3. Question No. 3—FinanceMILES ANDERSON (National—Waitaki) to the Minister of FinanceQuestion No. 3—Finance3. MILES ANDERSON (National—Waitaki) to the Minister of Finance: What is the operating allowance for Budget 2025?Hon NICOLA WILLIS (Minister of Finance): No sooner has one Budget been delivered than the next is under way. The operating allowance for the next Budget Budget 2025 is $2.4 billion. To be clear: that is $2.4 billion per year of additional net spending or revenue reduction on average across the forecast period. That is a very tight allowance indeed. In fact it is the lowest operating allowance since Steven Joyce's Budget in 2017. The Government is committed to controlling spending and getting the books back to surplus.Miles Anderson: How much has been pre-committed against the Budget 2025 allowance?Hon NICOLA WILLIS: The Government has pre-committed $1.37 billion per annum against the Budget 2025 allowance to meet forecast demographic volume and price pressures for front-line health services delivered by Health New Zealand. We have done this to give the health sector confidence to plan for the future so that New Zealanders can get the healthcare they need. The Government has also pre-committed funding for additional medicines including up to 26 new cancer treatments.Miles Anderson: How much does that leave in the allowance for new decisions?Hon NICOLA WILLIS: After pre-commitments and some non-discretionary forecast items there is currently less than a billion dollars remaining in the operating allowance for Budget 2025. Clearly managing within that remaining allowance will require tight controls on new spending. It is also important to remember that allowances are a net concept: they include savings initiatives as well as new spending and revenue increases as well as tax relief. So any savings or new revenue initiatives will boost that billion-dollar figure. As I said in the Budget speech savings and reprioritisation will be a feature of future Budgets just as they were in Budget 2024. Finding better ways to use public money will be a business-as-usual activity for this Government.Chlöe Swarbrick: Can the Minister promise that her operating allowance which is $100 million lower than Treasury says is necessary just to keep the lights on in this country will not result in front-line service cuts?Hon NICOLA WILLIS: Well I think the member clearly drafted her question before she listened to the answers to my earlier supplementaries because the key point here is that in order to meet cost pressures we will need to find savings elsewhere. We on this side of the House think that is a good and proper thing to do. Because if that member wants to contend that every dollar of public money being used today is always being used wisely then I would invite her to reflect on this: in the last Budget our Government found $23 billion of savings and reprioritisation—that's $5.9 billion every year over the next four years—and it only took us a few months to find it.Chlöe Swarbrick: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. While that was an incredibly lengthy answer it didn't get anywhere near addressing my question which was about front-line service cuts and whether the Minister could give any guarantee that there would not be front-line service cuts as a result of her operating allowance which is lower than what Treasury says is necessary for business as usual.SPEAKER: Well it wasn't an incredibly long answer; it was a longer answer but it most certainly addressed the question. What I would simply say is that if you're asking for a guarantee it is in the nature of a yes or no question. So you're going to probably get the type of answer you got.Chlöe Swarbrick: Can the Minister of Finance guarantee that there will be no further cuts to front-line services under her Government?Hon NICOLA WILLIS: I will repeat the commitment I have made in this House many times which is that we are focused on delivering services that get better results. That does not mean that we won't strive to find new and better ways to deliver public services and sometimes that will entail change. Because the alternative is that we accept that every service being delivered by a public agency today is being delivered the best way. That is clearly not the case and this is a Government that is determined to get better results for New Zealanders and make the changes needed to ensure that.Miles Anderson: How confident is she in finding savings?Hon NICOLA WILLIS: Well I am very confident. I say that because as I said to the member earlier we found an average saving of $5.9 billion per year across the forecast period in the Budget just gone. Despite some members predicting that the sky would fall in if the Government made any savings whatsoever we found that $5.9 billion per year so that we could direct it to higher-value uses—things like 500 additional police things like Gumboot Friday things like new classrooms and maintaining our existing classrooms—and I am confident that across the public sector there are many more savings and re-prioritisation opportunities.