Politics Jane Clifton
Worthy policies have become a stick to beat the Government with.
Whatever would politics do without false equivalencies? Once, it seemed like fun to measure aspects of the economy in chocolate fish. Now we have a new official benchmark: possums, rats and stoats. Somehow, a worthy policy of making the country predator-free by 2050 has turned into a new stick with which to beat the Government.
It started with an unseemly kerfuffle along the lines of: we can count and cost unwanted marsupials, mustelids and rodents, but not disadvantaged children. This morphed into Govt to Spend $28 Million on Vermin, Nothing on Kids. Further “j’accuse” carry-on ensued over the $15 million in new programmes to fight methamphetamine use – a cause of poverty and misery if ever there was one. But Rats and Stoats More Important than Drug Addicts. And Addicts More Important than Kids.
With corny synchronicity, a $1 billion prison-spend was then announced. Govt to House the Poor, But Only After They Rob a Dairy. And inevitably, Criminals Prioritised over Kids.
Putting the tin lid on it, news of a much-betterthan-expected set of fiscals brought the perennial peek-a-boo about tax cuts ahead of the next election – this being less than a year off, there is now more boo than peek. Given a fat surplus continuing, we may be getting personal and business tax cuts upon the re-election of National, and already a queue is forming of people ostentatiously refusing them.
If politicians capitulated and ran the country according to these snap comparisons – spare a stoat, feed a child – we would have an interesting sort of democracy, but one that, as in California, with its pestilence of well-intended referendums, would quickly develop a slew of non sequiturs.
Nothing is ever as proportionate and symmetrical as we might like it to be. The Government has, for instance, been hugely embarrassed at the need to so drastically expand prison capacity, having once called our incidence of locking up crims a moral and fiscal failure. But politicians are also the arbiters of the justice system and its sentencing options, so – with a mini-flick at how “judges keep locking people up” – National has had to wear this conspicuous failure. Ordinarily, ministers are falling over themselves to trumpet infrastructure spending. The curious fact that such a substantial capital item didn’t make the last Budget suggests much backroom finagling to avoid or minimise this photo op.
However, when it comes to tax cuts, there is no end to the equivalencies that can be made, from the righteous to the trite. National at least concedes that there’s no discernible clamour for cuts. Wages are rising – though not at a pace most of us would notice – and inflation is nearly as endangered as the tuatara.
BULLISH NOISES
Since the last round of tax cuts in 2010, source deductions – from income rather than consumption – have fallen several percentage points in relation to GDP. So although Prime Minister John Key is making bullish noises about the next round, Finance Minister Bill English is playing bad cop. He said this week the Government would have to consider “the cacophony of demands” for spending the surplus on other things. Translation: if the focus groups remain lukewarm, we’ll make a virtue on the hustings of spending the surplus on something undeniably worthy, instead.
It’s noteworthy how many judicious U-turns and deck-cleansings National has done lately, in a bid to get any snags and snarls tidied away before election season starts. The
It’s noteworthy how many judicious U-turns and deck-cleansings National has done lately.
minute it gets a sniff that tax cuts might be too useful a lightning rod for the Opposition, they will be popped back into the larder for another day, with rhetoric about how cuts boost the economy stowed on the same shelf.
Anyway, tax cuts aren’t the vote mobiliser they used to be. Fewer people now remember the Muldoon era when, with the top rate at 66% and effective marginal tax rates in the 90 per cents, on top of a growing schedule of arbitrary sales taxes and tariffs, tax felt like an actual punishment rather than just a burden. Since then, the rhetoric has disguised the fact that the tax take under Labour has been merely a percentage point or so greater than under National proportionate to GDP. Taxation is as near as dammit a neutralised issue, especially given the new imposts on property. People are more readily exercised about others, such as big corporates, not paying tax than about the tax they themselves are paying.
COMPETING BIDS
Still, like lab mice exhibiting “preying behaviour”, politicians reflexively repeat their last successes just in case. So, National will continue its flirtation in the hope of reprising its 2009 tax-cut victory, whereas Labour stands ready to repeat its 2005 finessing of National, when it trumped its rival’s generous tax-cut offer with free student loans. It vows to spend the $1.8 billion surplus on three free years of tertiary education. The other parties are making competing bids, including NZ First demanding more for the Super Gold Card and the war on P. The Greens mixed things up a little this week with a call for a tax on plastic bags. But – cue the Jaws theme – just when you thought everyone was staying dutifully in their assigned box, Kim Dotcom tweeted that – cue Terminator theme – he’d be baaack next election.
Again this column has to ask: what is it with spectacularly unsuccessful middle-aged male ex-politicians that they alone don’t notice the “ex-” permanently prefacing their names? Don Brash, Kevin Rudd, Colin Craig and now Icebreaker’s most notorious plus-sized model remain ready to oblige with encore performances no audience has called for. This brings to mind the suggestion that Sir Bob Harvey once made for an overstimulated fellow mayor: a spell in a drumming group in a men’s sweat lodge would do him a world of good.
Still, even another tiresome Dotcom DOS attack on the Government seems a relaxing prospect compared with the binary mayhem of the US presidential race. Trump’s pan-avenging divisiveness is being exhaustively canvassed in the American media, thank heavens. If this is a media conspiracy, long may journalists continue to connive. To compare Trump’s character and past actions to Hillary Clinton’s transgressions is surely the grandaddy of false equivalencies.
A spell in a drumming group in a men’s sweat lodge would do him a world of good.