If you can afford a high-quality, long-wearing pair of boots, you will pay a high cost one time and enjoy them for years.
If not, you will buy the boots you can afford and then the next pair, and the next. Overall, your costs are higher and your comfort lower.
Budget 2023 demonstrates some understanding of this need to invest upfront to gain savings and comfort over the long run.
Spending on things such as insulation, rail resilience and climate risk assessment all contribute to long-run flourishing in a changing world, but these are just line items from the already budgeted Climate Emergency Response Fund, rather than substantially new commitments to investing in our collective future.
More significant is the announcement of $6 billion of initial funding for a national resilience plan that is focused on building back better rather than business as usual.
The Budget includes $1 billion for recovery costs after Cyclone Gabrielle, including roads, rail, schools and other infrastructure. Rather than lock ourselves into a pattern of repeated after-the-fact emergency repair work, we should invest in resilience to the effects of climate change.
The national resilience plan is thus a step in the right direction.
Still, the vast bulk of spending in the Budget supports business as usual.
Business as usual is the poor man’s Budget option: pay as little as you can get away with now and let the future take care of itself.
If that really were the cheaper option it might be a wise choice.
But as we all know, it is actually more expensive to be poor than rich, and it is also more expensive to repair damage than to prevent it.
• Lisa Ellis is a professor of philosophy and politics at the University of Otago.
