The price of 91-octane petrol is set to stay below $3 a litre for the fourth week in a row – and that means the $50 weekly fuel payment for working families should be coming to an end.
The Government has always said any support would be timely, temporary andtargeted, but with so much volatility in the Middle East, should it be extended?
Finance Minister Nicola Willis has said she’ll take advice to Cabinet next week about extending the payment.
Bernard Hickey, a journalist and the publisher of the Kākā, told The Front Page that he’s surprised the Government has chosen not to reduce fuel excise duties.
“Because that’s something that has been used by many Governments overseas to not just take away the cost-of-living pain of higher fuel prices, but also to stop a pulse of inflation going into the economy,” Hickey said.
“This time around, a lot of other countries have been using fuel tax reductions, including Australia, India, Malaysia, Singapore and China, to reduce the pain on consumers but also to help their central banks in the fight against inflation.
“This Government chose not to do that for its own fiscal reasons, and I think it’s worth challenging that, particularly when even on its own terms, the Government may well have saved itself a lot of money and earned itself a bit of money by continuing to have consumers spend, pay GST, be employed, pay income tax and, at the same time, also avoid higher mortgage rates, which we now have because the Reserve Bank has put up interest rates.
" So I think the Government’s judgment and the advice it got from Treasury was lacking in that it could have increased the support through lower fuel excise and avoided an economic slowdown, avoided an inflation surge and probably cost a relatively small amount in fuel subsidies relative to the loss now in income from GST and income tax."
But there’s also the argument that this is all part of a bigger picture: New Zealand is lagging behind other countries on electric vehicles (EVs), solar power and batteries.
“New Zealand spent $1.5 billion just in 30 days on fossil fuels. So diesel, petrol and some other fuels. That was double what we spent in June 2025,” Hickey said.
“That’s $1.5 billion worth of exports that we have to make, and it’s $750 million extra every month that we have to sell to get ourselves back into trade surplus. That also means that consumers are having to find $750 million somewhere else, or not spend it somewhere else, and that’s flying through into our retail sector, which has been in recession now really for three or four years.
“We need to think about how to make ourselves independent from those sorts of shocks.
“One way to do that is to turn our transport system into an electrified transport system. At the moment it’s almost completely reliant on fossil fuels. It doesn’t have to be that way.
“Many of these electric vehicles, and I’m not just talking about cars here, I’m talking also about buses and trucks, are just par for the course, normal in places like China, Norway, Uruguay and we should have moved much faster because the costs of not moving, we’re now discovering, are $750 million a month.”
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
- Energy dependence
- Missed policy options
- Long-term solutions
- Solar and renewables.
