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First there’s the anticipation: what will you do with all the money? Perhaps a holiday? Maybe a new car? If you get as much as you’re hoping for, then maybe you could retire and move to Australia along with everyone else. Imagine that? Wouldn’t that be great?
But the dream is always followed by the letdown. When you finally have all the numbers in front of you, you find out all you are going to get is a measly $30.
But enough about Lotto.
Here comes Finance Minister Nicola Willis with her much-vaunted first Budget and her even-more-vaunted tax relief, a package that has generated plenty of Lotto-like anticipation and comes with Willis and the Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s assurance it will help the “squeezed middle” with their rising rents, high interest rates, sky-high insurances bills and all the rest.
And in the end, Willis has delivered on the party’s election promise. The $14.7 billion question, of course, is whether your tax relief turns out to be like most Lotto wins: a bloody great disappointment.
Back in August last year, National said families with kids on the average household income of $120,000 would, for example, be up to $250 a fortnight better off under the party’s planned tax relief package.
Willis’s Budget told us the National-led coalition will deliver that. That same family with kids will get up to $102 extra a fortnight through tax relief, and up to another $150 of childcare payments if they are eligible.
The key words in this are “up to” and “eligible”, and it will be interesting to see just how many families with children end up with that $252 — before the election National admitted only around 3000 families might get the full amount.
As for the rest of us, Willis told the House in her Budget address that, on average, households will benefit by $60 a fortnight, and households with children by $78 a fortnight.
The big, hairy question is how all this tax relief, which will cost $14.72b over four years, is being paid for. And it’s here that things become wide open to interpretation, and where Willis’s fiscal plan becomes the “Fudge It Budget”.
In laying out how bad the government’s books now are (and they’re bad), and how parsimonious she is compared to Labour, Willis made much sport — to loud cheers and applause from her colleagues — about how little new money she is spending (and will be spending over the coming years) and how all the cutting and trimming of the “back office” of the public service has only just begun.
She also crowed that she had paid for her tax relief package with all the cutting and scrimping and sacking public servants she has already done.
However, it’s also true that the Crown’s debt is expected to rise by another $17b. So, Willis suggesting that all that extra debt isn’t going into the same money pot as the cuts and savings — the pot the $14.72b tax relief is ultimately being paid out of — tastes like a big, big slice of fudging reality. It feels and smells like borrowing for tax cuts, and all for an extra $30 a week, on average.
What was that you said? Lotto is up to $38 million this Saturday?
More dollars than sense
If you are worrying whether you’ll be dining on dog food when you retire on a state pension, spare a thought for the down-to-earth multimillionaire Christopher Luxon.
The Prime Minister has so many retirement schemes — not including the state pension and the gold-plated parliamentary retirement plan he’ll be entitled to — that he cocked-up his declarations to Parliament’s registrar of pecuniary interests.
Luxon declared two KiwiSaver schemes, one with AMP, the other with Westpac, even though it is only legal to contribute to one.
It turned out he is only contributing to the AMP one; the other one is sitting fallow. It also turns out that Mr Trust-Me-I-Know-What-I’m-Doing is in two KiwiSaver schemes with some of the worst performing growth funds in the year to March. The AMP one is placed dead last in growth funds with a 10-year track record.
Never fear. According to the register of pecuniary interests, the Luxe has two other retirement plans and his seven mortgage-free properties to fall back on, along with bank deposits and what is effectively pin money from his prime ministerial salary of $484,200 (rising to $520,000 by 2026).
How wonderfully comforting it is to know we won’t be seeing the Luxe in the supermarket dog food aisle with the rest of us come retirement. Anyone for Chum? Woof! Woof!
It isn’t easy being gormless
In other news, what the hell is eating the Greens?
On the evidence of their nightmare start to our 54th parliament, you can only conclude they have all forsaken the vile kale and the disgusting tofu and instead started eating themselves — not something you really expect of a bunch of vegetarians and vegans.
Nor is it what the party and its supporters would have anticipated when the Greens won, partly, one suspects, on the back of disaffected voters deserting Labour, an astounding 11.6% of the overall vote last October, giving the party a record number of electorate seats and MPs. It might be Act and NZ First that are in government, but the Greens, with 15 seats, are the third-largest party in parliament.
And then it all went wrong. Putting aside the tragic, sudden death of Efeso Collins in February, the party has spent the first six months of the term looking like a crack team of bomb-makers competing to find the most inventive way to blow up political careers.
In January, Golriz Ghahraman resigned from Parliament after being caught (and later convicted of) shoplifting. Boom!
In March, Darleen Tana was stood down over allegations of the exploitation of migrant workers by her husband’s e-bike business. Boom! She has since become the centre of an Electoral Commission investigation over a paid article failing to include an authorisation statement. Boom, boom!
Then, last month, long-time party co-leader James Shaw chucked in parliament for good saying his overwhelming feeling, having done so, was “relief”. Boom!
The day he left, Julie Anne Genter marched across the House and demonstrated how to do performative outrage for a bewildered government minister. Boom!
And then last week, in a first for our parliament, the self-described Marxist Ricardo Menéndez March yelled out “fuck you” during a House debate. Boom!
On top of the amazing exploding MPs and incredible imploding political careers, there has also been the sense that the Greens’ co-leaders have not exactly been as upfront with the public as quickly as they should have been about the Ghahraman and Tana affairs.
And what are we to make of the extraordinary length of time — it’s been three months since Tana was suspended on full pay — that the “independent” review of her case is taking? It can’t be long before the long-running podcast The Vanished does an episode called “Where the hell is Darleen Tana and why is she still being paid?”
The gormless Greens’ latest “fuck you” faux pas adds to the distinct impression that the party is suffering from an unhelpful combination of smugness, arrogance and amateurism at a time when the National-led coalition seems keen to set fire to everything the Greens hold dear.
Compare that with the Te Pāti Māori, which has fewer than half the MPs of the Greens but, since the election, has demonstrated twice as much fight and three times the political nous. Witness yesterday’s spectacle. Appalled by what it sees as the coalition’s attacks on Māori, Te Pāti Māori didn’t just bellow “fuck you” in the House, it called for countrywide protests, the second since the election, to mark Budget Day. The party brought thousands onto the streets.
The self-satisfied and performative Greens, beset as they are by self-made and frankly pathetic troubles, might care to look to their left and see what effective, focused and popular opposition looks like.
