Abstract
The 2025 Long-Term Insights Briefing (LTIB) by the New Zealand Treasury is a valuable contribution to fiscal foresight, emphasizing resilience, transparency, and long-term thinking. It highlights core fiscal principles and outlines key challenges but stops short of deeper analysis. This policy note critiques the LTIB’s limitations, including insufficient attention to monetary-fiscal interactions, debt sustainability, expectations management, and climate risks. It also notes gaps in distributional analysis, structural challenges, and strategic foresight. To strengthen future briefings, Treasury must adopt a bolder, more analytically rigorous agenda that incorporates complex risks, embraces new tools, and better aligns fiscal strategy with evolving macroeconomic realities.