National's New Zealand

How bad are things under the Luxon regime? We already knew that we had the worst wage growth in the world, with wages 6.4% below 2021 levels - which shows the lie of National's "economic growth". But what does that mean in reality? The Press headline from today speaks for itself: "Police are dealing with a new type of shoplifter - ‘everyday people’ who just need to eat":

A year ago, Sergeant Melissa Shaw’s retail crime team was set up to curb retail theft in Christchurch.

Shaw expected to deal mainly with drug addicts who repeatedly steal to fund their next hit. And there have been those.

But then came the surprise: A growing cohort of thieves who were not drug addicts, not kleptomaniacs, not youths.

They were parents and elderly people with no criminal histories, without the money to keep up with rising living costs, who stole food and clothing for themselves and their families.

And that's where we are now: normal people having to steal to get buy, because National's "rockstar economy" doesn't provide for them, and instead funnels everything upwards into the pockets of Luxon and his mates.

We desperately need to get rid of this government. So in November, vote for regime change!

Time to tax the rich

Aotearoa has a problem: the rich don't pay their fair share. They benefit from our society: the state protects their wealth and provides peaceful conditions allowing them to carry on business without fear. And yet they refuse to pay for it. Meanwhile, their cartels suck the money out of ordinary New Zealanders, so they can spend it on bigger and bigger houses, bigger and bigger yachts, helicopters, and so on.

Its time we made them pay their fair share. And over the weekend, the Greens put up their election year tax policy, which will make them do it. A wealth tax, targeted at the super-rich, which will finally bring them into the tax system. A new top income tax rate, for those earning top incomes. A capital acquisitions tax, targeting gifts and inheritances over $1 million, to limit intergenerational accumulation and tax-dodging. A higher corporate tax rate for big companies. A bank-levy, targeting our biggest cartel parasites, Aussie banks. Stopping foreign tech companies from dodging New Zealand taxes by pretending the profits happen elsewhere. And reversing Luxon's landlord and property speculator tax cuts.

These are not radical socialist policies. They are all perfectly normal overseas. But the rich have bought so much power in our society since 1984 that they've been able to gaslight us into thinking that the normal is abnormal, that other countries don't have wealth taxes, inheritance taxes, more progressive income taxes, restrictions on tax cheating. And they've been able to do that, in part, because they can use their money to buy politicians and media outlets, steering our society in their preferred direction, despite huge public support for taxing them.

Taxing the rich and limiting their ability to accumulate and weaponise their wealth is a necessary thing for the preservation of our society. And the best bit is that it won't affect the vast majority of New Zealanders. Only a tiny proportion of people - the Chris Luxons of this world - have more than $10 million. Only a tiny proportion of people inherit or are given more than $1 million. Only a tiny proportion (which includes every MP) "earn" more than $160,000. None of that affects us. Instead, what we get in practice from this policy is a reduction in inequality, a restriction on the power of the rich, better-funded public services, and a tax cut! Because most of us will end up better off, thanks to a shift in the tax burden from the poor to the rich. Which is perfectly sensible the moment you think about it. There's no point taxing people who don't have any money. Instead you go after the people who do have it, the bloated accumulators who have sucked all the wealth out of our society into their own pockets.

Sadly, Chris Hipkins - a man paid $305,900 a year plus slush, who rorted his parliamentary superannuation scheme into buying his holiday home and then said "it's my money" - is saying that none of this will happen if he's in charge. Voters should take that as a challenge: if we want these policies, we have to vote for them. We need to put the Greens in a position where they can force this policy on Labour. Otherwise, nothing will change, and the rich will just keep on leaching and looting us.

Fucking absurd

Since time immemorial - or at least the 1990's - the National party's Big Economic Idea was cuts. Slash the state! Sack people! Give away billions in tax cuts to cronies so future governments couldn't fund anything! And to justify this peculiar fixation, they talk constantly about debt. There's too much of it! We can't afford the interest! We're about to go bankrupt! And sadly, this ideological framework has been swallowed wholesale by Labour, who sternly promise to keep debt low and not increase spending

But as Bernard Hickey points out this morning, none of this is true. Sure, the NZ government has $426 billion of debt - but it has $611 billion of assets, a positive net worth of $185 billion. And interest payments - which are now fixed and in NZ dollars, unlike the 1980's - are just 2% of government revenue. Which is perfectly sustainable.

And yet, National still keeps demanding cuts. Meanwhile, we have failing infrastructure, collapsing public services, and 33,000 homeless children. Hickey asks the obvious questions: would you leave kids homeless when you were worth $207 billion? Would you leave your kids homeless with interest costs of 2% of income? Answering "yes" to those isn't just fucking absurd, it's absolutely sociopathic. But I guess that's the sort of person right-wing politics attracts: the sort of person who wants to deliberately starve and freeze children, while running the country into the ground, all so they and their rich mates can steal more from us.

We need to vote this NeoLiberal plague out. Both sides of it. Because as long as Labour remains committed to NeoLiberalism and the "too much debt" myth, they will continue doing exactly what National does. The only difference is they'll lie to us about how they're helping us while they fuck us over.

Sabotage and spite

What is the purpose of the state? What is our government for?

If you ask the average New Zealander, you'll likely get some variation on "he tangata, he tangata, he tangata". But from today's budget, National clearly thinks the sole purpose of the state is to balance the books. The stuff government does doesn't matter; what matters is that the numbers all add up (sortof), and - if suitably heroic assumptions about growth and global peace are made - there's some sort of mystical government surplus in the far-off future.

But this sort of government by spreadsheet puts the outdated technological metaphor before the other thing. The numbers are less important than what government actually does. And what National is telling us is that, under them, its going to do less. Its going to support fewer people with state housing, even though need is growing. Its going to support fewer of us to university as well. While they're touting big headline numbers for health and education, when you poke at them, it turns out that its all sub-inflation increases, which means - you guessed it - doing less. And of course they're going to cut the core capabilities of the state, sacking 8,700 public servants to meet some arbitrary target.

Normal governments reprioritise spending to do other things - social spending for labour governments, tax cuts for National ones. Here, the cuts seem to be an end in themselves, driven by a desire to shrink the state, reduce its capacity, and stop it from being able to do things in the future. It's pure vandalism, the American dogma of "drowning the government in the bathtub", with a side-order of "fucking things up for next year", as a poison pill if they lose the election. Because the next government will have to undo a bunch of this damage, if they want government to be able to function at all. At which stage National will scream "waste" and accuse them of excessive spending. It's simply an exercise in sabotage and spite.

Most governments want to leave a better legacy than that. But clearly, the National party is now run by weirdo cultists intent on destroying the very state the purport to want to govern. The sooner we are rid of them, the better.

Pushing on an open door

RNZ has polling today on taxing billionaires, and its not good for the plutocrats:

The second poll commissioned in February 2026 revealed that 66 percent agreed that New Zealand's economic system was not set up to effectively to address issues like housing, healthcare and climate change.

Half of New Zealanders also agreed that billionaires shouldn't exist while people still struggled with basic necessities like food.

Sixty-eight percent supported billionaires being taxed more to fund public goods like healthcare, housing and climate action.

And another 37 percent were in favour of introducing a billion-dollar wealth cap to minimise the amount of wealth any person could legally hold.

This level of economic dissatisfaction and support for taxing billionaires means that taxing wealth fairly is pushing on an open door. The public is waiting for the government to do it, but so far only the Greens and Te Pāti Māori have committed. Meanwhile, Labour is still flailing around with its weak and pathetic "let's not actually tax anybody" capital gains tax. Will they rise to the occasion and lead people where they want to be led? Or put their own property portfolios before the public and continue to be toadies for the wealthy?

National has fucked the economy

National's core promise as a government is to be "better economic managers" (meaning: bald men in blue suits). And they made specific promises last election to return the government to surplus by the next election. So how's that working out for them? Terribly:

There is still no surplus in sight, according to Treasury’s latest economic forecasts.

Treasury sees the deficit deepening further, from $14.0 billion in the year to June 2025 to $16.9b in 2025/26, before narrowing to $60 million in 2029/30.

While this is an improvement from when Treasury last published forecasts at the May Budget, it still undershoots National’s pre-election pledge to return the books to surplus by 2026/27.

Unmentioned in any of the media coverage (which is all about surpluses and GDP and debt) but in the HYEFU is that unemployment still hasn't peaked and will remain high as far ahead as treasury is looking, while wages won't grow. So life is going to suck for normal people, no matter what the overall economy does.

And all because Nicola Willis crashed the economy by cutting everything and sacking everyone. Worse, she's promising more of the same, in a desperate effort to meet that self-imposed budget target.

The evidence is clear: things won't get better until we remove this government and replace it with one which understands that making things better requires investment, not cuts. The sooner the election, the better!

More unaffordable food

Remember when Luxon promised a "laser focus on the cost of living"? Mince - the most basic meat you can get - has now become unaffordable:

Beef mince long seen as the most affordable red-meat option for households is losing that status as prices continue to surge.

RaboResearch senior animal protein analyst Jen Corkran said food prices had risen across the board, but beef mince had jumped far faster than most staples.

New Stats NZ figures showed in the year to October, overall food prices rose 4.7 percent, but the average price of a one-kilogram pack of beef mince climbed 18 percent.

Corkran said mince was now averaging $23.17 per kilo, meaning it was actually slightly more expensive than lamb chops, which sat at $22.27.

As with butter earlier in the year, the cause is exports driving up prices. 80% of NZ beef is exported, and domestic prices are set by international markers - meaning the people where the food is produced (and who pay the environmental costs of that production in the form of polluted water and higher greenhouse gas emissions) can no longer afford to eat it. The dominance of exports also makes farmers immune to local consumer pressure, meaning the normal "market" solution - reducing demand - has no effect.

Which means that if we want affordable food, we need non-market solutions: export bans, domestic quotas, price regulation. Otherwise, if farmers aren't going to feed us, we have no reason to permit their industry to exist - and certainly no reason to continue to subsidise them with free water and free pollution and free emissions.

Still useless

So, Labour has finally, shambolically, released its capital gains tax policy, and as signalled it is a weak extension of the bright-line test, covering only non-residential property (but not farms), pre-compromised into oblivion in a desperate effort to avoid offending anybody. When they teased this idea back in September, I said that they're going to pay the political price of a CGT, in order to not raise enough money to do anything useful. All cost, no benefit. That hasn't changed. About the only thing going for this policy is that it can be implemented quickly, within a year of an election. And it can be extended later to cover the things Labour has excluded, like farms and shares and other financial instruments, some of which might require tricky policy work. But Labour isn't talking about that, so they're not even teasing incrementalism here. So even if you have an optimistic view that this is part of a secret plan to incrementally impose a comprehensive CGT one sector at a time, Labour simply can't be trusted to follow through on it.

(As for their quid pro quo - three free GP visits a year for everyone! - they've lumbered it with a pile of NeoLiberal rationing and a de facto universal ID card. Which is just intrusive, pointless waste. FFS, just fund health...)

It is clear that the state needs money to pay for the things we want it to do. It is also clear that we need to arrest inequality and the political power of the ultra-rich, by taking money away from the wealthy and using it for public purposes. Labour's bullshit half-measure doesn't really do any of these things. So I won't be voting for them. Instead, I'll be voting for a party which promises an actual wealth tax, which whacks the rich and raises enough revenue to actually fix things. I encourage everyone on the left, who wants proper public services and hates billionaires, to do the same. Labour's half-measure is OK as a transitional step towards a real wealth tax. But its not enough - and looking at their institutional culture of complying-in-advance with the demands of the rich, nothing from them ever will be.

This regime is a failure

When running for election in 2023, National's key promise was simple: "we will lower the cost of living". They've repeated that mantra every day since. Last week in question time, they were gloating about "lowering inflation" in a desperate effort to bat away the regime's terrible record on unemployment and economic growth. So how's that working out for them? Badly:

Inflation has edged to a 15-month-high on the back of higher rents, rates, electricity, and food, touching the top of the Reserve Bank's target band but unlikely to prevent further rate cuts.

Stats NZ said the consumer price index rose 1.0 percent in the three months ended September, pushing the annual rose to 3.0 percent from 2.7 percent, the highest since June last year.

The 11.3 percent rise in electricity prices was the single biggest contributor to the annual increase.

"Annual electricity increases are at their highest since the late 1980s, when there were several major reforms in the electricity market," Stats NZ senior manager of prices Nicola Growden said.

In other news, rent is unaffordable, butter is unaffordable, meat has become unaffordable, while the regime tries to suppress wages to keep profits high for its donors and cronies. No wonder people are angry!

This regime is a failure on its own terms. They set themselves a simple target, and they blew it - ruining countless lives in the process. The sooner we kick them out on their arses, the better.

Typically useless

On Saturday, the Herald's Thomas Coughlan reported that Labour was inching its way to a capital gains tax. But in typical Labour fashion, they're watering it down so much as to exclude almost everything:

It would probably look like a maximalist bright-line test: family homes exempt, farms also likely spared, but residential investment property and the family bach are all in.

Tax would be levied at realisation, not the once-favoured “deemed return” method, which is a wee bit too much like a wealth tax on people who aren’t always that wealthy.

[...]

Trade-offs abound. Political saleability comes at a fiscal cost. Oliver’s paper reckoned his limited CGT would raise barely 39% of the broad CGT’s take – around $2.4 billion after 10 years. Not trivial, but still less in 10 years than Labour’s 2023 wealth tax would have netted in one. At worst, it could make Labour look unserious about tackling the alleged austerity it’s spent the parliamentary term prosecuting.

So, they're going to pay the political price of a CGT, in order to not raise enough money to do anything useful. All cost, no benefit. And meanwhile, their rival parties, on whom they depend to even be a government, are going for simpler wealth taxes, which whack the rich to raise enough revenue to actually fix things, while leaving normal people - almost everybody, in fact - completely unaffected. Which seems simpler, easier, and clearer than Labour's bullshit.

If you're on the left, and you want better public services and a reduction in inequality, why vote for half-measures? And why vote for a party which waters its policies down, in order to comply in advance with the rich? Fuck the rich. By definition, we outnumber them 99-to-one. And if our country imagines itself to be democratic, our government should serve us, not them. It is an appalling indictment of our mainstream political parties that they continually pander to this tiny minority, while screwing over almost everybody who actually votes for them.

So next election, if you want change, vote for it. Vote for parties who will hold a metaphorical gun to labour's head to force them to do what is necessary. Don't vote for useless bootlickers.

Climate Change: Denying our obligations

In 2016, the then-National government signed the Paris Agreement, committing Aotearoa to a 30 (later 50) percent reduction in emissions by 2030. But since then, successive governments have failed to do enough to meet the target, leaving us with a huge shortfall, currently estimated at 84 million tons. The target is legally binding, and Aotearoa is expected to make up that shortfall using Paris' international cooperation mechanisms. But despite that clear international commitment, the government is refusing to publicly say whether it will meet our obligations. Instead, Ministers have repeatedly talked openly about cheating on the deal.

RNZ has a piece today about the problems this is causing. The lead is potential trade problems, as both the EU and UK FTAs include commitments to meet our Paris obligations (so: we can expect trade sanctions, likely targetted at the polluting dairy industry, if we don't). But its also affecting domestic policy. Currently this is predicated on the government meeting its obligations. But if it does not, then He Pou a Rangi will have to recommend stronger action, as they are legally required to consider "New Zealand’s relevant obligations under international agreements" as well as our (weaker) domestic targets:

The commission needed to clarify whether offshore purchases were still on the table, because otherwise it would need to change its recommendations on the level of carbon cuts the government should make here using the Emission Trading Scheme, in order to remain compliant.

The commission noted that making all the cuts here would be "costly and disruptive" and also not possible using only the country's main climate tool of the Emissions Trading Scheme, which covers less than half the country's greenhouse gas emissions.

Basically, if the government isn't going to use international cooperation, then the Paris 2030 target becomes a default domestic 2030 target, and He Pou a Rangi will be legally obliged to recommend radical cuts to meet it. Of course, National could remove that obligation, but that sort of overt repudiation would completely end their game of pretending to care while doing nothing, alienating kiwi voters and triggering those international trade sanctions.

RNZ also talks about Treasury not knowing whether to recognise the cost of meeting Paris - estimated at up to $24 billion - as a liability on the government's books. Which is something that would both focus the mind and act as a clear financial incentive for emissions reduction policies, effectively setting a government carbon price of $285/ton for policies to be measured against. But it would also blow all future surplus projections out of the water, which is another reason why Ministers really want to talk up uncertainty and won't commit. And given what they did to pay equity to remove a liability half that size, uncertainty is probably the lesser of two evils at the moment.

But whether the government recognises that obligation or not, we will be paying regardless - if not under the international cooperation mechanism, then in cleaning up after floods and drought and fires and cyclones, plus the social costs of insurance retreat and sea-level rise. The Paris Agreement is meant to reduce those long-term costs. Refusing to meet it is just another example of the long-term problem of New Zealand governments: taking the cheap, short-term option, and refusing to invest for the future.

National's "investment boost"

I've been thinking a bit about National's "investment boost", the centrepiece of its dogshit budget. Its pitched by the government as encouraging big capital investments which will create jobs for the future. But I don't think there's much chance of that. The problem is that the policy just won't last long enough for that sort of investment.

The first reason for this is politics. We're due an election in the next 18 months - maybe sooner if the increasingly irritable Winston throws a tanty when Rimmer takes his job - and at best its a crap-shoot for National (and those odds will only have gotten worse after they stole $13 billion from women). A future Labour-Green government may toss the whole policy simply to make fiscal space for their own policy choices. At the least, they'll limit it to promote better investment, and rip out the bits promoting mining, fossil fuels, and farming, because they don't want to subsidise them. The second is that poor policy design means there is no cap to government exposure for this depreciation, meaning it runs the risks of a huge cost blowout and turning into another film subsidy disaster. So even if National somehow clings to power, they'll need to change it to stop the financial bleeding. They'll be slow about it, because they won't want to admit they made a mistake, but eventually it'll have to be limited, probably after three or four years.

What does that mean for the policy? Most obviously, it is not going to result in the sorts of big new capital investment National is talking up, because there's simply no time to get something conceived, designed, consented, and built (and so paid for) before the tax break gets changed. Planning a big, multi-year project around this tax break is a great way to lose money (though people may plan in hope, then shelve projects and whine for a handout when the inevitable happens. NZ businesses apparently love whining, and its almost as if that is their real business model).

So what will we get? Small, quick, cheap stuff. Utes and computers, obviously, which don't really do shit to boost productivity, and are effectively consumer spending for businesses. National is probably hoping that that might give them a quick economic juice before the next election so they can say "things are getting better". For bigger projects, it'll be either short planning cycle stuff - again, small and quick - or stuff which is already consented and planned for, which can be brought forward. And on that front, there's an obvious type of project which has plenty of pre-consented stuff sitting around, and which can be built in two years from saying "go": solar farms. Yes, National may just have strengthened our solar boom. Their farmer-cronies (who want rural land "protected" from more productive uses so they can instead use it to pollute) will be spitting.

(It may also help with wind farms - which again have a lot of projects pre-consented and waiting - but they take longer to build).

Which also brings me to how a future government could use this policy: use it solely to push decarbonisation. Building a renewable energy project, electrifying a factory and getting it off gas, switching your fleet of delivery trucks to EVs? Have a depreciation break. Want to keep buying old, fossil infrastructure? Fuck you. We need to decarbonise quickly, and this seems like an excellent way to bring that investment forward and make it happen.

$13 billion

That's how much Nicola Willis thinks she stole from New Zealand women by repealing pay equity:

A tax incentive for businesses, boosts to health and education spending, and Crown funding for new gas fields are among new Budget initiatives made viable by nearly $13 billion in cuts to the pay equity regime.

[...]

The Government initially refused to disclose how much money it had saved as a result of the pay equity changes. However, the Budget says there is now $12.8b in “fiscal headroom” over the next four years as a result of the new, tighter system.

And she's using the money "saved" to pay for... more business tax cuts! Not health, housing, welfare, or any of the other countless things we desperately need as a result of National's cuts-driven recession, but to shovel more money to her donors and cronies. It's pure class warfare, based on outright theft. But that's so very very National, isn't it?

Meanwhile, there'll also be $200 million set aside for "co-investment" in the gas industry. This is an industry with literally no future - no future in electricity, no future in industry, and which faces a death spiral for its network. Only a complete sucker would invest in a pre-stranded asset. But then, its not about investment; its about creating a conflict of interest for the next government between its role as an investor and its role as a regulator and policy-maker, which will reliably generate advice and headlines about how much money the government will be burning by doing either. Essentially an ideological poison pill. The good news is that its a contingency, so there are no concrete plans yet for such investments (because there's no new gas fields to invest in), and this government has only 18 months left to run. And the quicker we kick it out, the less we'll lose on this bullshit.

National grovels to Trump

Its budget day, and the government has been whining about how it has no money and so can't afford anything. Meanwhile, they've just given away half a billion dollars a year to foreign fascist techbros:

New Zealand financial statements filed by tech firms including Google, Facebook and Amazon show how they're moving their local profits to tax havens like Ireland, allowing them to declare little or no taxable revenue here.

Treasury estimates a proposed Digital Services Tax would have pulled in $479 million from these firms over the next four years – but this week, under the shadow of Donald Trump's tariff threats, the Government announced it was dropping the bill from its legislative agenda.

The Herald has a closer look at Google's tax-cheating. They shipped over a billion dollars offshore by paying dodgy "service fees" to themselves, ensuring that there was nothing here to tax. If those profits had been taxed here instead of laundered through overseas tax havens, it would have been an extra quarter of a billion dollars we could have used to pay for the things we need. Instead, it will pay for political corruption and promoting fascism in the US.

A tax on tech revenue would have been one way of disincentivising techbro money-laundering. But National has cancelled it in order to grovel to Trump. But in the process, they've shown us a truth they'd rather deny: when they claim "there is no money", it is a choice, and a lie.

An alternative vision for Aotearoa

Its the budget next week, where National will inflict another round of cuts on kiwis in order to keep funding handouts to landlords and rich people. And while Labour is doing nothing (sorry, "keeping its powder dry"), the Greens are acting as the main opposition, releasing an alternative budget to show what we could be doing. The core idea? Tax the rich properly, with a wealth tax, higher company taxes, and reversing the landlord tax breaks, and using the money to pay for things people need: a better health system, more state housing, free dental care, free ECE, better public transport, and better support for students and people out of work. Oh, and there's a "fuck you" tax on private jet passengers, because fuck those people and their polluting luxury lifestyle.

Its a compelling vision, which shows us that we can have a better society; all we have to do is vote for it.

"Capital poor"

One of the eternal truths about Aotearoa's economy is that we are "capital poor": there's not enough money sloshing around here to fund the expansion of local businesses, or to build the things we want to. Which gets used as an excuse for all sorts of things, like setting up kiwisaver (good!), not taxing rich people properly, or selling the country to foreigners. For example, here's Chris Luxon doing the latter at his "investment summit" last week:

Low capital intensity has been identified as one of the major causes of that low productivity.

In order to increase our productivity, we need more capital investment. And David Seymour has been changing the rules to ensure we can.

Meanwhile, here's another story from last week: NZ bank profits hit $7.2 billion: KPMG. By way of comparison, that's more than the amount kiwi employees pay into kiwisaver each year. But unlike kiwisaver, it goes straight overseas into the pockets of those banks foreign owners.

Maybe we wouldn't be so "capital poor" if we hadn't allowed our wealth to be siphoned overseas for decades by a rapacious foreign oligopolies?

Climate Change: A perverse incentive

The government published its first Biennial Transparency Report under the Paris Agreement yesterday, and the media has correctly noted that it is missing any plan to actually meet our target. While it hypes domestic emissions reductions so far - which have been good, but will likely get worse thanks to National - there's an 84 million ton gap between our expected emissions and our Paris NDC. The report doesn't say how we're going to fill this, merely noting that the government is "exploring options for international cooperation".

Why so vague? And why haven't these "explorations" (which they've been doing for years) resulted in any agreements? Other countries have been signing them, after all, and while the previous government was rightly picky about whether foreign "credits" were real, I don't expect any such pickiness from National. They'll happily accept cheap fraud, if it means they get to tick the "target achieved" box, and dealing with the consequences will be Somebody Else's Problem.

A possible answer may be buried near the bottom of that RNZ article:

Also in the background, Treasury had advised Ministers Watts and Nicola Willis that if the government made a statement to the effect that it had signed a deal or made a firm commitment to do so, the $3-23 billion estimated cost of purchasing offshore credits between now and 2030 could start appearing as liability on the government's books.

So, if they take even baby steps towards meeting our obligations, then that's the "demonstration of intent" to meet the NDC that Treasury has been refusing to recognise, the entire obligation becomes real in accounting terms, and the government gets hit with a $23 billion future liability. Normal people might think that recognising an actual obligation is good, and that including the cost also reifies the cost of inaction and so incentivises fixing it. But all the government sees is "books look bad; bad headline". And so we have a perverse incentive: only by denying the problem and refusing to do anything about it can the illusion of fiscal probity be maintained.

It would be nice to have actual adults running climate policy. But that's not going to happen until we throw out this government and get a new one.

"Better economic management"

At the 2023 election, National basically ran on a platform of being better economic managers. So how'd that turn out for us? In just one year, they've fucked us for two full political terms:

The government's books are set to remain deeply in the red for the near term as a big dent in the tax take and higher expenses deliver continued budget deficits.

But the government has adopted a new measure of its finances, excluding the impact of ACC, which it said has distorted previous forecasts and had the potential to affect spending decisions.

[...]

Using the established measure the deficits would rise more than expected in the budget and a surplus was not expected in the forecast period to 2028/29.

The reason for this of course is austerity, which has seen core government services cut and 11.6% of all the workers in wellington sacked in a single year. Meanwhile, they're grinding down ordinary people with sub-inflation increases to the minimum wage and 0% pay offers to public servants (so: pay cuts in real terms). And all of this flows through to the rest of the economy. The only people doing well are landleeches, who are gouging us for an extra 6.9% this year. But then, that's who National works for, isn't it?

If this is "better economic management", I'd hate to see what worse looks like.

"Savings"

So, Nicola Willis has presented her nano-budget, which wasn't really a budget after all, just a list of money she is planning to reprioritise. And the headline is that she's found almost $7.5 billion of "savings" to fund tax cuts for landlords. So what are these "savings"?

The mini-Budget outlined the $7.47b in savings, made up of $2.61b from stopping work on initiatives including Let's get Wellington Moving and Fair Pay Agreements, $2.0b from the Emissions Trading Scheme, and $2.8b from tax and benefit changes.

So, cut spending on vital infrastructure, on decarbonisation, and on the poor. Which might make the books look better in the short term, but at the cost of having to pay for it later. That cut infrastructure spending means higher economic costs and greater expense later. That "reprioritisation" of ETS revenue from decarbonisation to landlord tax cuts means higher emissions, which we will pay for in 2030. And cutting benefits and ECE means higher social costs later. In other words, these aren't really "savings" at all, but piling up costs for the future. Its exactly like a shitty council Keeping Rates Low by skimping on road and sewer maintenance. And we all know how that turns out.

Burying the evidence

Back in 2020, IRD began a hugely controversial (among rich people) study of how much tax the rich are actually paying. earlier this year, it reported what we all knew: the rich aren't paying their fair share. The government refused to act on that, but they did pass a law, the Taxation Principles Reporting Act 2023, requiring IRD to report annually on the effectiveness, efficiency, and equity of the tax system, against a specified set of measurements and principles. Effectively, this would provide ongoing evidence of the need to tax the rich more, as well as of any other problems in the tax system.

The first of these reports is due by the end of the year. But National must not have liked what it says, because they're going to repeal the law under all-stages urgency to prevent its publication. Effectively, trying to bury the evidence. Of course, the report, and its drafts and associated correspondence are all official information. They are - unless National has a giant illegal shredder party - held. Which means that they can simply be requested under the OIA. And I expect every political journalist in the country is doing that right now.