Wow!
Who would have thought it?
The British Conservative Party government has moved to the left of the New Zealand Labour Party government in their plans to tackle the cost-of-living crisis.
Three days ago, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt (the equivalent to our Minister of Finance, Grant Robertson) announced:
- Increases in income taxes on the wealthy
- Increases in “windfall profits tax” for oil, gas and electricity generator companies and
- Increases in spending on public services – health in particular
In making this announcement Hunt said
“On tax, I have tried to be fair by following two broad principles: firstly, we ask those with more to contribute more; and secondly, we avoid the tax rises that most damage growth”
Increases in income taxes on the wealthy
He reduced the threshold at which the 45 percent personal income tax rate becomes payable from 150,000 pounds (about $178,500) to 125,140 pounds (about $148,900).
Those earning 150,000 pounds (about $178,500) or more will pay just more than 1,200 pounds (about $1,400) more a year.
Increases in “windfall profits tax” for oil, gas and electricity generator companies
Hunt also said his government would increase a windfall tax on oil and gas firms and extend it to power generation firms.
The levy will be increased to 35 percent from its current rate of 25 percent. It will also apply to electricity generators with a levy of 45 percent being applied from January 1.
Increases in spending on public services – health in particular
Hunt said the country’s health and social care system would receive an 8 billion pounds ($9.5bn) package within two years, which he said health chiefs had indicated would help fulfil key priorities.
He said he would increase the state-run National Health Service budget in each of the next two years by an extra 3.3 billion pounds ($3.9bn).
“The chief executive of the NHS, Amanda Pritchard, has said this should provide sufficient funding for the NHS to fulfil its key priorities,” Hunt said.
He said there would be an increase in funding available to the social care sector of up to 2.8 billion pounds ($3.3bn) next year and 4.7 billion pounds ($5.6bn) the year after.
He also said: “I can announce today that next year and the year after, we will invest an extra 2.3 billion pounds [$2.7bn] per year in our schools.”
I’m not holding a candle for these right-wing, born-to-rule Tories but compared to the New Zealand Labour government they are raging socialists.
Their top income tax rate is already higher than New Zealand’s (45% compared to 39%) and we don’t even have a “windfall profits tax” to increase although we desperately need one to deal with the likes of the big foreign banks who are creaming it here while their customers struggle.
Where O Where is there just the smallest modicum of economic leadership from our Labour government here?
Same place as their Fenton Street housing policies. Robertson seems bereft of ideas or vision. In fact I assume Bill English gave him a script and told him to follow it. And he has! Faithfully.
40 years ago social housing, largely government but also a smaller amount with councils, made up 7% of housing stock. SEVEN PERCENT ! And with 2 million people less! Labour 7nde4 Ardern have worked hard to ensure its remains firmly stuck in the mid 3% range.
So if that is their attitude to such a foundation need as somewhere to live, why would expect them to care about any other public necessity?
Labour are a mockery!
It is surely time for the rotten cabbages and big sauzages and a score of other refugees from Slater and Farrer’s filth farms to exercise some basic honesty on TDB when dealing with the question of NZ Labour–whose deficiencies are rather obvious. But after excoriating the present Govt. to then remain silent on what should replace them, or your attitude to the Natzos/ACT is really taking the urine. Natzo/ACT policy is quite clear; Claw Backs all round for the working class, attacks on Māori, Union Busting, cuddles for corporates. If you anti labourites support a Govt. that will do much worse than the current one–at least have the guts to say so.
The answer imo is for ordinary people to step up and organise, and in terms of MMP elections go for an MMP Govt. that supports the best possible line for working class, middle class, retired on “super” and alienated NZers. I could contain any number of parties.
I voted for these useless pricks and yes I fell for their bullshit and their heartfelt concerns about housing. Phil Twyford was legendary in opposition on the subject and I thought they really cared and took it seriously.
Now I feel duped.
So I will heap as much criticism upon them as I want because THEY are the government who can fix this mess but only if they want to! As the author so clearly wrote, when the British Conservative party is implementing policies expressly designed to help those in need and the NZ Labour party isn’t, whose at fault? Who are the phonies? Who is worse?
It’s not about National or ACT, it’s 100% about this government and their abdication of their responsibility. Personally as each new day dawns, I can’t tell the difference between National or Labour!
And by the way, I won’t be voting for any of the above listed parties!
I fell for their sincerity around medicinal cannabis which then got handed to the corporations and was over regulated making them unaffordable and the review into poverty which is a category I fall under and here we are 5 years later still waiting on any sort of fix.
Labour, full of promises with zero intention of delivering.
I agree. Where has all the vision gone? The leadership team within New Zealand Labour is going to drown in desperation next year if they are still bereft of ideas, and this really needn’t be the case.
National has never added a house to the social housing estate in NZ for at least 27 years and are unlikely to do so for the next 27 years. The Tories’ housing policy is to invite property speculators in to run a hill billy rock star economy.
Labour has been busy selling state houses in the provinces to pay for new houses in Auckland, the difference in land values means 3 properties down south have to be sold to pay for one new one in Auckland, not exactly fixing the problem is it.
NZ Labour is in thrall to neo Blairism still, and of course the Parliamentary consensus, which means The State Sector Act, Reserve Bank Act etc. just roll over which ever Govt. is in office. Natzos and ACT will be even worse than Labour of course without a pretence of the kind of reforms Labour has made–such as PPL, Minimum wage rises and FPAs. Of course the latter is a strike free zone, so while many non union members will benefit, it is a class peace move really, like the old National Award system of decades ago.
Monetarist principles of contracting out, blurred accountability, prentration of public infrastructure by private capital, are now so embedded few seem to think of the alternative of re-nationalisation and public ownership. But as residential property owners with thumping great mortgages descend into negative equity, a major chance will be presented amidst the hurt and inflationary chaos–ordinary people need to get politically active again in their communities.
An Aotearoa NZ “For the many not the few” type campaign needs to be urgently organised.
Isn’t it incredible that a party can head in one direction then, within weeks, change to the polar opposite. Did the navigators realise they were holding the map upside?
Trust me – by the next election in the UK, it will be tax cuts and picking on foreigners time once again and UK voters will lap it up like purring kittens round a saucer of comforting milk. Just like they do here in NZ – if National win the next election in NZ and lower the governments tax revenue you can kiss goodbye to major capital investment in future health care and other infrastructure projects as well as cuts to current re-distributive public services.
These are the policies that have been pursued by successive UK governments over the last decade and it’s dragged the UK economy to a stall. That fundamental approach has not been altered and if you look beyond the next 2 years there are brutal spending cuts to come – they’ve just been pushed out beyond the next election by one of the smartest and most electorally successful political parties in the world.
While running the risk of being accused of repeating myself:
AO/NZ politics is still the stunted moustache’s *neoliberalism.
The reason for that, is because the stunted moustache did such a fantastic job of entangling our bureaucracies and our broader politics into his patronising visions of the fruits if his crimes to calm our savage breasts, one of them being ‘trickle-down’. Money, it was suggested would trickle down from the Mighty Money looming over our heads. ( He neglected to explain that, that money trickling down from the Mighty above was our money they sucked up in the first place.)
The problem now is how to reverse the situation without causing ructions within The Mighty. I.e. fay / richwhite, gibb, chandler, hart, watson etc. The real and actual overlords of AO/NZ.
Well, I have an answer to that one. Fuck them! Let’s cause ructions!
But not us. Oh dear no. Would be unseemly. Someone might see us. We would much rather slaughter each other in a drunken madness in the privacy of our own homes. Our women, kids and men flailing away at each other in a psychotic frenzy born of an inexplicable hate, born of fear, born of hardship and poverty.
We can forget about our local politicians. All of them. We can discount our media as being a bleak landscape of bleached and waxed gas bags pointing to the body count. We can forget about our agrarian primary industry rising in raging dissent because they can’t find their tractor keys. We can forget about our laws and their enforcement because our laws were written to protect the criminals and condemn we the people.
We’ve become a resource-rich mad little lunatic country where we encourage each other to meet to fling our faeces at each other while we screech and rattle the branches. Thirty eight years of neoliberalism has neutered us. We’re a sad shambles of ball less, brainless, classless, humper-gatherers sniffing at the bargains in The Warehouse. The day will come when we’ll lose our beautiful AO/NZ and it’ll serve you fucking well right.
But not me! I’ve warned and warned and warned you time and again.
We need a royal commission of inquiry to go up The Monied Mighty and their politician mates like a Meth addict rat up a drain pipe.
But what will happen instead, will be a slow death. A gas chamber end to a wondrous beginning and you fucking idiots only have yourselves to blame.
Ignorant farmers thinking driving tractors slowly along roads will cause a revolution, town people crushed under a false economy of mystifyingly financially blown out hut prices, the dawn of farmers markets shot dead by a pony tail pulling money fetishist PM with the smell of four foreign owned bankster’s arse holes on his lips and those same banks now own most of our housing muster and have you and you and you in terminal slavery, no matter how polite you think paying huge mortgages might be, you suckers are now slaves to rapaciously greedy foreign investors. You fucking fools! You had Paradise under your flat feet and you sold it all for a handful of beans and a big black shiny 4×4 to a cabal of crooks.
Grant Robertson only has one job to do. And it ain’t for you suckers. His job is to merely balance the lies so you don’t figure out what’s going on. So far, he’s doing a pretty good job. You dopes still walk past the homeless and hungry while huts in the burb’s make good coin for the parasitic real esnake industry who pimp your lives to foreign money, read debt.
* roger douglas
N.B.
For those few of you left with an inquiring mind, keep an eye out for Russell Brand. He often has interesting people talking about interesting things that are more on-topic than you might think. He also mentioned AO/NZ farmers and their plight and of how they weren’t the only farmers suffering similarly.
Oh look! Here he is just now! Talking to an American farmer.
https://youtu.be/S1l6GUpeirs
“I recently spoke with farmer Will Harris, who is a fourth-generation cattleman at White Oak Pastures. He shared his opinion on Bill Gates’s land grab & use of technology in farming.”
How about that for a coincidence…
I think that word ‘stunted’ is very hot! The neoliberal idea comes from stunted brains, but bloated with that water on the brain disease that takes up space. But we have picked up on it and the stunted view has become the main one, continually bloating, so different ones just appear as small bumps around the edges.
neo liberalism produces shitholes that’s the intended outcome…show me an example where that isn’t the outcome…lab are neo-lib and some might say traitors to the NZ public….yes it’s all pollies on both sides policy…make the country a shithole.
Thinking about the UK and how they are going to need all that the Cons government can give them (that’s the Conservative Cons not the Labour ones).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO2lWmgEK1Y
The Brexit effect: how leaving the EU hit the UK | FT Film 28.24
Thumbs down is the direction for any stupid government following the UK, and enabling simple majorities to make life-denying directional changes for the country on a simple 1.+% majority (under the statistical allowance usually 3% for margin of error).
Business people can’t even run their mother system right; now they go into space and expect Earth leaders to act as their Mother Ship. Note (it’s relevant) that neolibs don’t set great store on good mothering and don’t encourage it, or even clearly define it, rather deride it.
grey there will be nothing from the tories they are under the thumb of foreign funded think tanks and their own swivel eyed brexshit loonies..the route charted for the UK is down the gurgler to 3rd worlde status…the UK is an example to us all of how neo-liberalism DOES NOT WORK.
Well, well, well. I hope it helps the people who need help in the UK.
Labour are not Labour. They need to re-brand themselves the Professional Managerial Class
indeed a bit of ‘honesty in advertising’ wouldn’t go amiss
Jeremy Hunt has done wonders for the United Kingdom!
well he’s given them an amusing name for comedians to play with.
Labour are right wing toss pots pretending to be left wing.