Budget day! Here’s a little light reading to get us started.
Budget 2016: The risk of not investing in children
Budget 2016: An opportunity to put children first
Budget 2016: Everything you need to know
What we know about Budget 2016
Budget 2016: Can we afford the superannuation status quo?
Fran O’Sullivan: Time to level the playing field on tax
Budget day 2016, what we want to see
If you could insert one line into Bill English’s Budget speech today, what would it be?
That last link is a bit of fun – write your own line for the budget!
More taxpayers money for the corporate world like Rio Tinto at Bluff would be good I think….. yeah right
So too would more taxpayers money for farmers businesses be good. They deserve it with the amount of tax they pay every time they make their millions out of selling the farm business…… yeah right
Some more taxpayer money to help out private media companies when they can’t pay their bills would be good too …….
I also think we should open the immigration doors even more than the currently record wide doors so we have even more people coming in and driving up the demand and prices for our houses ……. that is great stuff …… imagine when we all have homes worth $2million. It’s just the best ………
Some taxpayers money to help out foreign trusts would be worth it too – we can see the enormous benefits they bring to the world and to us here in NZ …. let’s help that industry out …….. wait, that’s not an industry …..
Oh, and we should transfer more land to foreigners who don’t even live here. They bring enormous benefits like beads and trinkets.., I mean, laptops and wifi ….
yeah
nah
fuck this lot
Another nothing budget for the future.
Brighter Future!!!!!!
a FURTHERER BUG IT
I wonder if last year’s great political deception is to be repeated
We ain’t giving you nothing, in fact we will rob from the most needy (womens refugees etc) to give bribes to our cronies and corporations (Charter schools and Sky City).
Winston had a good line….
More forests have fallen to print National’s progaganda than to build houses.
That’s the world we live in now..when even Winston seems more rational and fair minded than our ‘Beloved Leader’. Well, sometimes.
Are we still on the cusp of something special?
A Brighter Fuhrer….
Public debt bad, government debt not mentioned!
First I will abolish all charter schools and put that money, plus a whole lot more money, into support services in education for our state primary schools which are barely coping with the increasing number of damaged children who come from homes that have no money and no hope.
Second I would lower the numbers of immigrants by about two thirds, which is probably about the right amount for the current infrastructure to cope with. At the same time I would tighten up on the entry criteria to ensure the right kind of people with the right skills were coming in. That in itself would probably cut the intake by two thirds anyway.
Thirdly I would engage a lot of resources into obtaining land and setting up a large home building project, not just in Auckland, and ensure that the greatest proportion of these homes are under $500,000. That will be difficult largely because of the duopoly in the building supplies area, however, if the government makes a big enough order it can negotiate prices. Yes, I am suggesting that the government get into the building business. They did it before, they can do it again. Parallel to that, I will build a large number of houses which the government will retain ownership of and let to people who are homeless.
Fourthly I will ramp up the minimum wage to a truly liveable level, perhaps $25 an hour to start with, and raise benefits to a similarly liveable level. The stimulation to the economy of such a move would, in time, far outweigh the extra costs of paying people more.
Fifthly I would put in place a raft of easily accessible and appropriately resourced services designed to nurture, value and protect children. This country’s record of treatment of vulnerable children is nothing short of disgraceful. Any way you look at it these young people are our future, and to have them living in harmful accomodation, getting sick and not being able to attend school, having parents who cannot through poverty or will not through lack of skills care for them in proper ways. The loss of these young people to our economy is in billions a year.
Sixthly, I would rejig the tax system – whatever it takes – to ensure that people and organisations paid exactly the amount of tax they should. This should bring in a massive amount more money which the government would then use to alleviate the suffering of people who are struggling, for a variety of reasons, and are unable to do the best for their families.
All these, and other measures, would, over time, lift the living standards of all to a level where people can at last function to their potential. The value to our economy would be exponential.
The problem is we have a bunch of self-serving, lying, inept thickheads who are quite comfortable thank you very much, and would like all their besties to be the same.
Utterly, totally, completely and embarrassingly shameful!
@ Doogs, I’d vote for that!
Just also add in, that any corruption by Kleptocrats is an automatic jail sentence.
Abolish offshore trusts 0 rated tax status and make the names involved in the trusts publicly available.
Have a publicly funded media that is tasked to be politically neutral.
No lobbying or corporate donations allowed to government. All political parties get a set budget for their campaigns.
Pull troops out of the middle east. Double the number of refugees that NZ takes and try and do some sort of system whose aim is to return refugees back to their countries once, war, drought, etc is over. (not sure how workable that is).
Collateralising student loans and selling to offshore fund managers. Has to be a winner.
nice one! and, ‘futures’ in sandbags over carpet,eh.
p’raps the shallow, shouty dudes ev’one’s been getting dutifully(fearfully?) behind can be set to breaking rocks down into sand 17hrs a day -to spare them having to think about what they did/compassionate response.
I’d like to see a tax on the poor to dis-incentivise being poor
Don’t they already fine the homeless for being homeless?
No, they give them $5,000!!
That’s Auckland council.
We used to talk about light at the end of the tunnel. It seemed to recede as the GFC developed, and our fiscal cleverness went unappreciated and was, incidentally, unsuccessful. In recent years we’ve turned out the light at the end of the tunnel to save power but it hasn’t created savings because of the money we borrowed for tax cuts. This year we’re calling on NZers to embrace the darkness, and become creatures of the night. Like us.