CHRIS BISHOP: Grant Robertson thinks he's all OK, because he's proposed in this Budget the single biggest permanent increase in New Zealand Government spending in history: $6 billion in the operating allowance, which from this year onwards will be baked into Government spending. In other words, it gets locked into the forward Estimates and it's a permanent increase—$6 billion in this year alone. Even if you take out the National Party's very sensible and very pragmatic proposals to just reduce income tax thresholds to what they were when Labour came into office, just what they were four years ago or 4½ years ago—even if you take the cost of that, which is about $1.6 billion to 1.7 billion, leaving Mr Robertson $4.3 billion, it's still the single biggest increase in the operating allowance in New Zealand history. 