Robertson, who appeared before the Finance and Expenditures Committee on Tuesday via Zoom while Parliament is suspended for the week, has been put on trial over the spending.
“I’m trying to understand on behalf of the taxpayer how much more money you might have to spend on him,” said National MP Michael Woodhouse.
ACT leader David Seymour asked Robertson, “Did you spend so much money on things like $ 4 billion on housing and half a billion on free school lunches because people weren’t expecting a Delta outbreak?”
“No, I wouldn’t put it that way,” Robertson said, arguing that “most” of the money in the COVID-19 fund was spent on social support programs related to lockdowns and health-related things like vaccines.
“That is the main focus of the fund, it always has been and always will be.”
Robertson stated that despite documents remaining about $ 5 billion in the COVID-19 fund, there is also a significant under-spending rate. There is another $ 2 billion from the small business cash flow lending program that hasn’t been used.
He said tax revenue was about $ 6 billion better than expected.
And if the lockdown exceeds expectations, there will be $ 35 billion available from the Imprest Supply Bill, which gives the government the authority to spend money before it is officially allocated in September.
Seymour is concerned that the government’s COVID-19 fund is drying up.
“You have $ 5 billion left, you burn a billion and a half for each week of lockdown, which means you have about four weeks before you have to look elsewhere for money.”
“They say you have $ 35 billion in Imprest Supply. What will you get off of what it should be spent on, and if you can’t, will you borrow more and how? much?”
But Robertson is confident the government can handle it.
“Of course I don’t see it that way,” he said.
“Do we have enough money to pay off the wage subsidy system? The answer is yes, we have enough money to pay for it for a considerable amount of time before we ever have to go back to Parliament to ask for more money.
“The economy is in a very strong position, we have the ability to do this over any period of time, but we have more than enough resources for the current period that we are in.”
Robertson also denied criticism that the government used the COVID-19 fund to spend on things unrelated to the coronavirus.
He noted that during the election campaign, the National Party suggested using the fund on non-coronavirus-related issues such as roads, which he criticized at the time.
“Many of the decisions that have been made about the fund were apparently made in May 2020. If we then fast forward to the election campaign in August / September, we had around $ 12 billion in the fund at that point.
“We all thought a little differently at that time last year, but we put money aside and we have money and we have new priorities.
“It’s probably worth noting that in the budget process we went through this year, we actually went through the COVID fund and were re-prioritized around a billion dollars worth of it so that we had more resources available.”
Robertson announced that approximately $ 480 million has been paid out of the wage subsidy system to date during the most recent outbreak, and more than 127,000 companies have approved their applications.
He promised not to cut core services if the money ran out.
“We’ll make sure that the New Zealanders get the support they need because that worked. The economy recovered.”
