Whose money is it anyway?

Roading revenue is appropriated to the Land Transport Fund by the sole authority of s9(1) of the Land Transport Management Act 2003.  But then the Minister of Finance includes the same money his budget. That would be fine if he pointed out that the money is in the budget only because he has a statutory obligation to include it.

But he is actually seeking the vote of Parliament to appropriate these funds. So will the money appropriated by the budget legislation be paid to Land Transport New Zealand in addition to the money appropriated by s9(1) of the Land Transport Management Act 2003?

Yeah, right... This is just padding the budget to make it look like the government is actually doing something useful.  Unfortunately this is a long standing tradition of Ministers of Finance so I guess the AA and the RTF wont be successfully sueing to get the Crown to actually pay the money it has just appropriated to the Land Transport Fund.

Or there again, judges can sometimes do the unexpected so maybe they would demand that the Crown pay all of the money that has ever been appropriated by Finance Ministers in their budgets.

Now that would solve the Land Transport funding crisis and solve the problem of what to do with Mr Cullen's surpluses.