Polity: Mr Angry tries to reheat 2011 campaign

Written By: - Date published: 12:31 pm, August 11th, 2014 - 13 comments
Categories: debt / deficit, Economy, election 2014, labour, national, same old national, Steven Joyce, treasury - Tags: , , ,

polity_square_for_lynnReposted from Polity.

Over the weekend, Steven “Mr Angry” Joyce put out a press release saying:

A desperate Labour Party is making promises the country simply couldn’t afford as it tries to buy its way into contention at the election, Associate Finance Minister Steven Joyce says.

“We are hardly out of the starting blocks for this election campaign and the Labour Party has given up any remaining sense of fiscal responsibility,”

This is the same “ohmigod ohmigod there’s an $X billion hole!” line National ran in 2011. (Free advice for Steven: Never run the same gag twice.)

But it is 2014 now, and the charge of “the country can’t afford it” is a steaming pile of crap:

First, more than half of the money National is moaning about is money National had budgeted to spend anyway. So there’s a $ 9 billion distinction there that Joyce is plain making up. (Free advice for Steven: The Jedi mind trick does not work when you are not a Jedi.)

Second, the rest of the money is entirely affordable. The exact same documents (pdf) National plucks the spending figures from also detail the added revenue Labour will gain to offset the spending. That is what things like a Capital Gains Tax and changes to one of the income tax rates are for. So the extra spending over four years is more than matched by extra revenue. The fact that Joyce had nothing he wanted to say about those revenue projections shows how solid they are.

New Zealanders do face a choice this election, but that choice has nothing to do with fiscal prudence or debt reduction. We’ll get those either way.

Labour will pay down debt as fast National. It will run surpasses the same size as National. Everything Labour wants to do is paid for, and we are back in surplus.

The choice New Zealanders face is whether a CGT and other small tax changes are a good trade-off for:

  • better help for new parents
  • more paid parental leave
  • better early childhood education
  • a more vibrant forestry sector
  • better incentives to innovate
  • universal KiwiSaver
  • cheaper power bills
  • 100,000 affordable homes
  • maintaining health and education services at current levels or better
  • creating 21st century schools
  • lower class sizes
  • putting more food in schools
  • better access to healthcare
  • and a raft of smaller initiatives.

For my money, that is a good bargain for New Zealand.

13 comments on “Polity: Mr Angry tries to reheat 2011 campaign ”

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  1. Tracey 1
    11 August 2014 at 12:38 pm

    Thirdly, can mr joyce explain how his gang reached surplus and if it is real or accountancy trickery

    • Richard@Down South 1.1
      11 August 2014 at 6:26 pm

      Definitely accountancy trickery… theyre juggling the books with the Christchurch rebuild…. and the milk price drop will come and bite them in the ass

  2. Bearded Git 2
    11 August 2014 at 3:48 pm

    I think Labour are cutting back billions on the Nats fetish for road building too? Anyone confirm this?

  3. TightyRighty 3
    11 August 2014 at 6:27 pm

    how small is this cgt and “other” taxes? a proper figure would be good. say by the 3rd year if labour do gain the treasury benches what would the combined revenues of all these taxes be?

    • Falcor 3.1
      13 August 2014 at 4:45 pm

      Heaps, but the spend will be bigger so it should equate to a fiscal balance if not a minor deficit.

  4. feijoa 4
    11 August 2014 at 6:51 pm

    Well, National don’t have any policies, so I guess that just leaves criticising everyone else’s

    • Saarbo 4.1
      11 August 2014 at 9:11 pm

      I wonder if national will announce a small Tax cut when they launch their campaign in a couple of weeks. The other thing they may do is highlight the decline in revenue projected in the PREFU from the $1.6 billion drop in dairy revenue per year (between forecast $7 and actual $6)…anyway, Im thinking Joyce is making noise to highlight whatever national are about to announce…

  5. Local Kiwi 5
    11 August 2014 at 8:45 pm

    Bearded Grit,

    Yes Labour will carve some of the Nat’s Holiday Highway program that has a near nil cost benefit ratio, a method of financial auditing National does not strangely apply to their highway project to their mates luxury beach properties such as Omaha beach. also RONS projects will get very close once over scrutiny as nat’s did their when they took over the books.
    Joyce the Minister of “propaganda and National’s election campaign manager has shut money down for many other transport funding that baffles us as he is the Minister for everything and doer of nothing, remember NOVAPAY.

    Labour will automatically we feel reverse the National pork belly policy Joyce has on roads and rob the billions not worthy of taxpayer spending on and redirect it to other more sensible policies.

    National did the same thing when they took over from Clark in 2008, as they culled all the reserve accounts in most ministries that Labour had funded to the hilt like Ministry of Transport, Kiwirail’s rail network SOE and a list of others.

    When National raided the Ontrack they took the $200 million in a consolidated fund for full rail restoration and natural disaster repair, so when our Gisborne rail got washed out and Joyce said we couldn’t afford to fix it we learned as to why.

  6. Colonial Viper 6
    11 August 2014 at 9:21 pm

    Rob Salmond and many others have bought into the “surpluses are good, deficits are bad” bullshit.

    This country has a persistent, moderately severe trade deficit. If a Labour Government insists on running a surplus it can only do so by forcing NZ households and NZ companies to run a deficit. Ever bit of increase in the public sector surplus will be a worsening of the private sector deficit. Dollar for dollar.

    Dumb move.

  7. tc 7
    12 August 2014 at 1:04 am

    Joyce is never taken to task on the many porkies he tells and his sheer inadequacy as some uber competant mr fixit.

    Joyce behaves like he is still bullying around in the corporate circles and his media mates just supply a soapbox and standback. A typical tactic that substitutes slogans and emotion where rationality should be.

    The nats have plundered every avenue open, slashed, burned, wrecked, amalgamated, ppp’d etc whilst giving out top taxcuts, corporate welfare, borrowing billions and flogging off assets.

    Its the old attack is the best defence because they are willingly narrowing and weakening NZ econony to benefit the already wealthy and foreign interests funding them.

  8. David H 8
    12 August 2014 at 8:58 am

    Note to S Joyce: If you need to count past 10 take off your shoes and socks, over 20 use a calculator. Don’t guess. Oh and shouting does not add anything to the bottom line, or your credibility

  9. disturbed 9
    12 August 2014 at 6:46 pm

    CV tc DH

    Good post you all.

    Can you see the dumb shit PlanetKey are doing to us undermining our ability to hold on to our assets.

    NZ is broke and we are even told we cant even afford to run a railway and maintain it properly clearly shown by the loss of the Gisborne rail due to a lack of proper drainage under the tracks at a known washout spot.

    Key and his mob are saying we should not use Quantitative easing as all our trading partners do, so we borrow money from foreign banks and exposure our selves to a speculative market instead.

    Example;

    China our biggest trading partner (I think) is by far the worst at printing money, and an a article last week warned of a tsunami of Chinese printed money is about to hit our shores as these Chinese investors are eyeing up more kiwi properties and business’s.

    We cant compete with this mountain of money about to flood in, so we cant buy any substantial Kiwi properties ourselves.

    The Government has made s open for easy takeover now.

    We should be allowed to defend ourselves at this critical hour by emergency quantative easing and printing money as our trading partners are or we face living in a land without anything owned by us, as tenants in our own land as Key said.

  10. fambo 10
    13 August 2014 at 1:55 pm

    There’s $250 million of tax payers money earmarked for a new casino and convention centre in Christchurch that would be available for any Labour/Green policies just to start with