Cam Slater: You Can’t Trust Labour on Tax

Labour’s botched tax grab on Kiwi savers was the fastest reverse ferret ever seen in modern politics. It was so fast that the Taxpayers’ Union barely had time to beg for money to oppose it. Labour polls every night during the working week. The news broke on Wednesday night about their sneaky, slimy, secret and untrustworthy tax grab; and they must have received absolutely parlous polling information that saw them quickly back down and reverse their position. But the underlying belief amongst voters is that you can’t trust Labour on tax.

Stop. Cancel. Cartoon credit SonovaMin. The BFD.

Bryce Edwards has written precisely that in his daily email newsletter. He lists out the eight areas that hurt Labour:

1. The Labour Government lacks transparency

2. Labour is out of touch and arrogant

3. Labour has lost their way politically

4. Labour does too much policymaking on the hoof

5. Labour is soft on taxing the wealthy

6. Labour is untrustworthy on tax

7. Labour is poll-driven and lobbyist-driven

8. Labour’s become too reliant on PR and spin.

There are some choice quotes:

This adds to the growing narrative that this government attempts to undertake reform without proper consultation or communication, and sometimes does things in a stealthy way that lacks democratic integrity. Prominent Kiwisaver fund manager and commentator Sam Stubbs complained, “They almost tried to get this through without us knowing about it”.

Bryce Edwards

 

They were trying to be sneaky and furtive and got busted. Lloyd Burr was damning:

“It has to be the best example of how not to govern, how not to do politics, and how not to treat the public. You do not slyly try to introduce a new tax without even telling the public, without being upfront about it, or without issuing a press release… And it feels sneaky. And slimy. And secret… I’ve lost more faith in this government.”

Lloyd Burr

He’s dead right, and this nasty tax grab means that no one should ever trust Labour on tax again. They really wanted to implement this tax and they will be hoping to try and slip it in again in the future.

The perception is Labour are out of touch and arrogant:

RNZ political editor Jane Patterson discusses the negative optics of the reform: “The politics for the government were horrible: from a party promising no new taxes, during a cost-of-living crisis where people are seeing their wages disappear into the inflation black hole, as retirement savings plummet amid market turmoil.”

The Herald’s Thomas Coughlan also explains how strange it is that Labour were blind to how unpopular this would be: “the Government didn’t seem to understand that people would be upset at a tax on their retirement savings. This is no small tax. It would hit three million people with KiwiSaver accounts, 15 times more than the 200,000-odd hit by Labour’s top tax rate or investment property changes. People were understandably worried.”

Parker shouldn’t have been ignorant of the potential for public worry or backlash, because officials pointed out to him in their Regulatory Impact Assessment on the tax change that the public would be negatively impacted by it.

In this case, it seems that Labour was just out of touch with the public. Financial journalist Pattrick Smellie concludes: “The prime minister, and the finance and the revenue ministers must have been asleep at the wheel when this proposal came to cabinet decision-making. There can be no other explanation for one of the most remarkable political blunders of recent times and for its almost instant demise.”

Bryce Edwards

David Parker is a nasty, spiteful socialist who is constantly seeking to pillory, pillage and pilfer the hard-earned assets of people who he deems as ‘rich pricks’. He is infinitely worse than Michael Cullen in that regard. At least Michael Cullen, who created Kiwisaver had the cojones to establish a virtually compulsory retirement scheme. He’d be turning in his still warm grave at what the Labour Party has become: an enemy of the workers.

A lot of Labour’s problems over yesterday’s tax dilemma go back to the party’s determination to convince the public that it won’t carry out tax reform. Labour is scared of being painted as a “tax and spend” party, and hence promised at the last election to bring in no further taxes beyond those minor ones campaigned upon.

This has opened the Government up to greater scrutiny about their tax agenda. As Coughlan has explained today, “Labour proceeded to break its promise in spirit if not letter, multiple times this term, most obviously in its extension of the bright line test, the removal of interest deductions for landlords, and now, on GST. The party needs to regain the public’s trust on tax. It won’t do that through stealth taxes on their savings.”

Broadcaster Heather du Plessis-Allan also added that the new “retirement tax” was “objectionable” as it was “on top of the ute tax and the amazon tax and the landlord tax and the longer bright-line test tax.”

Bryce Edwards

Labour are a tax and spend party. There is little they can say otherwise. The evidence is before us all.

This issue alone has reinforced that you can’t trust Labour on tax. They love new taxes like an addict loves his meth pipe. They will try again; that is without a shadow of a doubt. We must not give them the chance, ever.

Cam Slater is a New Zealand-based blogger, best known for his role in Dirty Politics and publishing the Whale Oil Beef Hooked blog, which operated from 2005 until it closed in 2019. This article was first published HERE