Budget 2023 is fast approaching, and will be published on Thursday 18 May. The Budget lock up at the Banquet Hall in Parliament is one of the highlights of the political year, where journalists are given early copies of Budget documents to prepare their articles. The Budget is then formally delivered in the House, and is followed by an eight hour budget debate in the house which kicks off the annual budget scrutiny cycle.
This will be Finance Minister Hon Grant Roberston’s sixth budget, and the first delivered under the tenure of Prime Minister Chris Hipkins.
In a pre-budget speech last month, the Prime Minister laid out the Government’s priorities that have guided the development of this year’s budget. There are a few key takeaways from that speech:
- The Prime Minister has repeatedly said that this will be a no-frills budget which will focus on the cost of living and cyclone recovery.
- This focus will be addressed through investment in skills, science and infrastructure.
- There was also a commitment that no new taxes or levies will be introduced, with any extra funding acquired through a mix of borrowing and spending cuts in other areas.
As an Association, we are focused on ensuring that the Government is working in partnership with our sector to better understand what we need. While hospo itself is leading the long-term work that will make our sector more resilient, we also know that ongoing skills shortages, increased costs of doing business and the ever-changing regulatory environment only add to the pressures we have experienced over the past three years.
Increased investment in training in Aotearoa to address the national skills shortage is one of our top priorities, so we would like to see investment in work-based training initiatives, to both fill the immediate skills gaps that we are facing and upskill New Zealanders at the same time.
This means investing in hospitality apprenticeships and other on-the-job training schemes, as well as increasing MSD funding for those businesses who give people the skills they need to operate in areas with workforce shortages. This would help alleviate the immediate pressures on our industry, and assist us to prepare for the future.
Alongside training we also need to see an increase in investment in hospitality as an industry. We are constantly being hit with more red tape and administrative requirements – often without that being an intended consequence, because despite contributing over $13 billion to the national economy, our industry is too often left out of the conversation.
For that reason, we’re renewing our calls for the establishment of a ministerial portfolio for Hospitality, with a business unit within MBIE that is dedicated to our industry. Ensuring the regulatory environment is conducive to productivity and business growth while still prioritising the well-being of employees and consumers remains a top priority.
Despite leading work ourselves to build a more resilient, responsible and transparent industry through our HospoCred programme (which has been formally recognised within the Tourism and Hospitality Accord as part of the Better Work Action Plan), too often this work is ignored and replicated by Government at a significant cost to the taxpayer – when partnership with our industry could stand initiatives up more effectively, efficiently and quickly.
Promotion of New Zealand to the world as a place to work, as well as study and travel, is something that we are keen to see improved. As tourist numbers finally start to reach (and even exceed) pre-pandemic levels, our hospitality businesses are being left without the staff numbers to remain open and meet the demands of the influx of holiday-makers.
We are glad that infrastructure development is a priority for this Budget. Ensuring that our businesses and communities are resilient in the face of future natural disasters is of the utmost importance; we need to be able to prove that we learn the lessons that these events have taught us.
There are so many other areas that need to be addressed—like investment in community policing to keep our communities, staff and businesses safe; or lowering GST (and removing it from food items altogether) which will benefit both the food services industry and the public at a time when the cost of living is skyrocketing.
While we won’t know exactly which initiatives will be funded until the Budget is announced next week, we remain hopeful that the Government’s investment in skills, science and infrastructure is a good sign for our sector, through the priorities that we’ve identified in our 2023 election manifesto.