Green Budget Day 2023

Written By: - Date published: 11:27 am, May 18th, 2023 - 15 comments
Categories: budget 2023, Chlöe Swarbrick, greens - Tags:

Micky has a post up on Budget Day and what the government are doing and not doing. This Green Budget Day post is a discussion space specifically for green and other alternative economic visions are. An opportunity to bring some goodies to the table.

The Green Party have a tweet up this morning with this image from a Newshub poll.

That’s NZ MSM asking in election year, how popular the idea of a wealth tax is. Well done to the Greens, activists and NGOs on shifting the mainstream narrative on tax reform (this is an example of how the Greens influence politics despite not having so much conventional political power).

The stories we tell about how things can be different matter a great deal. As Chloe Swarbrick says in her opinion piece in the Herald, “All of these things were impossible, until they weren’t”,

This Thursday, the Government could end poverty. It could boost teachers and nurses and midwives and emergency service workers’ wages and conditions to rival Australia. It could knuckle down and commit to the scientifically necessary actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture, transport and manufacturing. It could put more conservation rangers in our native forests, restore wetlands and daylight streams across our cities.

It could pay for these things like the First Labour Government did, with taxes on those who profited handsomely during an extremely difficult period of time for everyone else.

…

Covid-19 exposed that the things we’ve been told are impossible are simply a matter of political willpower. Direct payments to people who need it, flexible working arrangements and rent freezes were issued at lightning speed. The needs of everyday people were prioritised.
Government Budgets, like laws, aren’t passed down from the gods. They aren’t written in scripture. They are the product of decisions. Those decisions reflect the values and priorities of decision-makers.

…

He and the Minister of Finance have spent the past few weeks tempering any expectation of real change, let alone transformation, in Thursday’s Budget. They’re talking down spending, talking up trade-offs and trademarking “bread and butter”.

These are their decisions. Tinker or transform. Choose an admittedly unfair status quo or choose the change empowered by a historical majority.

We’re already on the middle road. It’s flooding.

You cannot keep a world below 1.5 degrees of warming without taking the necessary, and now requisite, radical action to actually achieve that. That means you cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. You cannot end poverty without raising benefit levels to livable incomes. To do otherwise is to decide that some people deserve to live in poverty. You cannot get house prices to affordable levels when you refuse to define what affordable levels actually are.

You cannot say that you are pulling all of the available levers while ruling out land back, a capital gains tax, a wealth tax or rent controls.

Here is the Greens Progressive Tax Reform policy from 2020. This is a costed policy, with details on how it would work in the link. It’s important to start with the why of tax reform,

In Aotearoa, there is enough to go around. But the tax system has allowed wealth to accumulate with a small number of us, while most of us have only modest assets. We tax work in Aotearoa, but we don’t tax wealth.

COVID-19 has exposed wealth inequality, and the economic response to the pandemic is making inequality even worse with government stimulus spending benefiting wealthy asset owners. The Greens have a plan for a more equal Aotearoa, so everyone can flourish.

Our plan for fairer tax will help redistribute wealth from those with the most wealthy so we can support those with the least. Ours is the only tax plan that will ensure we can continue funding strong public services in the years to come, and make sure those with the least have enough income to live with dignity.

(Authors can’t link to twitter or youtube in posts currently because it makes the post invisible in the Mobile version of The Standard. I will put links in the comments).

15 comments on “Green Budget Day 2023 ”

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  2. roy cartland 2
    18 May 2023 at 11:48 am

    Thanks Weka. Timely post, and good reorientation back to relevant issues (and away from the mindless clickbait of 'infighting' and scandalous carry-on usually posted about the GP).

  3. Tiger Mountain 3
    18 May 2023 at 12:07 pm

    For a glorious few months in the first round of COVID, public health and well being was put before private profit. If the Govt. had made COVID related payments direct to citizens through IRD rather than employers, it would have been better in the situation, when a viable vaccine was not even certain.

    Labour not using its once in a generation 2020 MMP majority to retire Rogernomics, tax the rich, deal with the untaxed capital gain based economy, and get serious on Climate Disaster, will be in the history books, not as a mystery (given the paucity of left wingers in the Labour Caucus) but as a massive lost opportunity.

    Greens have great policy and I am a Green voter, supporting the brand despite the media channel gang ups and some own goals from a small number of MP level Greens.

  4. weka 4
    18 May 2023 at 12:54 pm

    Max Rashbrooke's twitter thread on the problems with taking GST off food

    Since it's being debated again, my reservations about taking GST off fruit and veg are: 1. Gives large tax cut to wealthy shoppers; more efficient ways exist to help the poor. 2. No guarantee supermarkets wdn't just pocket the 15%. 3. Wd create arguments about what qualifies.

    https://twitter.com/MaxRashbrooke/status/1657868390055432192

  5. bwaghorn 5
    18 May 2023 at 1:12 pm

    Tax wealth by all means, but don't just hand it out to the bottom, us it to provide world class education, health dental and housing, .

    • weka 5.1
      18 May 2023 at 1:16 pm

      Good point. GP policy is both/and (see CS’ NZH piece), but talking about those other things more is important.

  6. Phillip ure 6
    18 May 2023 at 1:45 pm

    Didn't the public awareness of how the richest are screwing over the rest of us come from the report released by parker..?

    • weka 6.1
      18 May 2023 at 2:13 pm

      NZ has been talking about poverty and wealth for a long time before April 2023.

      • Phillip ure 6.1.1
        18 May 2023 at 6:25 pm

        Yes..it has been discussed by the chattering class..as part of general dialogue..

        But I feel the tax report that put numbers on that ongoing rip off by the rich…released by parker..really brought it sharply into focus for most nz'ers…and has well-tilled the ground for legislation to deal with that..that is what I feel the parker report has achieved..

        And he/it deserve recognition for that fact…

  7. Ad 7
    18 May 2023 at 2:31 pm

    Actually the Green Party media releases have been very supportive of this budget.

    Of course they wanted more, but their comments on tax were pretty muted.

    • weka 7.1
      18 May 2023 at 6:58 pm

      sensible approach, the lead in critiques were enough, no point in criticising allies on a day when they're under attack by political enemies.

      Ghahraman,

      So much of #Budget2023 is picking up longstanding @NZGreens policy- from home insulation, to cheaper public transport, to climate resilience- what we need is the political will to fix our tax system so Gov has enough to truly end inequality in Aotearoa

      https://twitter.com/golrizghahraman/status/1659018772601262080

      I'll be interested to see what they say next about the climate budget.

  8. That_guy 8
    18 May 2023 at 5:39 pm

    This is the Greens at their best. Chloe has nailed it with that piece. Hope they keep on in this way, perhaps with a more explicit links between inequality and poor environmental outcomes.

    • weka 8.1
      18 May 2023 at 7:01 pm

      I hope so too. Looking forward to seeing what new policy they have for this year.

      AGM early July, the start of their election campaign?

  9. roblogic 9
    19 May 2023 at 7:03 am

    why scrapping the $5 prescription fee saves money in the long term

    tl;dr: because people who cannot spare $5 will just come back to the ER a few days or hours later – at $700/night for readmission)

    why is Adrian Orr desperate to plunge NZ into a recession?

    tl;dr: fighting inflation by killing the economy is extremely stupid. good work by Robertson countering this neocon insanity.

    but NZ is still a long long way from the pavlova paradise we once were. (tweet is from the US but still applies to our stunted wage growth, rampant inequality, and runaway housing market)

    I think a lot about how my grandpa was the sole provider for his wife and four kids, he built a 4-bedroom house with a vegetable garden on a hill in the New England suburbs, put his kids through college, took family vacations every year and retired at 62. and he was a mAiLmAN.

    another wet bus ticket uninspirational budget that misses the mark and fails to substantially improve anything