More than 100 community leaders braved a chilly Sunday morning to hear Phil Goff's response to the Budget in Pakuranga

You don’t have to be a historian to understand and appreciate history in this country.

That rule certainly applies to those Kiwi-Chinese who are relatively new here. What has been shared by that group of people is that New Zealand’s economy is, as correctly observed by Bruce Jesson, “once dominated by people who made things but it is now dominated by people who finance things.”

Even though they are migrant-turned new-New Zealanders, you feel how painful it is to them when hearing Finance Minister Bill English talk about possibly selling community assets such as Kiwi Bank.

The country has walked away from an economy of real entities to that of speculation. For them the Budget smells like: no substance, no plan to grow economy, no plan to create jobs and even no sign of understanding of inter-generation equity.

They like Phil Goff as a man of substance. As Trade Minister he signed the FTA with China, leading to China becoming our second largest trading partner.

In the year following the signing in 2008 our export to China reached $1billion, meaning more money in the pockets of Kiwis.

In 1989, when Phil Goff was Minister of Education he introduced and passed into law legislation which opened the door to international fee-paying students.

Now an entirely new sector called Export Education worth $2.5billion exists in New Zealand.

There are 20,000 international fee paying students in the country from China alone. This is an example of how to grow the economy and create jobs. We are a small country so we must be smarter.

Labour shows the way!

The Budget will turn our progressive tax system into regressive tax system. There is no fairness in the tax cuts, which benefit the wealthy few and throws the crumbs to the rest of the country’s wage-earners.

What was unique about Sunday’s post-Budget meeting with the Chinese community is that lots of new faces who didn’t seem to vote for Labour last time turned up and said they now feel much closer to Labour.

Also members of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce told me that the Budget seemed to have no plan to grow the economy. “Tax cuts for company rate sounds good but you will need to earn first – other than the transfer of money we can’t see where the money is coming from.”

More than 100 community leaders, small business owners, opinion leaders and a strong contingent of ethnic media braved a chilly Sunday morning to hear what Phil Goff had to say in response to the Budget.

The audience agreed with Phil Goff that Kiwis have been delivered a tax swindle and that tax cuts should have been fairer on middle and low income New Zealanders. Concern was also shared over the fact that the Budget does nothing to create jobs and the cuts to ECE and Healthcare will leave families out of pocket.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 24th, 2010 at 6:05 pm and is filed under Auckland, Budget, asian, ethnic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.