Article for Petone Herald

At this election,  for the first time in my memory, people are thinking hard about taxation.

 

Not many years ago I was happy to pay more tax if poorer people would be advantaged by it.  In the same way as I was happy to give to charities like World Vision. Then I noticed something.  World Vision was getting results but the government wasn't.

 

In fact there seemed to be more and more New Zealand children living in so-called "poverty",  more family breakdown, more violence and more sickness.Instead of reducing problems taxation-funded welfare has increased them.

 

When I was at Intermediate there were 30,000 working age people on a benefit (half of those were widows) and now there are 300,000. A seventy seven percent increase in population was matched by a thousand percent increase in beneficiaries. Can it be true that 300,000

New Zealanders can't get a job to support their families? Check the local papers. There is page after page of jobs.

 

But employers tell me that they can't get workers because the benefit pays more. And it's true. The average DPB payment equates to around $13 an hour before tax.

 

So now we are stuck with this topsy turvey situation where welfare is a better option than a job.

 

But a lot of people who get up and go to work everyday are  getting tired of carrying more than their share of the load.  The biggest single cost to government right now is working-age welfare payments. One in four dollars paid in tax goes to a non-working family. Some people cannot work for genuine reasons and frankly, we could look after them even better, but 300,000?

 

What do you think?

 

The ACT party thinks this is ludicrous.  It's unfair. We penalise the productive people by overtaxing them and encourage the non- productive by rewarding them with  handouts.

 

We must start looking after the right people or they are going to leave town (if they haven't already).

 

ACT will start by giving  back some of the money you earned. We will reduce the 21 cent tax rate to 15 and apply this right up to $38,000.  Anything over that level will only be taxed at 25 cents in the dollar.  Company tax will also be reduced from 33 percent  to 25. Eight cents extra in every dollar will stay in the business' bank account. What's more, ACT is the only party with a serious tax reduction policy.

 

Treasury says ACT can do this without touching any existing spending and it will stimulate an extra 1 - 1.5 % economic growth. That's growth we need to lift living standards and help us climb back up from 21st in the OECD rankings to being in the top five, where we sat only thirty years ago.

 

But ACT won't stop there. As well as ending all the "silly spending" we will attack the biggest chunk of spending called working-age welfare.  Where people are capable of working ACT will make sure welfare is strictly temporary. Getting people back to work will be good for them and their children and it will be good for the country.

 

ACT has a plan to make New Zealand a country full of self-reliant and prosperous people, with compassion for others expressed through voluntary and practical  means - not by the government robbing Peter to pay Paul.

 

Labour's vision is a country full of people who rely on the government to make decisions for them, save for them, to regulate them, to remove all risk from their lives and even put someone else's money into their bank accounts every week.