Dear Friend,

Campaign for Tax Relief opens with a bang

Three politicians in particular would NOT have been happy to see this full-page ad in the Herald on Sunday:

Getting this published full-page was only possible thanks to hundreds of contributions from our supporters. If you're one of our recent donors, thank you!

The ad is now going viral and we think it will end up reaching even more people online than it did in print. Click here to share the ad on Facebook.

I promise we're not stopping there. In fact, yesterday outside Parliament we formally launched our campaign for Tax Relief Now.

Click here to watch the video on YouTube.

Here's our key message:

Government spending is often wasteful, unfair, and puts politicians and bureaucrats in charge of the recovery. In contrast, tax relief rewards productive work, it helps all businesses, and it puts a rocket under economic growth – making government debt more manageable.

You visit and share the campaign site at www.taxrelief.nz.

(You might have also seen our Executive Director Jordan Williams on the AM Show yesterday. His appearance prompted an interesting discussion about the difference between the political right and left.)

Find out where the different parties stand

An important role we play in this election is evaluating the different parties.

Our campaign website includes the Taxpayer Scorecard, grading the Parliamentary parties based on their commitments to deliver tax relief and oppose new taxes:

Click here to share the Taxpayer Scorecard on Facebook.

This is not an endorsement of any political party. We understand that tax relief isn't the only thing you will consider when you cast your vote. And some parties outside of Parliament will have good ideas too!

But after seeing scorecards from special interest groups giving "A+" ratings to whichever party promised to spend the most on their pet projects, we knew we had to provide a taxpayer-friendly scorecard.

Below is a more detailed version of the scorecard. Click here to view a large version.

If you want to find out how we arrived at these grades, you can read our index of party policies here.

Thanks for making our work possible.

Louis Houlbrooke Campaigns Manager New Zealand Taxpayers' Union

PS. In our latest episode of the Taxpayer Talk podcast, Islay talks to ACT leader David Seymour about his party's proposed tax cuts, public debt and cutting red tape. Click here to listen.

You can subscribe to Taxpayer Talk via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, iHeart Radio and all good podcast apps.