Category: Politics
You and I, gentle readers, can see all too clearly what is happening to our country. In despair we watch the whole colossal slow-motion train wreck, helpless to do anything about it. It is not that we are not trying to help. We warn, we write letters to newspapers, we support blogs such as this, we make our views plain to politicians, we spread the word in season and out of season. Yet nothing we say or do makes the slightest bit of difference. We are modern day Cassandras, gifted with prophecy yet cursed that our accurate predictions of doom will never be believed.
The Tax Working Group released its report on proposed changes to our tax system on Wednesday to a respectful response from the government. This is in sharp contrast to the dismissive reaction the 2025 Taskforce received to their report on ways for New Zealand to catch up with Australia.
Following the tax reforms of the 1980s, New Zealand ’s tax system was widely regarded as one of the least distortionary in the OECD. It remained largely that way through the 1990s (although under National the personal income tax scale was widened rather than flattened with cuts to lower rates not being accompanied by cuts to the top rate, contrary to the efforts of finance minister Bill Birch). The 2001 (McLeod) Tax Review found that the tax system was in good shape.
It can be argued that the announced referendum on MMP, to be held in conjunction with the 2011 general election, is one of the most important constitutional reforms undertaken by any New Zealand Government. Yet, while there is “lofty” talk about the need for public consultation – “We want to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to have their say on this significant constitutional issue” – it is clear that the government is not serious about public input.[1]
No one pretends that if the mixed-member proportional voting system (MMP) is thrown out by public referendum New Zealand’s constitutional woes will be over.
New Zealand has a lot to be proud of but there are some aspects of life ‘down under’ that we would prefer not to mention. Near the top of that list is racism.
There was a poem which my mother had learnt off by heart as a girl and portions of which she could long remember and recite to us. It was, I later discovered, Whittier’s Barbara Frietchie, and it tells of a true episode in the American Civil War when Confederate forces, occupying a town in the north, decreed on pain of death that all Union flags in the town should be taken down.
[New Zealand] is a beautiful place with boundless opportunity. So I won’t accept that the bottom third of the OECD for average income is where we rightfully belong. I simply won’t believe we have to put up with losing 80,000 of our people every year to other parts of the world. I am horrified that the gap between our wages and those in Australia are now wider than they have been in our history – at more than 35%. How can we hope to hold on to our young people, the educated, the talented, the motivated, if on the Monday you can earn $50,000 for doing one job and on the Friday earn $80,000 by simply moving across the ditch? If we stay on the same growth course and speed, by 2030 the gap between wages here and wages in Australia will have risen to over 60%. We have a plan to steer New Zealand on a course to a more prosperous future. And we need to get to work on that plan straight away. John Key, “National’s Blueprint for Change”, January 2008.
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