Cancer patients and conservation groups have derided the New Zealand coalition government's budget as visionless and backwards.
On Thursday, Finance Minister Nicola Willis delivered her first budget, coming good on campaign pledges to cut government spending and provide income tax relief.
However, Ms Willis' National party did not meet an election promise to fund 13 new cancer treatments, upsetting sufferers.
"There are patients right now with terminal cancer who are waiting for these medicines to be funded," Patient Advocacy Aotearoa's Malcolm Mulholland told Newstalk ZB.
"If they're not funded, to be perfectly blunt, some will die."
Ms Willis offered regrets in her speech inside the budget lockup.
"Those cancer patients will see more drugs funded in future ... we are determined to deliver it. And we will," she said.
Across-the-board government cuts have hit the conservation department, environment ministry, environmental legal aid and the climate change commission - with hundreds of millions worth of climate projects shelved alone.
"It's a shredder," Greens co-leader Chloe Swarbrick said, who was surprised at the scale of climate cuts.
Greenpeace said the budget amounted to a "war on nature".
"Without enough funding, these agencies cannot respond to the anti-nature policies this government keeps throwing at them," executive director Russell Norman said.
The scientific community was also left reeling.
"Analysing this year's budget is an exercise in determining how bad the damage will be," New Zealand Association of Scientists co-president Lucy Stewart said.
"There is one genuinely welcome new initiative - funding for Geonet, the National Seismic Hazard Model, and the National Geohazards Monitoring Centre has been extended out until 2027."
Environmental groups are planning a "March for Nature" protest next week, following hot on the heels of a Maori day of protest action on Thursday.
Thousands turned out at dozens of sites across the country in protests organised by the Maori Party, timed alongside the budget, but aimed at government reforms to diminish the Treaty of Waitangi.
But it was not just the left that were underwhelmed by Ms Willis' budget: right-wing waste-watch group the Taxpayers Union said the scale of both public sector and tax cuts didn't go far enough.
"If you were looking forward to a bonfire of wasteful initiatives, you'll be disappointed," executive director Jordan Williams said.
"Instead of popping (former Finance Minister) Grant Robertson's spending balloons, the more we got into the details, the clearer it became that Nicola Willis has added helium!
"Willis' 2024 budget spends $13.8 billion more than Robertson's 2023 budget ... if the shoe was on the other foot and this Budget was from Labour - she'd be calling it out as 'shortchanging Kiwis'.
Politically important lobby group Federated Farmers said they were pleased with the "no frills" budget, and looked forward to promised regulation cuts.
"Just like the average farmer's budget, the government doesn't have a lot of spare cash laying around to spend on nice-to-haves and optional extras," president Wayne Langford said.
