We go into Budget 2021 with an extraordinary tailwind as a country: record low interest rates worldwide, terms of trade with the milk price higher than it's been in a long, long time, and we are an island nation on a pandemic planet. These are enormous advantages for any country to go into a Budget with, and yet we face enormous difficulties. We see rising asset prices that have dramatically increased inequality under a Labour Government. We see a country where interest rates won't be low for ever, and that's a real problem when the Government has rising public debt because its response to COVID-19 has been based on public debt and borrowing to stimulate the economy. And then there's the COVID situation, which risks becoming dramatically more complex, for four reasons: there is going to be vaccination that will change the parameters of the virus—its infectiousness and virulence; there'll be variants of that virus that may well make it a vaccine buster; there are new technologies, like finger-prick testing for immunity; and then there is public fatigue—public balance sheets and just people being a bit over it. All of that means the world is going to move on from COVID, and is New Zealand ready?