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Happy
Monday Friend,
A lot has
happened since my last email – from pushback on our latest poll – to
a disturbing economic update – and a Wellington Mayor
selling her car to 'help pay the bills'. Or did
she?
No time to
waste, let's get cracking.
UPDATE: More
than 7,000 Kiwis demanding answers over privacy leak 🥊 😡
Last
Tuesday we launched IRD-Leak.nz following
the extraordinary news that Inland Revenue has been caught
red-handed
leaking the private information of taxpayers to social media giants
like Facebook, LinkedIn and Google.
Already,
more than 7,000 Kiwis have used the tool to make a Privacy Act request
to Inland Revenue, demanding the status of their sensitive taxpayer
data.
Right now,
there's no telling where your information has ended up – and IRD and
the Minister aren't fronting up. But clearly taxpayers want
answers!
My inbox
has been flooded with messages of outrage and disbelief. "How can
they get away with this, Jordan!?"
As I told
the media – unlike voluntarily giving your data to third parties –
you literally have no choice with IRD by law. This creates an
expectation of trust, which has been broken.
To find out whether
your personal tax data has been caught up, click here and ask IRD for
the answers.
🚨 NZ economy now officially in deeper dodo
than the 2008 Global Financial Crisis 🚨
On
Thursday our in-house economist, Ray, was glued to his screen
anxiously waiting for Stats NZ's release of gross domestic product for
the second quarter of 2024.
New
Zealand's GDP has
fallen 0.2% this quarter, and while narrowly escaping a 'technical
recession', this will almost certainly be true with the next
quarter’s result which is expected to also signal a further
decline.
TL:DR: Friend – we are now officially in a worse position than the 2008
Global Financial Crisis, which took another six quarters for
GDP per capita to rise consistently, which only then signalled real
economic growth returning.
The answer? The Reserve Bank must accelerate its program
of reducing the official cash-rate in light of continuing weakness in
the economy.
The Government also needs to play its part with further
spending cuts – especially at the bloated policy
ministries.
After 2008, strong fiscal consolidation played a big role
in returning New Zealand to surplus and enabled debt to be paid down.
It's important that this Government increases its efforts to achieve
the same.
Chris
Hipkins' didn't like our last poll! So he attacked the pollster...
🤦
Our latest
Taxpayers' Union-Curia Poll wasn't good news for
Chris Hipkins. And boy did he not like it!
Our poll
showed many things, but the media was most interested in the Preferred
Prime Minister results – revealing a 6.1 point drop in Hipkins'
popularity, from 18.7% in July – to 12.6% this September.
In
comparison, Luxon was sitting on 32.7% as preferred Prime Minister –
down 1.8 points since last our July poll.
Rather than acknowledging the gaping wound in Labour – many on the
left chose instead to attack us, as well as our pollster, Curia Market
Research.
You probably know that Curia is run by David Farrar – who
co-founded Taxpayers' Union with me eleven years ago. This has always
been public. He also has run polls for National, and many other groups
in the past (including, ironically, Labour!).
Curia remains one
of (if not the most) accurate pollsters in the country, which is
exactly why I stand by David's work. In fact, David
did a better job of picking the final election results than any other
public poll in the lead up to last year's voting (oh, and the 2017
election when he was also the closest)!
Curia continues to deliver accurate and unbiased polling, and
suggesting otherwise is laughable – as you will remember, it was
Curia's polling that revealed National's political turmoil in 2020.
Which arguably led to the demise of Judith Collins as National Party
leader
My advice to our friends on the left and Mr Hipkins: Just
because they don't like the results – doesn't make them any less
accurate.
Willis'
Bureaucrats paid twice the sector average 🤥 🤥
If Christopher Luxon is serious about “getting back to basics”, he
must have Nicola Willis on notice after news broke of her own pet
ministry's spending.
At the risk of being scrubbed from their office Christmas party
invite list (they are literally on the floor below us in Wellington)
it
has come to light this week that Nicola Willis’ “Social Investment
Agency” has doubled its budget compared to its equivalent
agency, which was disestablished last year.
So where is all this extra money going? It turns out that it pays
to be a bureaucrat for Nicola Willis. Reports show that bureaucratic
salaries at her new agency make up an average of $148,215.
That’s compared to
the average public
paper-pusher salary of $97,200!
Nb: for comparison, according to Stats NZ the overall average
(public and private sector combined) is $76,810 – but that's a
different issue...
If Minister Willis is serious about getting “back to basics”, she
shouldn't be giving gold-plated salaries to her staff.
As a taxpayer, you should not have to foot the bill for more
overpaid bureaucrats. It’s high time for her to quit favouritism and
start taking her boss’s advice on canning the “nice-to-haves”
seriously.
Ministry
of Regulation's $400,000 Bill 💸 🤦♂️
And
from the same file, David Seymour's also deserves some stern
questions... 91 staff at his newly made Ministry of Regulation
have an average
salary in excess of $150,000.
But there’s
more – turns out these 91 bureaucrats weren’t enough to get the job
done. Seymour's agency is spending another $400,000 of taxpayer money on outside
consultants.
Really important to understand, I think, that this
Ministry was created to reduce red tape and save
taxpayer money – it seems to be in danger of being highjacked
by career grifters doing the exact opposite.
It
is a perfect illustration of a much bigger problem in Wellington. Even
for brand new ministries, Ministers are not responsible for the
selection of CEO appointments (that's left to the "experts" at the
ironically named "Public Service Commission") thanks to reforms
ushered in under the Ardern regime by one [checks notes] Hon Chris
Hipkins.
Technically, under the Public Services Act 2020,
Cabinet can reject a recommended appointment – but so far that's never
happened.
So
instead of getting an economics or regulatory expert to head
the Ministry of Regulation, pool ol' Seymour has had a life-long Mandarin
former Oranga Tamariki boss Gráinne Mossforced upon him by the
Wellington blob. Is
she taking one for the team?
Misinformation is being used to bang the same 'we need
a Capital Gains Tax' drum 🥁💸
Hipkins is
rallying his (remaining) supporter(s) to push for a wealth tax – and
clearly aren't willing to let the truth get in the way of a good
story! A recent RNZ headline read "Wealthy
people pay lower tax in NZ than in similar states, study shows" –
so naturally, we were curious.
Firstly, the article itself is based on a report compiled by
a social policy researcher – not an economist or taxation expert.
Core arguments are based on data pulled from a 2023 OECD
report that appears to use a similar methodology to that used
in the discredited work produced by Inland Revenue and the Treasury
last year under instruction from then Revenue Minister, David
Parker.
My thoughts on a wealth tax were included in the article –
albeit at the very bottom. Here are my two cents 👇
"The problem is that we've got an economy
that's under-capitalised, with too much money going into
housing.
"Any capital gains tax that's been
proposed to date, of course, rightly excludes the family
home.
"A CGT would likely make the housing
problem worse and starve our economy of what it actually needs for
growth and, frankly, more productivity and higher wages.
"The tax on company profits, for example,
the ability to get capital in and out of the New Zealand economy, that
is where we do pretty poorly.
"We've got one of the highest company
taxes in the world. That means for the rest of the world, investing in
New Zealand at a 28% company tax rate is pretty
unattractive."
Even our
highly paid Mayors are struggling at the moment 🎻
Friend, we
both know it's hard at the moment – and rates across the country are
skyrocketing thanks largely to poor planning and wasteful spending in
councils.
But we can spare a
thought for Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau – who last week said she had
to sell her car to help keep herself afloat during this economic
crunch.
This was
despite her recent 3.7% pay bump, bringing her mayoral salary to
$189,799 – and I won't even mention that Mayor Whanau won $1.4m from
Lotto back in 2002!
Now after
an interview on Q+A with Jack Tame, she says she didn't
sell her car to help pay the bills! Rather, her initial statement was
'taken out of context'.
How dare the Mayor of Wellington take the Mayor of
Wellington out of context! Someone ought to write a stern
letter.
Friend, I
think these comments from Whanau are indicative of an out-of-touch
attitude that we are seeing across councils up and down the
country.
Remember
only weeks earlier when Whanau claimed there is no more 'fat to trim'
in terms of her council's expenditure, despite
revelations of a $563,000 bike rack literally right across the road
below her office!
Taxpayer
Talk: Ewan McQueen on treaty issues🎙️
I was
pleased to welcome Ewan McQueen onto the podcast this
week. Author of "One
One Sun in the Sky: the untold story of sovereignty and the Treaty of
Waitangi" Ewan provides fascinating commentary on the topic
of using an evidence-based perspective on questions surrounding
sovereignty and the Treaty of Waitangi.
Like so
many, I was interested to hear Ewan's thoughts after comments recently
made by some senior politicians (yes, it's you again Mr Hipkins!) on
whether Māori ceded sovereignty. Have a listen and decide for yourself
👇
Listen
to the episode on our website | Apple
Podcasts | Spotify
| iHeart
Radio
Have a
great week! 😊
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Jordan
Williams
Executive Director
New Zealand
Taxpayers’ Union
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