PM shifts tax focus to help for families

Helen Clark

Prime Minister Helen Clark has eliminated any talk of the embarrassing tax-threshold adjustments - promised in this year's Budget - from her pre-election campaign tax vocabulary.

Instead, on the trail in Wairarapa yesterday, she was promoting "tax relief" in the form of the Working for Families package - the centrepiece of last year's Budget.

In two separate pre-campaign meetings yesterday, Helen Clark told her audiences that the Government would not be offering tax cuts, but was offering tax relief in the form of the Working for Families package.

Until this year's Budget threw the issue of tax cuts into sharp focus, the Working for Families package had never been sold as tax relief.

It is a series of phased-in increases to existing entitlements and some new ones for low and middle income families with children that will cost more than $1 billion a year by 2007.

The threshold adjustment, one measure that could be described as across-the-board tax relief - albeit in three years - is not part of the Government's parade of promises.

It will cost $360 million within four years and give taxpayers between 67c and $10 a week in their pockets.

Asked why it was never mentioned, she said: "The threshold change was simply seen as an updating of thresholds. The big thing in tax relief is what is happening with Working for Families."

She cited the case of a mother of five she met in Auckland last week who was $85 a week better off since family support increases in April.

"We have decided that's the top priority for tax relief, to help the families on the low and modest incomes at the present time," she told staff at Carterton's Paua Shell factory and shop.

She spoke earlier to a mainly elderly audience of 200 in the Masterton Town Hall, setting out the Government's record on issues affecting the elderly, such as the superannuation fund, a rise in rates rebates and cataract surgery, hip and knee replacement, lowering doctors' fees and prescriptions, and cancelling compulsory driving tests for the over-80s.

She said people had a choice at the election on the question of trust "and who do you trust to do what they say they will do?"

Implying that New Zealand's anti-nuclear policy might be under threat, she said another issue was "who stands up for New Zealand?"

"As long as I'm Prime Minister, that nuclear-free policy won't be gone by lunchtime or any other time," she said to applause.

She also talked unprompted about the Iraq war, saying that as long as she remained Prime Minister "young Kiwis in uniform aren't going to be sent to wars which aren't justified".

"That's why we weren't in Iraq: I absolutely stand by that decision."

Helen Clark laughed off a call by National leader Don Brash for her to name the election date.

"There's more rugby fever than election fever around."

She said Dr Brash must be desperate to have called a press conference about it.

Dr Brash accused her and minister Pete Hodgson of "gameplaying" and said the public was getting sick of it.

But questioned about his decision to withhold his party's tax policy until the election date is known, he said the public would have ample time to understand it.

"We are going to put it out in our own good time. They don't need long at all, frankly, but they'll have at least a month."