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- Date published:
6:05 am, July 21st, 2025 - 43 comments
Categories: budget 2025, Chlöe Swarbrick, farming, farming -
Tags: green budget, jack tame, TARA, TINA
Green Party co-leader Chloe Swarbrick was on Q&A in May, just a few days before the NACTFirst government’s first budget, fronting up to Jack Tame’s questions about the Greens’ alternative budget. Video below.
Tame was his usual focused, politely relentless interviewer, and Swarbrick looked increasingly uncomfortable as Tame simply bypassed her charm and shone a pretty blunt light on her lack of detail. This is good for the Greens because they have to be able to explain what they are doing outside of the already converted.
But in the absence of a lot of detail1, there was something else: the Greens are attempting to change the narrative. This is key Green Party approach, it’s how they effect change without necessarily having a lot of conventional political power. They’ve done it before with climate, and poverty, and now they’re doing it with taxation-funded infrastructure as a route to societal wellbeing and resiliency.
Hell, even a hardcore Labourite is writing about the need for Labour and the Greens to work together on tax policy this year before next year’s election run up. The Greens lead the radical edge, which makes it easier for Labour, as the major party in waiting to form government, to advance progressive tax policy that swing voters can get behind. See Ad and Bearded Git’s post The left should unite on tax, fast on Green tax policy and what Labour might do.
This is gold and a breath of fresh air. There Are Real Alternatives.
The dearth of detail in May left Swarbrick to talk about what is the point of taxation?
Because we have an infrastructure deficit accrued over a long period of time, we have to invest in infrastructure now and to do that costs money. We thus need to have an adult conversation about this. It’s refreshing to see it stated boldly and without shame. It’s radical in a country that has insisted on the neoliberal There Is No Alternative narrative for forty years, and in a country currently run by parties that see spending on the public good as a cardinal sin.
She talks about our current issue of people leaving the country, especially the age bracket that is our working age population. The solution is to build a country that people want to fight for. The Greens are creating a compelling vision of what that can look like. A country where we “invest in the common good”.
I would have liked to see Swarbrick more prepared, and it feels like a distinct departure from what Shaw would have done. But I also hope that the MP dramas and tragedies of recent years are behind the party so their time and energy is freed up and they can focus more of their attention on what they do well. It feels like the new Greens with Chloe Swarbrick and Marama Davidson leading the party into a new cutting edge. Still a bit wobbly, but definitely heading in a good direction and building steam.
The Greens are running a roadshow around New Zealand, a tour of twenty towns and cities over the winter: An Economy for the People by the People, to talk about the alternative budget and the vision of a different future. I hope New Zealanders get out there and engage with the party and help build this vision.
How about we tax new arrivals to the country, to cover the years of tax they haven't paid here that has paid for the existing infrastructure they'll have instant access to .
refugees? Children of immigrants?
all those low waged fruit pickers?
Permanent adult incomers , refugee exempt
So we not only want to import
slavesvulnerable low wage workers, but we want to charge them for the privilege of being overworked and exploited too?Either that or don't import people that can't make a contribution to what public benifits they are getting from day one that t hey havnt contributed to
By that logic we should also tax all of those greedy, freeloading babies and children.
Do they have any idea how expensive schools and maternity care are?
Also, by that logic, New Zealand should be reimbursing them for all the taxes they've paid in the past, in other countries, that have paid for their education, healthcare, etc., that has enabled them to come to New Zealand and contribute their labour. I'm sick of these, bullshit, xenophobic, freeloading arguments.
Its about time The Greens paid their share. I call for a poll tax. Sure no taxation without representation . Ditto no representation without taxation.
Why would you want a poll tax?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_tax
Really appreciate this write-up and the focus on narrative shift: it's sorely needed. In response to the broader question of what is the point of taxation, a few key principles often get lost in the noise:
A smaller working population now shoulders both growing infrastructure needs and the retirement of those who paid far less tax decades ago.
We can have both strong immigration and enough housing and infrastructure, if we start investing in what actually builds a future.
The Greens may not always have the slickest comms, but they are dragging the conversation in the right direction. That matters.
excellent.
What does this one mean?
what is the pay as you go myth?
Re the smaller population needing to produce greater wealth, is this an economic model issue? I see increasing numbers of people freaking out at population decline, but I've not seen anyone play this out in real terms as opposed to neoliberal ones. Is it really that bad?
Basically, it's the myth that the taxes you pay over your working life directly fund your own superannuation.
In reality, superannuation is funded from current government revenue, not from personal savings or contribution, although KiwiSaver is a classic half-assed New Zealand attempt to change that somewhat.
That means it’s not a pre-funded individual entitlement. But a system where today’s retirees are supported by today’s taxpayers.
So super is less like a personal investment, and more like an intergenerational contract: each working generation funds the retirement of the one before it. As demographics shift with fewer workers and more retirees, the sustainability of that contract has become a real economic challenge, even if the political narrative suggests everyone "earned" their payout.
As for the long-term economic consequences of that change in demographics, it's kind of complicated.
If you're a neolib it definitely causes you to start sweating as modern capitalism is structurally dependent on cheap, abundant labour. If you lose that, the system collapses pretty quickly.
But in real terms, we're yet to see the real impacts on the labour market, housing, and infrastructure. At least in New Zealand. We can hazard a guess based on roughly similar historical precedents (e.g. the black death, the industrial revolution) that it'll almost certainly entail:
The closest we have to a contemporary example is Japan, which is going down a largely neoliberal route and finally starting to liberalise its immigration settings after years of trying to paper over the demographic cracks with robots, ultra-low interest rates, and deliberately weakened yen.
what is the pay as you go myth?
As I understand it PAYG means that it it paid for out of current revenue, not from some fund built up the purpose. Not sure though why that should be considered a myth.
I think you might be right. I can never get them the right way around.,
I think the myth is that Super isn't PAYG, where ACC actually isn't (for example).
This one I'll disagree with. I would say immigrants aren't the problem, our immigration settings are. A large part of the immigration debate for the left is reacting against Winston Peters and rightly pushing back against the conflation with racism. But down south there's been decades of wealthy immigrants out bidding locals on rural land off the backs of the exchange rate (Brits and Americans especially). That's been part of the rural housing/life crisis.
There's also a conflict between the need to grow, the need to bring in cheap labour to do that, and the need to shift to steady state as mitigation and adaptation to climate/ecology crises.
I also think that if the left continues to frame critiques of immigration policy as inherently racist, and refuses to let people express their concerns, we will end up with the kind of sociopolitical shitshow the UK now has, including a sharply rising neofascist movement.
The solution isn't to allow racist rhetoric to flow freely, we can still push back on that, it's to have a national conversation about what being a New Zealander is and what we want and how we want to welcome people to come and be part of that. Liberals need to stop pretending that being a New Zealander isn’t a thing.
I think our immigration settings have far more to do with importing cheap labour at one end and attracting foreign capital at the other: both driven by economic policy, not social cohesion.
And in the middle, everyone else gets squeezed. Local workers undercut on wages, renters locked out of housing, rural communities priced out by overseas investors.
It’s not immigration that’s the problem: it’s how we’ve structured it to serve capital first, and society second.
The real challenge is how we define being a New Zealander in a way that’s inclusive, grounded, and aligned with the values we actually want to stand for: not just inherited myths, historical atrocities, or political slogans.
It’s not about pretending national identity doesn’t exist. It’s about making sure it reflects who we are and who we want to welcome, without defaulting to exclusion or nostalgia.
New Zealand should be best understood as a promise. Of a society built not on race or religion or class: but on our shared values.
A land shared with and by tangata whenua, who are not just the indigenous people of this country, but a fundamental and foundational part of our constitutional order.
And if that promise is to mean anything at all, we must be willing to welcome others into it. And be prepared to contribute our fair share.
this is positional framing? My main problem with it is that we need to start with sustainability, or let's use the term regenerative instead so we don't miss the point. I know this is outside mainstream politics, but from a green pov, there's no economy without regeneration, unless we want to simply be a lifeboat until the shit hits the fan and everything collapses. Immigration sits secondary to the conversation about population and what the land base can sustain and what we can regenerate out of the mess we are in ecologically.
There's nothing to stop ecological, economic, or social sustainability (or regeneration: if we're that way inclined :p) being one of those fancy shared national values I proposed we use to define New Zealand-ness.
But even if we accept that there’s some upper limit to how many people the planet can sustain, that doesn’t mean turning inward. We have to think globally while acting locally. International markets: for labour, food, goods; aren’t going away.
Besides, regeneration in isolation is a dead end. Without global thinking, we’re just fiddling while Rome burns. Or worse, sliding into a kind of bunker building doomsday prepper mentality. A green North Korea with no nukes but a large strategic stockpile of lentils.
that's perplexing. I didn't advocate doomer prepper or isolationism at all. Which makes me wonder if I'm not explaining very well (quite possible).
When I talk about the necessity of starting with ecological systems, it's because of the stark reality that we cannot transcend physics (the natural world). This is basic green understanding. Limiting population to what a land base can sustain doesn't inherently mean isolation. Vague handwaves to immigration always being good never address the biophysical boundaries we live within.
I have no idea how you got to doomer prep stuff, unless you are largely unaware of the broad range of regenerative, degrowth or steady state options available to us that are based in human wellbeing and social connection. I mean, I just assume you know about those, hence I'm perplexed.
They're absolutely going away if we carry on the way we are. None of those things will survive climate collapse. That's the ground on which all policy should be understood and developed and I just don't see that happening on the left with regards to discussing immigration.
Nah, you're doing a great job articulating your perspective. Seriously!
I really appreciate how clearly grounded your argument is in ecological limits, and I absolutely respect the depth of thought you're bringing to this.
I think where our views diverge is more about the shape of what a sustainable, green future could look like: especially in terms of scale and connectivity.
You're making a compelling case for an economy rooted in the ecological capacity of the local land base. That makes perfect sense: it’s a deeply logical response to real biophysical constraints, and it follows that immigration, resource use, and other policies should be designed with those limits in mind.
What I’m trying to add (maybe with a touch more hyperbole than is strictly necessary) is that even within those limits, there are forms of interdependence we probably can’t, or shouldn’t, abandon if we still want a high-tech society with strong social wellbeing.
Things like international movement of capital, knowledge, resources, and yes, people.
They may need to be dramatically rethought, but I don’t think they can vanish altogether.
And that’s where I see a risk (not in your argument per se, but in some extreme localist interpretations): if we take “only live off your local land base” to its endpoint without nuance, we risk falling into scarcity thinking, nationalism, or isolationism.
Not because that’s the intention, but because the logic can drift there if it’s not counterbalanced.
Take food, for example: its production isn't distributed evenly across the globe. Some regions simply can’t feed their population without trade. So, unless we’re willing to let millions starve or forcibly relocate, some level of global coordination seems necessary.
That doesn’t mean ignoring ecological limits. Just that we might need to negotiate how we stay within them, not only at the local scale, but across interconnected systems too.
You can't just magic up an entire economy out of whole cloth. It has to evolve in relation to what already exists, including international supply chains, institutions, and social expectations.
ok, got you now, and agree 👍
yep. The approach of starting with ecology doesn't restrict us to geography, otherwise we'd all be having to grow everything in our backyard, and some of us would def be starving in short order 😆. Starting with nature is an intentional shift to work with natural cycles (because they're more efficient at cradle to grave and regeneration).
Biomimicry is a good example of this, it doesn't inherent reject high tech, although we will probably disagree on where the balance lies. Which is the beauty of using the concept of regeneration as the guide, it stops being about what individual humans want (we are hardwired to desire more), and starts being about what is possible within a sustainable framework.
We might still choose to overshoot in certain areas (eg healthcare), but it's still done within a knowledge base and framework of sustainability over the long term. That neatly ties into the values conversation, and thus democracy.
thanks also for the positive feedback, I've been feeling a bit glum about the political debate around this.
It's been useful though, the doomer things appearing (you and Ad for different reasons) helped me understand that 'limits to growth' probably sounds like something terrible. If one hasn't spent time in the subcultures who are already transitioning and living good lives, it probably just comes across as things being taken away.
I'm also thinking about how many people just don't trust nature, often again from inexperience with regenerative living.
Both of those are comms issues that can be worked on ☺️
I think we need to bring back capital controls, in and out of the country. However this is anathema to neoliberalism.
Capital movements across borders can be very destabalising.
Not just neoliberalism: capital openness is a pillar of almost every viable contemporary economic framework from mainstream Keynesianism to market social democracy.
As a small, open economy, we absolutely can afford to deliver a high standard of living for everyone. But we can’t afford to retreat into protectionism or capital controls.
Why would we deny ourselves access to:
Capital movement can be destabilising if unregulated, but closing the gates entirely? That’s throwing out baby, bathwater, and the bath.
Why would we deny ourselves access to:
Capital controls would allow those things, but would not allow unproductive capital coming in.
I could be wrong but I suspect that our banks borrow from their overseas parent banks. Since 80% of bank lending (I'm given to understand) is for the purpose of housing, this arrangement seems wrong somehow.
The other important role of taxation is as a foundation for our monetary system. Arguably Tax Funds public goods is actually subsidiary to this.
This aligns well with recent Green party rhetoric to understand public goods for the real results delivered as well as the sums expended.
IMHO sin taxes need to be looked at again..
Given the recent cancer revelations around alcohol consumption…
…alcohol needs to start its ciggy-journey…
..we could start by graphic warnings on packaging..pictures of the seven cancers..and a serious upping of the sin tax on it…and I mean a serious increase…this to act as a deterrent to consumption ..
And of course the other side of the coin is cannabis….full legalisation/serious taxation will be another revenue stream…
(The weed tax could be ring-fenced to help those suffering from alcohol cancers ..thus completing a circle…of sorts ..)
https://www.actionpoint.org.nz/alcohol_excise_taxes
It's levied at 14% for beer 30% for win and 50% for spirits plus gst
You’d be happy drug dealers dodge all tax and levies!!
Did you not read that I advocated taxation on cannabis .?
What on earth are you going on about..?
What a refreshing exchange of ideas and ideals. I particularly like: "New Zealand should be best understood as a promise. Of a society built not on race or religion or class: but on our shared values."
I could live in a society built on shared values, provided they incorporated my values.
https://e-tangata.co.nz/comment-and-analysis/nicky-hager-beware-the-smooth-talker-with-a-forked-tongue
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it'd be great if you could explain that in your own words.
I deleted the copypasta (because I didn't see what you were trying to say).
Sorry weka, I don't have a full record of my comment @5.1, and my memory is weak, so what I was trying to say will remain a mystery.
I wasn't asking about the copy pasta, I was suggesting you expand on this,
Ah – thanks. A thing I was getting at is that "a society built on shared values" is an excellent goal / principle, but identifying values that (all, or even most) Kiwis (can) share is challenging. For example, I value egalitarianism, but it's possible that isn't shared by all Kiwis, sorted or otherwise.
As an alternative example, most Kiwis could probably get behind many of the UN's universal human rights – even those that may infringe on profit taking.
A third example is the political debate about the roles and size (shrink here, grow there) of govt, and the tug of war between shrinking and increasing tax revenue. If left-leaning parties can't reach an accord on how to tax, then maybe they could at least agree on the need to increase tax revenue.
https://thestandard.org.nz/the-left-should-unite-on-tax-fast/#comment-2039091
Also, some values wax and wane as societies evolve, and immediate or long-term (personal and/or community) circumstances/prospects change. I think that's consistent with what Hager was suggesting by quoting James Richmond.
Anyway, one value/system that almost all Kiwis probably share is (representative) democracy – one person, two votes. And I thought the diversity of opinion expressed on yesterday's Open Mike about making 16 the age of eligibility to vote was interesting – so far it's only decreased, from 21 years to 20 (in 1969) to 18 (in 1974)), but current prospects for making it 16 aren't good, and one commenter wondered if "we should be looking to increase the voting age".
Nice one DMK. For me this opens up two conversations. One is about the values, the other is about how to reach consensus.
I also wonder to what extent egalitarianism is still a value in NZ, or at least what of that can be salvaged.
I don't think we all have to agree or have the same values. In fact, I think that human culture and society works best with a range of values and views. Biodiversity. One reason is that when people on any political spectrum get carried away, there are others who are able to say, hang on, there's a problem here. That leads to consensus tech that is built on relationship and working together rather than everyone have to agree with everyone else.
One person/two votes is a limited form of democracy. We can build on that with other structures like participatory democracy and citizen assemblies.
Expect opposition to citizens' assemblies from the usual Actors
I’d argue it’s still one of our fundamental values and part of our national soul: a story that's accessible and resonates with every New Zealander. And moreover, I'd argue it is salvageable. But we need to reclaim it, as well as the rest of our national values, from the clutches of the right.
Because when it comes to selling policy, it’s rarely about the technical detail. It’s about vibes. It’s about values. It’s about how it makes us feel as citizens, as neighbours, as people.
Just imagine a genuinely progressive policy platform built around a radically different national story than the one we tell ourselves now.
One that leans into egalitarianism without the coded racism. Rugged independence that doesn’t mean going it alone, but lives alongside communities we’re proud to be part of, and neighbours we’ll always pitch in to help.
A vision of mateship that ditches toxic masculinity in favour of something healthier: like talking about mental health while helping your best mate build a deck.
And ecological responsibility that isn’t about dominance or extraction, but about respect for the land and the systems we live within.
That's a prescription that nobody, not even David Seymour, could argue against.
5.1.1.1.1.1
Drowsy M Kram's and Weka's responses make me proud to be a reader/part of this site. Thank you, you two! An invitation to expand, tick done, and then a careful reflection made by Weka with some additional points. Could be used as a model…….
Just one point I don't think values, if they are wide/universal/fundamental, wax and wane though the importance we place on them as members of our society in our political system does.
Thanks Shanreagh, quite right – it's (societal / political) support for any particular value that waxes and wanes, not the value / principle itself.