Labour is expected to announce its pissweak, don’t-upset-the-rich tax policy this week. Meanwhile, Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor has said the thing they really didn't want anyone to say: the government needs to collect more taxes:
Damien O’Connor, a senior minister at the centre of the climate change issue, started the week with a blunt assessment of the tax-climate issue. He told the red meat sector: “We probably don’t have enough tax in this country.”And just to put the icing on the cake, he said that those taxes should target wealth or capital gains, rather than ordinary people through GST.During a Sunday night debate at the Red Meat Sector Conference, O’Connor said the Government was hard-pressed trying to find funds to respond to Cyclone Gabrielle. With climate change expected to bring more regular and more severe extreme weather events, he told the crowd he thought more taxes would be needed to fix infrastructure.
“We’ve put a bit more into [road] maintenance, but we still actually have to catch up. If we want to continue to run our economy the way we have run it in the past, we are going to have to contribute more,” he said.
O'Connor is worried about paying for the costs of climate change - something his audience of farmers are paying nothing towards. But we have other problems as well. A crumbling health sector. Collapsing social services. Rampant inequality. Insufficient housing. Higher taxes targetting wealth will help us fix all of these problems, and more. But Labour is apparently not allowed to publicly admit that, for fear of upsetting the rich - who do not vote for them anyway. It is weak and pathetic, and they would apparently rather see the country fall apart than do anything real to stop it. Fortunately, thanks to MMP, we have other electoral options, who are willing to recognise our problems and the obvious solutions, and who aren't suck-ups to the rich like Labour are.
