Was Willis’ third Budget the charm for Kiwi women?

Friday, 5 June 2026

London-based Kiwi Vic Harris is co-founder and portfolio manager, The Curve Investments

OPINION: I never used to care about Budget Day. I'd see the headlines - fiscal surplus this, operating allowance that - and feel exactly nothing. But somewhere between building a global community of 120,000 women investors and finding myself living 18,000 kilometres from home, that changed. Now I read every line. And this year? It was a tough one to swallow. One I'd honestly rather not have had to explain.

So let me start somewhere unexpected: I actually feel for Nicola Willis.

There’s a term in leadership research called the glass cliff. Most people know the glass ceiling, the invisible barrier that stops women from reaching the top. The glass cliff is what happens next: women are more likely to be appointed to leadership roles when conditions are already unstable, when risk of failure is high, and when the foundation has already started to crack.

Think of Theresa May, tasked with delivering Brexit after its most forceful champions stepped back. Or Marissa Mayer, who took over a company already in structural decline. These are not clean slates; they are crisis inheritances.

Nicola Willis has walked into a similarly difficult moment: fiscal pressure, a cost-of-living crisis, global volatility, and an electorate running short on patience. She is walking a tightrope in plain sight, and she deserves acknowledgement for that.

But acknowledgement is not the same as approval.

Because this was also a Budget that had the opportunity to do more for women, and didn’t.

Before that, it’s worth grounding what a Budget actually is: a series of trade-offs. Spend in one area, and something else gives. Run deficits for long enough and you don’t just defer pressure. You compound it.

This Budget’s headline is fiscal repair: a projected return to surplus of $2.6 billion by 2028–29, from a current $11.4 billion deficit. That matters. It signals discipline in a period where credibility counts.

But the path there is narrow and not especially bold.

First: cuts to the public service, $2.4 billion in savings, with thousands of roles set to go. That is efficiency on paper, but it is also a redistribution of pressure onto households and workers.

Second: the removal of previously popular supports, including the Fees Free tertiary scheme, freeing up over $1 billion. A policy that lowered barriers to education is gone, in the name of balance-sheet repair.

Third: New revenue measures, including a levy on banks and insurers and stronger debt recovery through Inland Revenue. Spend less, shrink the state, and extract more from regulated sectors. The surplus is built, but it is cautious and dependent on a stable external environment.

And within those trade-offs sits the absence.

Because nowhere in this Budget is there a serious attempt to shift women’s long-term economic position.

No intervention on the retirement savings gap, where women continue to retire with significantly less due to time out of the workforce and lower lifetime earnings. No meaningful childcare reform, despite it being one of the most direct constraints on participation and progression. No targeted strategy to close wage gaps or materially scale support for women-led enterprise.

Let me put some numbers to that, because the abstract becomes damning when you make it concrete.

On pay: New Zealand women currently earn over 5% less per hour than men and that gap widens significantly in finance, construction, and technology, and compounds with age as career breaks accumulate. This budget introduced no pay transparency measures, no reporting requirements, no structural mechanism to close it faster.

On childcare: ECE subsidies have fallen behind inflation by up to 13.5% since 2020, forcing centres to raise fees and locking families out of affordable care. Budget 2026's response was a 1.5% subsidy increase, below inflation, for the sixth year running. The sector asked for 5%. They received less than a third of that. When childcare becomes unaffordable, it is almost always women who step back. That has a direct and measurable cost to lifetime earnings.

On retirement: the average KiwiSaver balance is currently $42,664 for men and $34,185 for women, a 25% gap that widens to around 37% for women approaching retirement. And here's the part nobody says out loud: neither figure is nearly enough to retire on. The Retirement Commission itself says many New Zealanders will need NZ Super just to get by. Women are retiring with less of an already inadequate sum. This budget had nothing new on retirement savings. Nothing.

These are not social side issues. They are economic levers. And leaving them untouched is a choice.

There are, of course, indirect positives. Fiscal consolidation can support lower inflation over time, which disproportionately benefits women who sit closer to the sharp end of household cost pressures. Stability matters. But it is diffuse and slow-moving, not transformative.

There is also a cost embedded in the approach. Women are over-represented in public sector employment, which means job reductions land unevenly. A shrinking state is not gender-neutral in practice.

The brain drain tells the rest of the story

Between 2021 and 2025, New Zealand departures more than doubled, from 26,000 to 64,000 annually. At peak, 180 people a day left the country. Not for adventure, but because the maths stopped working.

Wages in Australia are roughly 30% higher for comparable roles. For many skilled workers, the decision has become mechanical rather than emotional.

I’ve lost count of how many friends in London, when their visas expire, choose to “go home” to Australia - not New Zealand - because the economic argument is simply stronger elsewhere.

Yes, the latest data shows departures easing slightly in early 2026. But a smaller haemorrhage is still a haemorrhage. The underlying reasons people left - stagnant wages, limited opportunity, a sense that New Zealand wasn't backing its own people - were not addressed by this budget. Not even close.

Back to Willis

Here’s the thing about the glass cliff: the women on it often do extraordinary work under impossible conditions. Willis is running a disciplined ship in choppy water. Most governments globally are still navigating a post-Covid hangover. That context matters.

But the glass cliff also comes with a constraint: when women finally get a seat at the table, the margin for bold thinking is often at its thinnest. And that’s the opportunity this Budget didn’t quite take.

There was room here to do something more ambitious. On retirement savings. On backing and retaining talent. On making New Zealand a place people choose to build a future, not leave for one.

Third time's a charm, they say. This one feels more like third time's a caution.