Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Where does Labour plan on finding the $13 billion for pay equity?

Why did Chris Hipkins choose to announce that he will restore the pay equity regime within the first 100 days of a Labour-led Government? Why did he do that?

I'm really confused by it because it's not as if there was a special event or venue that he tied the announcement to. He was just at a public meeting in Spreydon and then seemed to blurt it out.

This is hugely consequential for the Labour Party.

What it's done is change the focus. It should be about the PREFU and about holding the Finance Minister's feet to the fire over why she's still taking on more debt and why she's trying to sell us a set of figures based on, quote, "heroic assumptions" that essentially ignore the current price of oil and bond yields.

But instead of doing that, Chippy has inserted himself into the conversation.

Rather than focusing on Nicola Willis, what I'm now much more interested in is this: where is Labour going to find the apparent $13 billion needed to fund its pay equity promise?

I don't know if you've seen what's in the PREFU but even though the outlook is much rosier than it was four months ago, we're still borrowing as a country and will continue to do so for the next three to four years. And that's based on optimistic, even heroic, assumptions.

We are still, to quote Nicola, "borrowing for groceries". We are still on track to pay $13.7 billion a year in interest costs on our existing debt. And that's without Chippy adding even more to it.

So where is he going to find the money for this pay equity promise if it's not going on the debt? Or is it going on the debt?

This is the weirdest strategy from Chippy.

Frankly, up until now I expected Labour's announcement to be that it would ditch this policy, just as it ditched the so-called landlords' tax policy, albeit for different reasons. Labour has clearly demonstrated it's willing to change its mind and scrap policies that simply aren't going to work.

The books have just been opened and shown that we have no money and that our debt is already costing us a fortune. Yet here we are, wondering where Chris Hipkins is going to find another $13 billion for pay equity.

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