Grant says "no" again

Yesterday the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists released a report on dental care in Aotearoa, highlighting its unaffordability and recommending free, universal dental care. This is something the left has been campaigning for for a long time - Jim Anderton pushed for it before the 2011 election, and Helen Clark has advocated for it. It would massively improve people's lives, reduce pain and suffering, and save money in the long-term. But it would involve spending money, so naturally Grant Robertson has vetoed it:

The Tooth be told report, commissioned by the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, said free or subsidised access to dental care in Aotearoa would save millions of dollars in healthcare over time.

But Acting Prime Minister Grant Robertson told Morning Report moving directly to universal dental care would require over a billion dollars a year in extra funding and any additional investment needed to be weighed against other priorities in the health sector.

Instead of free and universal provision, he wants people to go crawling to WINZ, with all the added pain and suffering that entails. Weirdly, he thinks that this isn't a deterrent - which I guess tells us either that he has never dealt with them, or that nine years on an MP's salary and six on a deputy prime minister's has destroyed all memory of it (and WINZ has got massively worse since Grant was a student).

Its a stupid and short-sighted decision - every dollar spent today on dental care saves $1.60, which is a far better benefit / cost ratio than you get from an Auckland motorway. But the money has to be spent up front, and how does that help Grant's next budget? Also, apparently voters hate long-term investment - or at least the donors he talks to in the Koru Club do, and they're the people who matter to him now.

It's a perfect example of Labour's metapolicy of austerity - can't do anything, gotta keep taxes on the rich low! It's also a perfect example of why they deserve to lose the next election. Labour is giving us nothing to vote for. So why should people lift a finger to keep paying Grant $334,734 a year?

Climate Change: Austerity is undermining our response

Imagine if the government declared a war, but didn't fund it? That's basicly what they've done with climate change. In December 2020 Parliament declared a "climate emergency", finally acknowledging the urgency of the crisis. But efforts to actually act to reduce emissions have been undermined by the usual bureaucratic penny-pinching:

Efforts to rein in the over-subsidising of large industrial polluters and a law that would enable a managed retreat from flood-prone coastlines were delayed because funding for them wasn't received in Budget 2021.

These were just two of several parts of the climate change work programme delayed or scaled down as a result of the failed Budget bid, according to a June Cabinet paper from Climate Change Minister James Shaw.

[...]

Shaw had sought $23 million in funding for MfE but had only received the bare minimum of $6.45m to keep the lights on and existing programmes going. The decision left "an $11.2m shortfall for what is needed to deliver the climate change work programme in 2021/22 that was agreed by Cabinet, and signalled for decision within the coming financial year".

Like most austerity, this shortsighted penny-pinching costs more than it saves. The total cost of the work programme is $11.2 million. Using the government's social cost of carbon of $150/ton, that's about 75,000 tons. Or less than 2% of the total industrial free allocation. Reining in existing over-subsidisation would save more than that, so by delaying it Robertson's tight fistedness is actually costing us money. But as usual, Treasury only looks at the costs of action, rather than the benefits.

Climate Change: Funding the transition

Finance Minister Grant Robertson released his annual Budget Policy statement today, which included a $4.5 billion fund to fight climate change:

The cornerstone of this new focus will be a Climate Emergency Response Fund (CERF), made up of $4.5 billion in proceeds from the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). Half of the fund will go to capital expenditure and half to ongoing spending.

Already, some $840 million to fund the Government’s increased international climate aid commitments has been allocated from the CERF. That leaves about half a billion dollars a year for capital spending over the next four years and about $300 million for the operating costs of new schemes.

The CERF will also bankroll efforts to adapt to the coming impacts of climate change in Budgets after 2022, in addition to reducing emissions.

Taking climate aid out of it suggests not all of the spending will be new (I'd expect top-ups to the clean car rebate scheme if it works and people buy fewer utes to come out of it as well). But that's still a big pile of cash. And you can do a hell of a lot with half a billion of capital funding a year. For example:

• For $300 million a year, we could build a 150MW windfarm or solar plant every year to help decarbonise electricity generation and drive Huntly out of business;
• For a one-off-cost of roughly $500 million, we could clean up Glenbrook and transition it to clean steel production;
• For $50 million a year, we can scale up biofuel production to reduce transport emissions;
• For $75 million a year, we can put solar panels on 10,000 state houses a year, reducing the power bills of the most vulnerable while expanding renewable generation capacity. Or we could run a subsidy scheme along the lines of the insulation subsidy for twice that many homes;
• For $50 million a year, we can plant 2500 hectares of native forest as a permanent carbon sink, increasing biodiversity while returning carbon to the biosphere;
• For $100 million a year, we could fund or subsidise 50,000 e-bikes a year to boost uptake and build towards giving free e-bikes to everyone (though arguably this should be funded from the same pool as the clean car rebate, by increasing fees on polluting utes).

There are other options where the costs are less obvious: funding rail transport or coastal shipping to get trucks off the roads, or funding the transmission line upgrades which are limiting industrial electrification, or building the network of EV charging stations. And there'll be all sorts of little things we can do as well. Many of the ideas above are already cost-effective at the government's internal carbon price, meaning they are a long-term saving for New Zealand which we should fund anyway. Having a dedicated pot of cash for these things means we can start actually doing it. Obviously, more money would be better, and allow a faster transition. But this is a good start, and hopefully when free allocations are cut and agriculture is bought into the ETS, we'll see more money to push things faster.

The "most open and transparent government ever" again

According to the Prime Minister and other Ministers, the decision to open up Auckland and allow Covid to spread was made on the basis of "eroding social licence". The phrase repeatedly appears in Cabinet Papers on the subject, particularly in the 4 October review of alert level settings which caused the whole shitshow. But while this phrase is apparently crucial to government decision-making, the Prime Minister and a bunch of other senior Ministers claim not to know what it means.

If taken seriously, this should cast serious doubt on their decision-making on such matters. But its clearly not meant to be taken seriously. Instead, it's a casual "fuck you" response from the self-proclaimed "most open and transparent government ever", and an example of their obsession with secrecy and reluctance to release anything if they can possibly contrive an excuse not to.

I mean really, would it have killed them to just point at a dictionary? And would it really have taken them 16 working days to do so?

Reading the room

It looks like the government has finally read the room on the housing crisis, with Finance Minister grant Robertson writing to the Reserve Bank to tell them to start looking at controlling house prices:

Finance Minister Grant Robertson has told Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr that it’s time to think about out of control house prices.

Robertson has written to Orr telling him that “housing price instability is harmful to our aims of reduced inequality and poverty, and is also likely to negatively impact the Government’s aim of creating a more productive and inclusive economy”.

He wants the bank to think about the ways it and the Government can work together to achieve “sustained moderation in house prices that we have both sought”.

His letter suggests this could include asking the governor to consider stability of house prices when it makes monetary policy decisions, including decisions about interest rates.

This is something that Ardern was ruling out just last week, despite it being the way the Reserve Bank Act is meant to operate. But I guess she's finally picked up on the public anger over this. The prospect of people without wealthy parents being locked out of home ownership forever and the creation of an English-style landed gentry is deeply at odds with most kiwis' perception of how our country should be, and we expect the government to fix it. Ardern's staunch refusal to do so and her successive ruling out of any effective policy measure was making people angrier and angrier. But while this is a start, the government needs to go further, from "trying not to make the problem any worse" to actually solving it with mass house-building and wealth taxes. And if they don't, they'll be out on their arses next election.

"The most transparent government ever" again

When Labour was elected, they promised that "this will be the most open, most transparent Government that New Zealand has ever had". The reality:

Newly-released emails reveal Finance Minister Grant Robertson's staff tried to keep secret Treasury's criticism of a government proposal, but were unsuccessful.

Earlier this year, RNZ revealed Treasury had rubbished the so-called "feebate" scheme aimed at promoting electric cars, warning it would have virtually no effect on carbon emissions over two decades.

That advice was obtained by RNZ under the Official Information Act, but fresh correspondence reveals Mr Robertson's office had tried to stop Treasury from releasing it.

And the reason for that is obvious: because it made the Minister look bad. Treasury pushed back against the Minister, but the Minister succeeded in having some of the advice redacted. Its a perfect example of how the "no surprises" policy is a recipe for Ministerial intervention in departmental OIA decisions - and of why we need to ensure that those decisions are made independently. Its also an example of how Labour's rhetoric on transparency fails to match reality. Because a Minister truly committed to transparency simply wouldn't be doing this. The fact that they are doing this, and routinely, tells us both that they are not committed to open government, and that they have something to hide.

Fuck tax cuts

The government's Tax Working Group released its interim report yesterday, which supported some form of capital gains tax. But Finance Minister Grant Robertson today wouldn't commit to taxing capital gains, with the usual "not ruling it out, not ruling it in" bullshit. He wouldn't even say whether he supported it personally. But he did take the time to tease the rich with the prospect of tax cuts:

Tax cuts in the election year are possible, Finance Minister Grant Robertson said this morning.

While not committing to reducing income tax in 2020, Robertson didn't rule out the move in an interview with Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking.

Oh for fuck's sake. Robertson is meant to be a Labour MP. And Labour is meant to stand for ordinary kiwis. You know how you make ordinary kiwis better off? Raising wages (which Labour is doing, by increasing the minimum wage and improvements to employment law). You know how else you make ordinary kiwis better off? By providing decent public services which save them money and protect them from poverty. Schools. Hospitals. Housing. Childcare. Universities. Parental leave. Public transport. ACC. Pensions. You know what makes all of that impossible? Fucking tax cuts.

Like local body politics with its "low rates" mantra, our politics is cursed with a party which explicitly wants to shrink the state and destroy all those public services which make our lives easier, and a party which supposedly advocates better services, but in reality has no spine and won't stand up for them. And as a result, every time the government has been doing well financially and has some money it could do something useful with, it has given it away in tax cuts to the rich, rather than investing it in our people. Every fucking time. No matter who is in government. And that's why we have shitty schools and shitty hospitals and not enough state houses and starvation-level benefits and crippling university fees, rather than being a Nordic paradise.

Tax cuts are why we have shit public services. Tax cuts - particularly Labour's 1987 raid which slashed taxes on the rich - are why we have inequality. Tax cuts are good only for the rich. So why the fuck is a "Labour" Minister making noises about them? Maybe it's something to do with his $250,000 salary, which gives him a completely different perspective on life from the other 99% of New Zealanders.