Bribe eight years in the making
Steven Joyce has delivered an election-year Budget that puts money in everyone’s hip pocket with a big hint of more to come. You can call it a lolly scramble or you can call it an election-year bribe but, with bumper surpluses projected and debt well below the norm in the Western World, this is the Budget National has scrimped for over the past eight years. Joyce delivered the Budget wearing his hat as finance minister but it showed the cunning of someone who wears another hat – as campaign manager. Nearly everyone gets something, with tax-threshold changes delivering about $41 a week to a couple on the average wage, while superannuitants will be better off by $13 a week for a couple, or $8.50 a week for pensioners who live alone. There are shades of the infamous chewing-gum tax cuts for those on the lowest incomes – someone on $15,000 a year won’t even scrape up enough for a Big Mac, qualifying for just $1.30 a week. But whopper increases to the accommodation supplement and – to a lesser extent – Working For Families make up for it.
The Working For Families and accommodation supplement changes are deliberately targeted at those on the lowest incomes, and people living in areas where soaring house prices have resulted in more families living on the breadline.
Some families could be about $145 a week in the money – depending on where they live – based on the accommodation supplement changes alone.
That will make big inroads into New Zealand’s child poverty rates, an area that is increasingly troubling even wealthier voters.
Labour will criticise its rivals for not being bold enough and for a lack of fresh thinking.
Most of the Government’s other spending announcements had already been rolled out and weren’t ‘‘new’’ at all. And, where there are winners there are losers – changes to the Working For Families thresholds mean some families won’t be any better off. But it’s thin pickings for Labour. This is a Budget that makes a further raid into traditional Labour territory by targeting low and middle-income New Zealand.
But, with the upper tax rate unchanged, Joyce’s big hint that there will be more to come on the campaign trail is a big steer that there could be a move to keep National’s traditional constituency sweet as well.