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Speaker 1: So election year is often running with Christoga Laxon's State

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Speaker 1: of the Nation address yesterday, where he declared the recovery

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Speaker 1: has arrived. We should know the election date later this week.

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Speaker 1: What we do know is the theme of National's campaign.

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Speaker 1: He was telling everybody yesterday. He told Mike it's fixing

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Speaker 1: the basics and building the future, which is not a shock.

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Speaker 1: It's just a variation of the way they've positioned themselves

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Speaker 1: for a while. They are the party that concentrates on

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Speaker 1: the need to haves, not the knights to haves. They're

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Speaker 1: the party that says that Labour trashed the economy in

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Speaker 1: six years with their spending. They're the party that is

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Speaker 1: said all along, we're the guys who'll fix it up.

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Speaker 1: But the real question is what are they fixing and

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Speaker 1: what are they building. So Treasury's figures from the half

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Speaker 1: Yearly Economic and Fiscal Update delivered just before Christmas showed

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Speaker 1: that the government has both cut capital expenditures since its

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Speaker 1: election and lowered forecast for new spending. So capex fell

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Speaker 1: by six billion dollars between the twenty three, twenty four

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Speaker 1: and twenty four to twenty five years, and spending was

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Speaker 1: one point six billion dollars less in twenty four to

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Speaker 1: twenty five than was budgeted. So that's not a lot

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Speaker 1: of fixing of leaky hospitals and rickety courtrooms going on.

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Speaker 1: That's a lot of cutting or spending. And yet despite that,

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Speaker 1: their spending has gone up, and we know that from

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Speaker 1: their borrowing. And that's because the big ticket items like

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Speaker 1: benefits and pensions keep going up, and so have the

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Speaker 1: costs and services like education and health. So what can

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Speaker 1: you fix and what can you build? There's not a

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Speaker 1: lot of invigorating news in the near future. It seems

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Speaker 1: as though our fundamentals room will remain basically unchanged. The

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Speaker 1: great hope for all of us is that the private

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Speaker 1: sector just gets on with it, understanding the limits to

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Speaker 1: our capacity, and we get back to what I would

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Speaker 1: say is the unofficial slogan, which is we are the

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Speaker 1: national party. Vote for us. We're not as bad as

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Speaker 1: the other lot. For more from Early edition with Ryan Bridge,

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Speaker 1: listen live to News Talks it be from five am weekdays,

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Speaker 1: or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.