By the time the New Zealand minister of finance got around to delivering his first wellbeing budget, he’d had a pretty terrible week, not of his own making. Two days earlier, the opposition National Party had released what it claimed were some of the budget documents. Treasury went into meltdown. The Treasury secretary Gabriel Makhlouf had gone to the police claiming that the Treasury website had undergone a “sustained and systemic hack”. He went on the radio and doubled down on this claim, suggesting this was akin to people raiding a vault. He had advised his minister, Grant Robertson, the documents the National Party had must have been made illegally, a claim the minister had then, under advice, repeated.