Mike Hosking: Govt's 'no' on sugar tax is my cup of tea

The proposal to tax sugar smacks of wanting to be seen to be doing something about our chronic health issues. Photo / Supplied

COMMENT: What the government doesn't do, occasionally fills me with hope.

For all your KiwiBuilds and capital gains taxes and working groups that end up nowhere or in calamity, every now and then they show some real common sense.

Yet another university study on sugar has found that we need a tax for it.

We don't of course but that doesn't stop them producing the reports.

I assume someone somewhere is adding the cost of all these studies that essentially say the same thing and yet produce the same outcome ... which is no action on a tax.

We know we are too fat, not active enough and have too much diabetes, we know what leads to those problems.

The tax idea I am convinced has come about because those at the sharp end of the problem have run out of ideas and ways to change our habits.

They are no more sure a tax would work than anyone but it appeases them for a period of time in the reassurance they are at least trying something.

You would have thought an activist government like ours might be into such an idea, but no, and it's a very definite unequivocal no to boot.

Then we come to electric cars, another piece of modern angst agitated for by groupings who wish to save the planet, and banish fossil fuels.

They, like the sugar research academics, have failed to convince us of the merits, and so have begun the campaign to artificially support their concept through tax relief.

In others words use our money to subsidise them so as to make them more affordable.

Now a lot of people think of me as anti EV when in fact nothing could be further from the truth.

If you like an EV, want an EV, go buy one.

Within a couple of years every major manufacturer in the world will be producing them.

What I am against is not the EV, but the subsidisation of the EV based on the premise that they are the future.

If they are the future, they should be able to become the future based on their merits not taxpayer support.

Anything can be popular if you make it cheap enough with someone else's money.

Once again, you might have thought this government, especially given the presence of the Greens, would be embracing these agitators with alacrity, but no.

In fact they look like they have upset, disappointed and let down the pro EV brigade by further postponing a promised package of incentives.

The previous government, perhaps ironically given who they were, set a target of 64,000 EVs by next year. The Drive Electric people say given the delay that dream is "dead in the water".

Based on the concept that you should never look a gift horse in the mouth, maybe I should merely be grateful that this lot are not entirely ideologically driven or whipped by the unions, or riddled with inexperience and thus leading us towards the sort of end game you might have thought was coming our way given all the other clusters they have managed to encounter, engineer or stumble over.

In both the lack of sugar tax and lack of EV subsidy, we find a reassuring amount of common sense, perhaps even clarity of thought.

I might even add, given I am feeling charitable, their response to last week's welfare group findings.

A veritable slew of money wasting ideas are put forward, which inevitably would lead to greater dependence on the state, not to mention a completely unnecessary drain on finances, and yet the government have rejected the vast majority and only to this point enacted three.

So can we garner a level of reassurance from these actions and reactions?

Can smatterings of common sense indeed be detected within the complex structure of this three-headed government?

Or can we just be grateful for small mercies?

Sadly I favour the latter, but given it's all funded with our money will take anything I can get.