If you are in the enviable position of being super-rich and insulated by untold supplies of liquidity to buy up towns, industries, our ripe-for-picking conservation estate and even whole governments, you will probably bypass this column.
For the rest of us – from the new precariat to those mired in utmost poverty and ill health – it is indeed way past time to update New Zealand’s tax system. Preferably after intelligent, focussed reference to tax regimes in countries that are palpably doing better than us.
Whatever “back on track” meant three years ago, it’s a bad joke now.
With the cost of living through the roof and crumbling public services, action is urgent, you would have thought.
And ‘voila’ it has been, this week’s Green Party election announcement by co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick covering off and refining her party’s aspirational fiscal proposals and new revenues.
Most of these have been jeered out of court or administratively buried this last three years but Swarbrick joins a growing number of independent media commentators putting forward what most people would believe were common sense: Tested overseas models that turn talk into reliable policy and action in line with similar countries and economies.
In a sane world, taxing wealth over
$10 million at an annual rate of 2.5 percent shouldn’t worry anyone, least of all the richest 16,000 New Zealanders.
Increasing the tax rate for very large corporations like supermarkets, banks and power companies, while retaining a lower rate for small and medium businesses, would also tap new wealth streams for both government and cash-strapped local authorities, which have been given three months to write their own epitaphs – to central government’s satisfaction.
I never knew when the $10,000 tax-free threshold that my parents enjoyed in my childhood disappeared but that piece of solace, along with the family benefit that could be capitalised for a deposit on a first house, made early childhood life more abundant for families.
These days, the current crude metrics of household income after tax with GST on every purchase thereafter has never been addressed, while the bulk of living costs – from food to iPhones – exit the country in a tsunami of multinational greed and entitlement.
Housing speculation is the most lucrative game in town, yet it too is supposed to be tax free. Tackling tax avoidance by mega companies like Facebook, Amazon, Visa and Uber would not knock sense into the tech bosses but it might start an avalanche that would be better than clawing money out of our most harmed communities, currently enduring the mingy shadow of every ill-natured brain fritz dredged up by coalition politicians.
Swarbrick told the NZ Herald that New Zealanders needed to know there was clearly enough to go round if we broke this ‘cost of greed’ crisis.
“If we are willing to have a rational discussion about fixing the tax system and making it fairer, we can resource the things that allow all of us to thrive and ultimately that’s what the Green Party is standing for – a country and an economy that works for all of us,” she said.
Several weeks ago, the Listener’s front page story compared New Zealand to Singapore; a financial powerhouse the size of Lake Taupō with virtually no natural resources or land and where bureaucrats are well-trained and highly regarded by its six million citizens.
A well planned future is central to its exceedingly stable government and although dissent does not fare well, citizen satisfaction is stellar.
“New Zealand needs to be more like Singapore,” prime minister Luxon intoned in the news magazine’s front page cartoon.
“…Er, Chris, they-have a massive public service,” his trusty finance minister and shadow Nicola Willis shot back, having summarily axed yet another tranche of 9000 government civil servants in recent weeks.
PM: “Um, right…. but with fewer civil servants.
“…. And no long-term vision.”
The mythical “track” that nauseated us three years ago is obviously not for all of us.
“Possibly some of the richest two percent of the world’s population have decided to give up on the pretence that ‘progress’ or ‘development’ or ‘prosperity ‘can be achieved for all eight billion of the world’s people,” wrote Kim Stanley Robinson, sci-fi writer and author of the estimable Ministry for the Future.
“Prosperity for all” had taken a back seat and early in this century the richest pulled into their fortress mansions, bought up governments or disabled them from action against them and bolted doors to wait it out until some poorly-theorised “better times” – or at least their own lifetime, he said.
For the rest of us, the good news is that sociological analysis of median planetary income data indicated local equivalents of a US$100,000 wage could be achieved today for all eight billion of us, he said. Trial groups reported it required paying attention but even looked ‘remarkably stylish’ and sustainable. “If one percent of the humans alive controlled everyone’s work and took far more than their share of the benefits of that work, while blocking the project of equality and sustainability however they could, that project would become very much more difficult,” he said.
“This would go without saying, except that it needs saying.”
• Liz Waters
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