Dear Friend,
After nearly five years at the Taxpayers' Union, on Friday I'm packing my desk as it's my last day.
Jordan first shoulder-tapped me for the role five years ago – at the time I was a Parliamentary press secretary. Moving to the Taxpayers’ Union gave me the freedom to expose and rip into wasteful bureaucracy in ways that wouldn’t fly in the risk-averse halls of Parliament.
There are just so many highlights from the last five years. Here’s a few:
- Presenting the annual Jonesie Awards celebrating the best of the worst of government waste (picture above).
- Leading a successful campaign to shut down Jacinda Ardern’s unfair capital gains tax.
- Forcing the Christchurch City Council to the steps of the High Court to release the cost of its seven-metre ‘touch wall’.
- Exposing how a circus of bureaucrats at DOC and Te Papa froze a dead sea turtle for 21 months before hosting it a catered funeral and commissioning a helicopter for its hilltop burial.
- Securing a fuel tax holiday to combat the cost of living crisis (see below).
- Riling up the Wellington arts luvvies by exposing how hundreds of millions in COVID funds have been spent on the likes of ‘indigenised hypno-soundscapes’.
- Leading two legs of the Stop Three Waters roadshow, meeting Taxpayers’ Union supporters and noisily fighting for local democracy on roadsides from Invercargill to Kerikeri. Pictured is the photo from our Blenheim event that made the front page of the local paper:
And I’ve been lucky to work with the dozens of young interns and researchers who I’ve watched develop into keen critics of government waste, graduating into roles in the private sector, politics, and even government agencies.
Most of all, I’m proud of my role in growing the Taxpayers’ Union as real force for good with old-fashioned people power. When I joined the team, we had 35,000 subscribed supporters. Five years later, we’ve built that up to more than 180,000, entrenching the Union as a major force in New Zealand politics, independent of the political parties, to hold central and local government to account (regardless of what party is in office!).
There is no job quite like working at the Taxpayers’ Union!
Every day we respond to breaking news and political shifts, inserting a taxpayer voice into the debate while also progressing longer-term campaigns. It’s hard work, but thrilling, addictive, and often hilarious.
I’ll never forget the afternoon that Trevor Mallard was grilled by Select Committee over legal costs he’d incurred by defaming a Parliamentary staffer. I was stuck in a very dry economic briefing with the Secretary of the Treasury, and emerged to find my phone buzzing with messages from colleagues who had gate-crashed Trevor Mallard’s grilling with our mascot Porky the Waste-hater, and a giant “taxpayer invoice”.
I rushed down to Parliament journalists in tow – the media couldn’t believe we’d gotten away with it. They rolled their eyes at our shameless attention-grab, but still put Porky on the newspaper front pages the next day – the pictures were just too good.
Of course, Porky had a serious point: it put the Speaker of the House squarely in the public eye for his disgraceful behaviour and failure to reimburse taxpayers who picked up the tab.
In the face of an increasingly left-wing media, we have to be creative, using financial support from New Zealanders like you to make taxpayers impossible to ignore.
A great example was when Jordan gave me the green light to hand out ‘fuel tax refunds’ in cash to motorists at a North Shore petrol station. Newshub and 1 News turned up to collect clips for the 6 o'clock news of New Zealanders shocked to learn how much they were paying in tax. RNZ even covered the stunt when one their journalists drove past, saw the queue of traffic, and pulled in to investigate.
To be honest, I was worried I’d get an earful from financial supporters, considering I was literally giving our donors’ precious money away! But the stunt paid off: in the days following our media blitz, the Government urgently threw together and announced its fuel tax holiday.
By giving away $5,000 – less than a cost of a single advert in the Herald – we injected into primetime media the message that 52% of the cost of petrol is tax and secured a tax cut of half a billion dollars. That’s bang for buck. <[link removed]>
I believe the Taxpayers’ Union’s biggest successes are yet to come
With the Borad, Jordan and I have invested a lot of time searching for our new Campaigns Manager – and we think you'll be delighted to meet him very soon. He’s coming on board in September, and is uniquely qualified to take the effort fighting for Lower Taxes, Less Waste, and More Transparency to new heights.
If I can make one last request of you on behalf of the Taxpayers’ Union – and this won’t be a big surprise – it’s foryour financial support <[link removed]>. In many ways this is the dream job, and it is incredibly humbling to know that it is made possible by the thousands of donors who make the work possible.
Unlike many political groups, the Taxpayers' Union isn't reliant on taxpayer funding or a handful of uber-wealthy donors, and personally I’d like it to stay that way. Our strength comes from thousands of New Zealanders chipping in$10 <[link removed]>,$100 <[link removed]>, or sometimes$1000 <[link removed]>at a time. And if you cancommit to a monthly donation <[link removed]>, that makes planning and budgeting campaigns running up to next year’s election far more certain. As Jordan reminds the team often, we can't save the world if we can't keep the lights on <[link removed]>!
Of course, not everyone can financially contribute. I’d like to thank everyone who helps the Taxpayers’ Union in other ways – volunteering, spreading the word on social media, and even just sending through feedback and tipoffs to the team. Annabel, Jordan and I can’t respond to all of your messages, but we do read them, and your kind words are a highlight of the job.
Where to for me?
Five years in one job is a decent stint for a 28-year-old these days – all the more so in Wellington, where it seems anyone with a communications background has spent the last five years jumping from government agency to government agency, taking advantage of the eye-watering public sector salaries on offer under this Government.
You might be glad to know that I’m not boarding the Wellington gravy train – I’m heading offshore for an overdue OE.
My departure was delayed first by COVID, and then by Nanaia Mahuta, whose Three Waters asset grab convinced me to get a campaign against it into full swing. But the time has come to keep a promise I made to myself: I’ll be enjoying an extended break in South America where the cost of living is low, and if I particularly enjoy Colombia or Ecuador or Guatemala I might settle in and try my hand at remote work. Could the economic management there be any worse than in New Zealand right now...
Thanks again for everything you do, not just as Taxpayers’ Union supporter, but as a taxpaying New Zealander.
Signing off,
Louis Houlbrooke
Campaigns Manager
New Zealand Taxpayers' Union
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New Zealand Taxpayers' Union Inc. - 117 Lambton Quay, Level 4, Wellington 6011, New Zealand
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