get growth going again."
Another area of concern was getting people back into jobs such as those in the struggling tourism industry.
"We've still got issues with the international tourism industry who employs 55,000 people... a priority of course is to get the trans-Tasman bubble going and that makes a huge difference to the tourism industry."
Mr Goldsmith also argued the tourism industry could get a boost from bringing back international students.
"The absolute priority must be to get those students back for the second semester and yet we're fluffing around not making much progress on that," he said.
"The universities have got large halls of residence, they've got plans, they're confident they can do it and quarantine them and get cracking into the second semester.
"They can do it. It just needs a 'can do' attitude - a focus on what we can do instead of always focusing on what we're not allowed to do.
"We've got to trust New Zealanders to figure out how to get back into business, get their jobs up and running again and where we're going to go into the future."
SHARE ME