Nats’ tax revenue issues

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

Due to international treaties with China and other countries like Singapore and Australia, many overseas buyers are not able to be charged any more tax than a New Zealander is charged. If such a tax was implemented, NZers would need to be charged too.

The Nats were in the select committee in 2019 and agreed to this. Were they sleepwalking?

We know that National MPs are not great at respecting contracts and treaties — like the Treaty of Waitangi, Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples or for climate change (which they signed) — but I don’t think they can get out of this one.

It’s quite surprising really, as they pretend to be good at business and contracts, and handshake deals are a big part of that.

In addition, techies say it’s unlikely they’ll realise much tax from online gambling as there are ways to avoid that, like using VPNs or virtual private networks which protect your privacy online. This will also mean there’ll be $billions of holes in their projected tax revenue to fill.

Where will that money come from? Let’s hope the Nats won’t increase GST again, as they did last time, if they get into government.

They did say they wouldn’t do that, but they did.

That would really blow out our cost-of-living budgets, especially as most of us will lose more than we’ll gain already when we pay for buses, school lunches and prescriptions, let alone anything else.

Then there is the plan to give tens of thousands of dollars to landlords via rebates on interest. There’s no guarantee rents will drop and some landlords have already said they’ll use it to buy more rental property. That will push prices up again and disadvantage first-home buyers.

It might be easier if the Nats just withdraw their plan to give big tax cuts to their donors, themselves, landlords and the very wealthy. After all, we know that if we get tax cuts we usually get a very small amount in comparison to the wealthy — and something else is withdrawn or underfunded. Just as public services were cut last time we had a National-Act govt. No thanks.

Mary-Ann de Kort