I almost feel sorry for Nicola Willis.
She is under some pressure trying to make National’s tax cut policy work. After all she did promise to resign if she did not deliver tax cuts.
Remember when she said:
I am going to ensure that National meets it commitment to deliver tax reduction. I do care that it adds up. If we didn’t deliver tax reduction, yes, I would resign, because we are making a commitment to the New Zealand people, and we intend to keep it.
There are weasel words included in this. She is not saying how much and to who. But no doubt she will be reminded of what she said. Repeatedly.
And there are some rather big holes in National’s calculations. The end of the foreign buyer tax will hurt. There are also major questions about other funding sources in particular the online gambling tax. Increasing rates of cancer so that you can afford to give landlords a tax cut is a sign of how desperate things are.
So Willis has used the tried and true method used by desperate politicians and that is to make baseless allegations against Labour to try and create confusion. Either that or she has no idea of what she is talking about. Either possibility is concerning.
Yesterday she started talking about fiscal cliffs and hinted darkly that there were hidden features in the Government’s finances. From Radio New Zealand:
“I am concerned by the scale of the financial challenges left to us by the outgoing government. I am still receiving advice on both the number of those challenges, their size, and the options available,” she said.
They came in two broad categories, Willis said: Risks referred to in the pre-election update but with their true scale and urgency not made clear for reasons including commercial sensitivity; and government programmes set to expire because they were only funded on a short-term basis.
“I think what they did is they found clever workarounds to make the books look better than they really are. For example, it is absolutely permissible for a government to only short-term fund a programme, that is allowed, but where you know that you will have to go back to fund it in future Budgets – then actually you should just be funding it for the long term.”
One example for that second category was Pharmac funding, she said.
“Did they really intend to withdraw funding for listed medicines, and if not why didn’t they account for that in their pre-election update?”
Other examples she offered were a cybersecurity programme for schools, and funding for the school lunches programme.
The practice was “extremely disingenuous,” she said. “It makes the books look better in future years even though it is highly unlikely ministers genuinely intended to stop funding those programmes.”
She obviously does not want to do the tough job of actually reading and comprehending Budget documents. Instead she is insisting for a Reader’s Digest version so that she can get her head around what is in the country’s finances.
Grant Robertson did not hold back in response. About the list he said:
“It already exists, it’s called the Budget. We put it out every year. And all of those things are in here,” he said, holding up a copy. “How can we be hiding something that’s literally in this document?”
Deciding how to handle time-limited funding was just part of the job, he said.
“I inherited a number of time-limited pieces of funding and what you do at each Budget is you go back and you look and say ‘Well are we going to extend that? Are we going to baseline it? Are we going to look at another way of doing it? This is literally the job that Nicola Willis has signed up for and she seems to think it’s some kind of scandal.”
He pointed to the school cybersecurity funding.
“Nicola Willis seemed to suggest that particular example she gave today was, quote: ‘Buried in the estimates’. It’s on page 89 of a 154-page document. It is not buried.
“If she couldn’t make it to page 89 of the Budget I’m really, really concerned at what kind of finance minister she’ll make.”
This is nothing new. In the last National Government Nick Smith specialised in bogus figures and analysis to claim that there was a crisis with ACC funding when it was clear there was not. Read any of the Standard posts on the topic to get a feel of what was happening.
This incident is evidence either that National will cynically make baseless claims to attack Labour or that Nicola Willis has no idea about what she is talking about and has not been doing her most basic job of reading and comprehending previous budget documents. Or possibly both.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress