National and Act riding the wrong horses

The oaks are bare now and the willows golden. Every afternoon where I am, horses gather on each side of the country road, their big heads hanging over a pair of facing gates, their big eyes staring at each other. Three of them on one side, one on the other, unmoving, gazing at each other with longing.

I think of them as National and Act — only, you know, beautiful.

What do you do when you’re the Opposition, locked down in a crisis? Stand and wait, hoping for the day you can get together and have some fun. This week, ahead of the Budget, both parties have told us what they’d do if they were allowed to have some fun.

National’s finance spokesperson Paul Goldsmith produced a five-point plan which boiled down to: tax cuts.

I kid you not — the specific proposals involve a GST refund and tax deductions on investments, both aimed at businesses, and a tax plan for everyone that will “see people keep more of what they earn”.

Is this the scope of National’s vision? Tax cuts are supposedly legit when the economy is going well, but also, we now learn, when it’s in peril. There is apparently no time when tax cuts are not the answer.

Also in Goldsmith’s plan: a commitment to “invest in quality infrastructure”, which he specified as “upgrading skills, turbo-charging the innovation sector and improving the quality of public services, such as health”. That’s already happening.

Goldsmith said this new investment was possible because National would “use the Government’s balance sheet”. That’s how you say “more debt” when you don’t want to use words like “borrow” and “debt”.

Act Party leader David Seymour is a new man, his naturally curly hair unleashed by the no-haircuts lockdown, his bouncy manner finally translating into a bounce in the polls.

And he’s got a whole new plan for New Zealand. It’s called Unleashing our Potential and if you’re wondering if Potential is the name of a wild dog you would not be far wrong.

Act proposes $3.1 billion in tax cuts and a budget surplus within four years. How?

“We will restart the economy,” said Seymour, “not with wasteful handouts and massive public works, but by cutting taxes and red tape.” He also says there should be “no more ‘nice to haves”’.

Let’s pick that apart. Cutting taxes assumes the money saved will be invested in productive economic growth and not, say, in property or offshore profits. There’s little evidence for it.

Cutting red tape and, as Seymour also said, eliminating “barriers to employment” means winding back health and safety rules, reducing the minimum wage and you can definitely kiss farewell to the Zero Carbon Act.

No “massive public works” seems to mean privatising infrastructure. An end to “wasteful handouts” means no more employment support or other funding initiatives.

Act wants to give business a licence to do pretty much what it wants. The Government’s job is to get out of the way.

And “no more nice to haves”? That’s code. A quick return to budget surplus, with tax cuts, means savage spending cuts.

It doesn’t even make sense. New Zealand ranks near top in the world for the ease of doing business. We have some shameful rates of workplace “accidents”. Unions have very little power and they work for prosperity, not against it. Taxes are not high.

This stuff matters. As the pandemic has revealed, we need to do some retooling. Broaden our exports and increase the manufacturing base. Grow the housing stock for vulnerable people. Get much better at the education and training required for a flexible workforce. Fix the under-funded and stupidly organised health system.

Addressing such problems doesn’t happen when things are going well. No one wants change in the good times.

But in a crisis? It offers a chance. We’re spending a lot of money and a great many of us face changes anyway in our work and our lives. So the challenge is to make those changes good, not just for now but for the future.

The biggest disappointment about National is that they’ve said so little to show they understand this. Instead, their message is: let’s go back to how things were, asap. The party’s former development maestro, Steven Joyce, has even counselled them to do that.

Act gets it, but their vision is a terrible one.

Both seem terrified of spending more on welfare. They exclude some of the hardest-hit sectors of society from their solutions.

Meanwhile, those horses are still out there. Waiting. Just like National and Act, tempting us with the offer of a ride to freedom. But they’re not a metaphor. Sometimes, a horse is only a horse.