Marlborough Express - Weekend Express
‘Change’ that’s really all about nostalgia
While preaching the virtues of austerity, the new government has shown few signs of thrift when dispensing the baubles of office.
The number of MPs inside and outside Cabinet has swollen to 30 members. Some 44% of the coalition’s MPs now belong to the Executive, and enjoy the backroom staff deemed necessary to service their needs.
In the end, National won support for its tax cuts, but lost the foreign buyers tax that (on the campaign trail) the new Finance Minister Nicola Willis had promised would provide “the lion’s share” of revenue to pay for them.
An extra $740 million will now have to be found every year to pay for the tax cuts. Ultimately though, NZ First leader Winston Peters probably did National a favour by killing a foreign buyer’s tax that few economists believed had any hope of reaching its revenue targets. It would also have lifted house prices in the Auckland market.
Peters will be Foreign Affairs Minister, and he also won first crack at the deputy PM’s job.
Among NZ First’s other victories: Shane Jones will manage a $1.2 billion tranche of regional development projects, the retirement age will stay at 65, and improvements will occur in aged and dementia care, and to the Gold Card.
Despite the talk about change, a striking number of coalition proposals share a nostalgia for the era before Treaty obligations, indigenous rights,
gender diversity and environmental regulation became the norm, and before the judiciary sought alternatives to imprisonment. The scrapping of the Māori Health Authority and the removal from legislation of all reference to Treaty principles are indicators of this
desire to re-embrace the attitudes of yesteryear.
In a similar vein, the parties agreed to reduce spending on cycleways, revoke several anti-smoking measures, and restore oil and gas exploration.
Nearly half the population live in rented accommodation. “Landlords,” Seymour promises, “will once again be treated with dignity.”
Towards that end, landlords will enjoy a multi-billion dollar tax break on their property investments, will be able once more to evict tenants at will, and can impose a new “pet bond” on tenants, additional to the current maximum bond of four weeks’ rent.
Regularly, New Zealand is voted the easiest, least-regulated country in the world in which to do business. Regardless, ACT has won support for a new Ministry of Regulation, to be funded by scrapping the Productivity Commission.
This new Ministry will review regulations in primary industries, the finance sector, early childhood education, and healthcare occupational licencing, presumably in order to reduce compliance requirements in those sectors.
This sounds like a new tier of bureaucratic output measurement, equipped with more backroom staff.
Explicitly though, 2017 will become the new yardstick for departmental spending. This tying of state pending to 2017 levels seems somewhat perverse, given the subsequent increases in population and public expectations.
In reality, the state sector had been severely stretched in 2017, with glaring capital expenditure needs in education and in the health system, which was left ill-prepared for the pandemic.
Ultimately, nostalgic rhetoric can win elections. New Zealand may be about to discover whether the policies of the past provide a sound basis for meeting future needs.