I mean, they're playing nice in public - but behind closed doors, they must be tearing their hair out because this is next level crazy.
I mean, none of it is a surprise. It is full of exactly the kind of utopian, money grows on trees, when-I-grow-up-I-want-to-be-a-unicorn kind of stuff that we expect from the Greens.
There is a wealth tax, there is an increased tax for companies, there are two new personal tax rates, there's a private jet tax, an inheritance tax, there's doubling the bright-line test to bring in more capital gains tax, and a doubling of the minerals tax.
They're also gonna save some money by cutting planned prisoner beds, but they haven't quite explained how they're going to stop these bad guys actually committing the crimes that land them in prison in the first place.
They're gonna spend the money on light rail in Auckland, an overnight train from Wellington to Auckland, trains from Auckland to Tauranga, trains from Christchurch and Dunedin, trains from Auckland to Hamilton,
There's free GPs, free nursing services, free annual dental check-ups, free basic dental care, free prescriptions, and free childcare from age 6 months.
There's also free income in the form of a UBI for students and beneficiaries - as I say, just the usual crazy stuff which 90 percent of us voters seem to agree makes them completely unfit to run the country's books.
My reaction, obviously, has just been to laugh - because, you know, I was 5 years old too once and I also had these kinds of dreams.
Labour's reaction must be to cry, because this kind of loony nonsense that's paraded as serious policy just makes it so much harder for them to get back into Government.
I mean, Labour will need the Greens much more than they have in the past, right?
We are no longer dealing with the Greens sitting at 5 percent where their nutty ideas can be ignored because they will not get as much out of coalition negotiations, we are now dealing with the Green Party consistently sitting at 10 percent and above.
A Labour-Greens government will be 3 quarters Labour and one quarter the Greens - and that's not even counting the other dollop of crazy that's going to come from the Māori Party.
Jet tax, death tax, wealth tax, crims out on the street - Labour must be weeping today.
Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show HERE - where this article was sourced.
11 comments:
Heather, who's actually going to pay for this, there will be no one left except for pensioners and unemployed crims. Who will be supporting who exactly?
Lol, it's funny that failed people on the left then go into politics. It's their last hope. A simple competency test for anyone entering a political party would immediately see all parties on the left bereft of people.
Alarm bells - C. Marx and M. Engels will get a lot of support from the " I deserve a free ride for life" mentality of Aotearoa.
And not a mention of any Green eco policy !!!
I know people who are totally ignorant of this lunacy and will still vote for them assuming their are voting for environmentalists.
If they were correctly renamed the NZ Socialist Party, the same people would never support them.
No, Anon 939, Marx and Engels would not have been at all impressed with the free ride mentality. Classical communism's view is "no work, no eat". They accused the nobility and the church of being the free-riders.
Chloe and marama’s Manifesto for Imaginary Arithmetic
By a stroke of genius—or perhaps an errant yoga mat to the head—the Green Party has unveiled its alternative budget, a masterwork of economic surrealism in which taxing billionaires, bank profits, and (presumably) the nation’s nine private jets will usher in a glorious new era of state-funded nirvana.
Leading the charge were Chlöe Swarbrick, the party’s resident philosopher-poet (with self/diagnosed dyscalculia) of inner-city struggle, and Marama Davidson, the Green minister for Vibes. Between them, they presented a fiscal vision so unshackled from economic orthodoxy it could only be measured in feelings per dollar.
To wit: tax the rich, end poverty, fix the climate, heal the nation, build affordable housing out of macrocarpa and hope. A familiar tune, yes, but this time set to a particularly avant-garde rhythm in which “revenue” and “expenditure” no longer need to rhyme. Instead, money simply arrives, summoned through the moral force of progressive indignation.
And the specifics? Ah, the specifics. Well, there’s a wealth tax, of course—a Green perennial, reborn yet again like a philosophical compost heap. Then there’s a banking levy (banks are bad, remember), higher income taxes for the audacious crime of earning, and a modest assumption that corporations will continue operating happily in New Zealand while being fleeced like sheep at a rural fundraiser.
Also targeted: private jets. All nine of them. Yes, nine. Apparently this elite airfleet is all that stands between us and full dental care for every child, a universal basic income, and a solar-powered tram to Invercargill.
Now, there is a kind of beautiful innocence in this document. A faith in the idea that you can run a modern economy like a community potluck, where everyone just brings what they can and nobody counts the sausages. But running a country, it turns out, is not quite the same as running a writers’ co-op in Grey Lynn. There are, awkwardly, numbers involved.
Still, credit where it’s due: Like drag queens haunting public libraries, the Greens understand the parody of politics. This is not a budget. It is a performance. A piece of activist pageantry designed to thrill Twitter, infuriate talkback radio, and prompt at least one RNZ panel to stroke its collective chin into oblivion.
And in that sense, it’s perfect. Because if there’s one thing their budget excels at, it’s delivering that rare political commodity: moral dopamine. It may not add up, it may not pass Treasury’s laugh test, and it may never see the inside of a legislative chamber.
But by God, it feels righteous. And isn’t that what modern budgeting is really all about?
Aww, just ZB stuff on autopilot. Not sure that in order to win in 2026, Labour needs to comment on the Greens budget released more than a year out. Obviously the Greens overdo things to get some traction, and Labour can just factor their policies into their own policy work which is ongoing this year. The Greens need Labour, just as ACT and NZF need National. But at the moment, ACT and NZF are taking oxygen from National, and probably diminishing the right-wing side of their vote, in a way that the Greens aren't doing to Labour because of all of the Greens' dramas. But who knows where we'll all be this time next year!
Anon @ 8.00 - you can take pensioners out of the equation. We’ve left for Aussie with the rest of our extended families.
Like more and more of the population, older people are also saying FTIO (F… this, I’m off).
What Labour might be/could be saying behind closed doors on the greens alternative budget? How about this, Heather!
Subject: RE: Green Alt Budget – Do We Respond or Just Drink?
From: [REDACTED]@labour.org.nz
To: Internal Comms – Policy & Damage Containment
Time: 11:17 AM
Team,
The Greens have released their alternative budget — or as I now call it, Lord of the Fiscal Rings: The Return of the Vibes.
Headline offers: wealth taxes, universal dental, free public transport, and enough spending promises to make Santa file for insolvency. All paid for, apparently, by chasing 14 billionaires and the country’s entire private jet fleet (nine planes total — we checked).
What’s missing?
Everything they usually scream about.
• No police abolition.
• No EV-only cities.
• No gender-neutral pronouns for traffic signs.
It’s like someone confiscated their Twitter logins for 24 hours and let Treasury interns ghostwrite it.
Make no mistake: this is a rebrand. Chloe’s playing Finance Minister-in-waiting, and Marama didn’t invoke colonisation until page four. It’s calculated — and that makes it our problem.
Expect media to ask if we’ll “embrace Green boldness” (read: economic acid trip). The answer is still no — but we’ll need to say it without sounding like grumpy landlords with spreadsheets.
Prep Hipkins with calm language:
“While we appreciate ambition, real budgets must balance. This one does not.”
Also: someone please hide the gin in comms. We’ve got Question Time and a caucus morale crisis by 3PM.
Cheers,
[REDACTED]
Policy Comms, Damage Control Unit
Must be easy being Green, just invent a budget. Pull a huge number out of the sky and spend it. And for this monumental brain fart you get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars plus perks.
Chloe and co want to tax the miniscule wealth that the average worker saves and give it to the unemployed at $400 per week.
That’s nearly the old aged pension.
So let’s think this through. Get an education, get a student loan, get a job, work for 40 years, pay off a mortgage, raise kids, save for retirement and get $500 per week.
Or sit on your arse, do nothin and get paid $400 per week.
If Australia looks like a better deal than NZ due to the NZ govt grabbing your assets then the population will simply leave.
No people, no tax, no functioning anything.
Two matters.
1. I see that many readers have already posted the comment = " We are currently in negotiation with a Travel Agent as to flights to Australia - at the earliest possible time".
2. Can someone please explain how - NZ Customs, NZ Police & the Intelligence sections of both - missed the arrival of a narco submarine from Mexico, which brought a fresh supply of powder for the Greens to sniff, inhale, inject - prior to concocting their Green Budget.
Just asking?
Did some-one say 10% vote Green? Why, for God’s sake, did we ever close the asylums?
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