THE MAN IN CHARGE OF THE MONEY
THE CALL CAME at dinner. Grant Robertson, minister of finance, was attending the opening of a new museum at Waitangi on 5 February 2020. For weeks, he had been following reports of a new virus spreading on the other side of the world. Typically, Robertson doesn’t take calls while he’s a guest, but this one was from an old friend, Rodney Jones, whose work regularly took him to China. Robertson had a feeling Jones wasn’t ringing to make small talk, so he stepped out to answer his phone. “This is really bad,” Jones told him. As February turned to March, and the virus was declared a pandemic, Robertson was confronted with the prospect of a global recession.
New Zealand had never encountered a situation like this in its history. There was no playbook to follow. “We did look at other countries, but we were operating in an environment where we didn’t have much information,” Robertson recalls. “So we did things like ask, ‘What did we do after the earthquakes? What did we do after the global financial crisis? Is that a good model?’” By the time the decision was made in mid-March to shut the borders, Robertson and Treasury were rushing to deliver a financial support package that would ensure “cashflow and confidence” for business owners. Over the course of a weekend, a $12 billion economic support package — including $5 billion for wage subsidies — was developed. It was finalised on a teleconference with Robertson, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters and “maybe James Shaw, I think”.
On 14 March, Robertson told New Zealanders what the financial future looked like. In short, not good. “A recession in New Zealand is now almost certain,” he told Parliament, “with the advice that we are receiving that the shock will be larger than that seen during the global financial crisis. This will affect every part of our economy now and for some time to come. We are going to see many New Zealanders lose their jobs, and some businesses will fail.”
Then, he walked through the reasoning behind the wage subsidy — “the largest investment in our lifetimes”. Robertson spoke for 15 minutes with a reassuring confidence, occasionally adjusting his glasses. Although he was neither deputy prime minister nor deputy leader of the Labour Party at the time, many New Zealanders mistook him for both. His widely praised economic response package amounted to 4 per cent of New Zealand’s GDP, compared to equivalent packages in Australia (1.2 per cent) and Britain (0.6 per cent). By September, CEOs around the country polled in the New Zealand Herald had rated Robertson as New Zealand’s top-performing cabinet minister.
One year on, Robertson is happy to be leaving his Beehive office, even if it’s just to walk across the road for a coffee. While waiting in line at the cafe in the National Library, he assesses the cabinet food before deciding against eating. “I’m fasting,” he says, explaining that “2020 was a year for stress eating”. He’s been fasting for “12 hours, ideally 14” each night for two months and says it’s working, “sort of”. He’s also been hitting the parliamentary gym three times a week.
Robertson is amiable, the type of person you would happily bump into at a function: easy to talk to and not too serious. He uses. He’s ready with an answer (generally a long one) to every question, seemingly without thinking.
