Our city is brimming with talent and hard-work. We want world-class infrastructure, we want events that bring us all together, and we want to have fun and enjoy life. That’s been on display in abundance with each rolling sneak-peek of our long-awaited City Rail Link Stations, as people from every walk of life have come out to join in celebration of the future within our grasp.
This massive project represents what serious investment, long-term thinking, and working through the hard stuff across political party lines, central and local Government, can get us. When we share a vision of what our city and country can be and we orient our work towards that big, common picture, we can see the wood for the trees. We understand that no one is going to fully get their own way, that trade-offs have got to be made, but that we’ll get somewhere new, exciting and better – together.
You don’t expect everyone to agree with you in politics, but you hope that the people New Zealanders elect to Parliament have the integrity to be honest, and keep their word.
That would mean confronting the reality of the challenges facing us, from the $200 billion infrastructure deficit, to the emergency department crisis, to the desperately needed investment to build a climate resilient, flourishing economy. It would mean working out some common ground on those big problems with local authorities, and sticking to the agreed plan to start fixing them. It would mean being straight up about how these things do and will cost money, and engaging in thoughtful, transparent discussion and debate about how we fairly distribute those costs.
Unfortunately, in the past month, the current Government has demonstrated it has no interest in taking on the leadership our country so desperately needs right now. It’s really important to note that much of this is despite repeated attempts from the Greens to try and patch across the aisle to ensure some consistency, and consensus, on the big stuff, from climate adaptation to reducing our exposure to fossil fuel inflation to a Parliamentary Budget Office, which would stop the he-said-she-said election merry-go-round.
The National Party decided in last August to rip up the foundation of the Auckland Deal, which would have seen tourists to our wonderful city paying a small fee, common in many other jurisdictions, to generate the revenue necessary to support the infrastructure and events they use and come to see. This means costs will continue to be borne by general ratepayers. They then announced they’re moving ahead with a rates cap, to seemingly clamp down on the increased rates bill they’d just created… Resulting in international ratings agencies being clear this would also increase the cost of borrowing, while local authorities confirmed it’d mean they’d have to increase fees and charges in other ways.
Which brings us back to the critical point: if we want to fix the problems our country is facing, it’s going to cost us money. Someone is going to have to pay for it. Right now, it’s working New Zealanders who disproportionately shoulder that burden.
IRD work from 2022 told us that the average hard working New Zealander pays 22 cents in tax on every dollar earned, while the very wealthiest 300 households pay just 9 cents. That’s why the Greens have proposed a tax plan that would give income tax cuts to 96% of New Zealanders, paid for by a 2.5% wealth tax on individual net wealth in excess of $10 million, which would also unlock the resources necessary to pay for investing in our public infrastructure and services which would lower our collective, baseline cost of living.
My wish for this election is that all New Zealanders have the time and space to engage properly about the problems facing our country, and what the actual solutions (that might not fit neatly on an attack billboard) look like. The standard and substance of our political debate deserves to be so much higher. That’s how we build an economy that works for all of us.
