Tomorrow, National will give huge tax cuts to the wealthiest New Zealanders. $12,000 a year for a typical CEO or a Prime Minister on $350,000 a year. $290,000 a year for Paul Reynolds, the CEO of Telecom. The Right are trying a bunch of excuses for this unneeded gift to the richest people in the country, paid for by working Kiwis. Let’s debunk ’em.
The Greens have released their alternative budget, “Mind the Gap”. It focuses on the inequality between rich and poor in NZ (rightly called “the scourge of modern societiesâ€). It’s great to see the Greens tackling this issue head on.
The Herald editorial is rightly damning of the government’s lacklustre approach to science funding. The ‘new’ money is a trickle, barely replacing last year’s cuts. A crucial difference between Labour and National has always been that Labour invests in the long-term success of the country while National makes short-term wealth grabs for the ruling elite.
The Nats are looking to cut $1.8 billion in spending over four years. Where from? What and who will be deemed to be “low quality” in need of “weeding out”? The answers are going to tell us a lot about the National Party’s values…
There are a second set of seminars in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch over the next week on Choices and Consequences of the 2010 budget. Based on the Bold Choices seminar that I attended last weekend in Auckland (there are later ones in Wellington and Christchurch), they will be well worth attending. There are some materials on-line from that seminar.
Oh and David Farrar was shocked to find that Kiwiblog had been advertising the seminars 
Cuts to prisoner rehabilitation, night classes, and the Super Gold Card aren’t about saving money. The government is only too happy to sign blank cheques for stupid projects like Transmission Gully and the Holiday Highway on the vaguest cost estimates. No, these successful policies are having the financial life bled out of them because they contradict National’s ideology.
