At the start of question time today, I wondered why Bill English didn’t front for questions in Parliament. I knew his planned trip to speak at the Dunedin Chamber of Commerce was postponed due to airplane issues. I figured he must be stuck in Wellington with time on his hands.
Perhaps he didn’t want to personally front up and admit he’d got it wrong in a previous interview about the budget.
So in Parliament today, Revenue Minister Peter Dunne fronted on Mr English’s behalf and admitted the Finance Minister had not understood the Child Tax Credit changes his Government rammed through under budget urgency. Dunne confessed that Mr English had got it totally wrong in the Post-budget radio interview on the changes to the child tax credit, labelled ‘the paperboy tax’.
Mr English said in the interview that interest on savings would not be taxed under the new regime – when in fact the opposite is true.
The frightening thing is key government Ministers do not appear to know what was happening in the Budget.
They have already backed down on some of the teacher changes, taking money from contingencies to cover that gaffe. Now they’re admitting they didn’t understand their own tax policy either.
We need pro-growth tax changes in New Zealand. This Government prefers tinkering with a system that is not working, and what is becoming increasingly clear is that they are not even on top of their tinkering.
Funny how a Tory interpretation of Labour shadow budget costings blazes across the front page of the Herald, but an actual Tory budget screw up doesn’t get a mention? It doesn’t add up.
The IRD is so under resourced that the tax system is basically an honesty box. This seems to be because both Labour and National agree that core National supporters should be able to dodge tax with impunity.
did you read that statement before you hit the submit button little porgy? the level of stupidity coming from the mouths, and pens of the tory syncophants is reaching epic proportions..
genuine bottom of the barrel stuff…ewww!
to be fair though…. the fact that this bunch of tory hero’s has now been exposed as irretrievably incompetent, incorrigibly dishonest, and utterly lacking in vision…is not an easy thing for the average reactionary conservative to contemplate…
no doubt, the manic, and childish nature of the attempts to rebut the reality as we now know it to be is a symptom of the difficulties they are having with these concepts..
i look forward to more evidence of the continuing breakdown of the carefully constructed fiction that the national party is actually a real, democratic government…
always enjoy your posts david… along with mp’s like chris hipkins, you are giving people like me confidence that we may yet get a real government soon that understands what “duty of care” really means….
“Like an opossum in headlights, the Government continues to chart the same economic course. It is not clear whether this inertia is due to a lack of courage, or a lack of imagination.”
It is due to a lack of ethics imo. These neoliberals are constructs of their own making (as opposed to normal,natural man) and are perfectly on course for their own money worshipping agenda.
Economics has become the be alpha and omega and is the perfect church of excuses for all business men and women, forex traders, bankers etc to find sanctuary in. Economics has nothing to say about the social condition, which is just the way painstakingly crafted since 1978, neoliberal automatons like it.
We were warned of this in August, 2005. However,it was so alien and amoral to me that I missed it. I never realised people could be so wicked.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0508/S00023.ht