John Armstrong: Taxation crucial in party's fight for life

While Thursday's package of de facto tax cuts showed vividly how the Labour Party concedes absolutely nothing in this election, the announcement contained a concession of sorts.

By offering something it now prefers to describe as "family tax relief" when it had previously talked in terms of "targeting assistance to families", Labour has signed up to the language of the centre-right.

"Tax relief" - which National has borrowed from George W. Bush's last campaign - is being used interchangeably with "tax cuts", with barely anyone noticing.

But a couple of months back, Australian senator Kerry Nettle warned the Greens' annual conference that the centre-right would use such "loaded" language to set the election agenda on its terms.

Referring to the work of influential American linguistics professor George Lakoff, she said talk of "tax relief" implied tax was something bad from which you needed relief.

If voters bought into such language, they were more likely to buy into the solution - cutting taxes. Other options were accordingly shut out.

It was consequently difficult for the centre-left to win the policy arguments when the issues were being framed in the language of their opponents.

Nettle argued that the centre-left should be fighting back. She urged her fellow Greens to find ways of breaking the centre-right's monopoly on language and shift the electorate's mindset to take in Green terms such as "social justice" and reinforce the notion that paying tax was an investment in building a better society.

That was Labour's line when it stormed into power in 1999 and brought in a new top tax rate of 39c in the dollar.

Now, in the fight of its life, Labour finds itself on the losing side of the spending versus tax cuts argument.

It will not admit it, but its follow-the-leader copying of National in similarly offering "tax relief" is an admission that it has lost. As is the sudden arrival out of nowhere of Thursday's package.

In the end, the numbers - who gets how much and when - will determine which of the two major parties wins the wider war over tax cuts.

However, losing the initial battle over whether there should be cuts at all is one reason Finance Minister Michael Cullen has failed to gain traction on his claims that National's cuts are unaffordable.

All this has been somewhat obscured by Thursday's announcement being a tactical triumph for Labour in containing the element of surprise with which to blitzkrieg National ahead of that party's release of its tax policy on Monday.

In fact, Labour has been lucky. A windfall of extra tax revenue has given it the last-minute means to try to neutralise National's proposed cuts by offering substantial help to families much further up the income scale than its current Working for Families programme permits.

Regardless, some voters - especially those who miss out - will see this as a cynical exercise in vote-buying.

But while Labour started working on the package as soon as it became aware of bumper forecasts of the future tax take, it really had no choice.

The extra tax revenue would have been seized on by National as bolstering its argument that tax cuts are affordable. Labour could not leave a vacuum.

Neither could Labour face the potential prospect of National drip-feeding details of Monday's policy launch through this weekend and overshadowing Labour's formal campaign opening tomorrow afternoon.

It also could not allow Don Brash to use Monday night's head-to-head television debate with Helen Clark as a free promotion of who gets how much and when.

Labour had to do something.

While it may now be on more equal footing in the tax war, this is only one example of how the phraseology of the centre-right is dominating the agenda at this election. Conservative imagery is shaping debate across a range of issues.

Don Brash's defining of National as the party representing "mainstream New Zealanders" is a device designed to marginalise Labour as a party pandering to extreme lobbies, noisy minorities and the politically correct.

National has had considerable success in framing the so-called morals debate by using the words "political correctness" as an umbrella phrase to connect a host of unrelated measures and thereby suggest Labour is pushing an agenda.

Labour's arguments that smoking in bars is a health hazard to those pouring the drinks, or that legalising prostitution will improve the safety of workers in that industry do not get a look in.

As Steve Maharey has noted, the "politically correct" label can be directed at anyone who says they want change from the status quo. And it is hard to counter.

National has other equally loaded terms that are being widely used without question - such as "race-based funding", "family values" and "welfare dependency".

However, the real skill shown by the architects of National's campaign has been to draw such themes together in a way that leads voters down a particular path and ready to accept National's solution to the problem.

The best example is its billboard advertisement which asks "What's your petrol tax for?" The red side of the billboard carrying Helen Clark's stern image lists "hip-hop tours, prisoner compo, welfare bribes, taniwha, NCEA inquiries, Treaty lawyers, twilight golf ... " The blue side carrying Brash's smiling face simply says "Roads".

The hidden intention of this advertisement - again borrowed from overseas - is to get voters believing that Labour's tax-and-spend approach inevitably results in "politically correct" programmes that waste public money - money which could otherwise be used to pay for something essential, such as roads or, even more to the point, tax cuts.

The theme has been carried into National's television advertising, which highlights "The Clark-Cullen Taxathon".

That is backed up by a pamphlet - which has been distributed to a million households - listing the "Prime Moneywaster's pet projects".

By adding up the items on the list - the increased number of public servants, sickness and invalids beneficiaries, Labour's carbon tax, and so on - the total is close to $2 billion. Hey presto, tax cuts are affordable after all.

Labour's response has been to slam National's advertising as negative and infantile.

So much for the spin. No one is getting excited about Labour's advertisements.

No one is talking its language in this campaign.