Dear John --

It’s been just over a week since we delivered Budget 2024, which will give hardworking Kiwis tax relief for the first time in 14 years.

About 400,000 people have used the tax calculator to see how much better off they’ll be thanks to our tax relief plan. If you haven’t already, check out the calculator here. 

We identified billions of dollars in back-office savings from across the public service in order to provide tax relief and make significant new investments in the frontline services Kiwis rely on like health, education and law and order.

In health alone, we boosted funding by $16.68 billion across three Budgets for things like hospital and specialist services, primary health, an extension to breast screening, more doctors and free mental health counselling services through Gumboot Friday.

But we have more work to do.

Our medicine-buying agency Pharmac required almost $1.8 billion to fix a funding gap left by Labour which, gone unaddressed, would have affected Kiwis access to lifesaving drugs.

While our first job was to maintain this access, we remain committed to funding 13 new cancer medicines in our first term and work is underway right now on delivering this crucial part of our plan to improve cancer care.

Thank you,
Christopher