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NZ budget offers business loans for R&D at risk from Covid-19

  

One-off support for industry research is complemented by funding for archives and audiovisual collections

New Zealand’s government is to launch a $150 million short-term loan scheme to help businesses continue with R&D projects affected by the Covid-19 lockdown.

The initiative is part of the $50 billion Covid-19 response and recovery fund announced by finance minister Grant Robertson in the 2020 budget on 14 May.

The loans will provide one-off support for businesses and will be administered by Callaghan Innovation, the government’s industry R&D funding agency.

The budget also allocated $32m to preserving historical audiovisual collections as a research resource. These include broadcast news, documentaries, films, music and oral histories that are at risk of being lost or damaged by inadequate storage facilities.

The budget describes these collections as capturing the “issues and experiences of New Zealanders through the decades, unique cultural events and defining moments in our nation’s history”.

It also provides $192m for a new Archives New Zealand facility, which will be part of an upgrade to the National Library in Wellington.

In his budget speech, Robertson announced a $195m Pacific recovery package to support Pacific Islands communities in NZ who had been affected by Covid-19 restrictions. He said this would include “a major focus” on programmes to support education and training.

“This budget invests nearly $1bn to support the core provision of education services. This will provide substantial support to students across all levels of education, while also targeting investment in areas that we know will benefit students who need it the most,” Robertson said.

Newsroom NZ commentator Rod Oram says the budget could have allocated more funding to renewable energy and sustainable agriculture.

“The government deserves huge credit for the way it has handled the pandemic to date. So complicated, fast-moving and unprecedented are those challenges, though, the government, business and the public have had little time to think much about the future,” he writes in a budget editorial.

“But enough people and organisations have given broad expressions of the better future they want and need. The government should have said something in the budget about how it would begin to use some of the vast sums it’s spending to those ends.”