THE HAPS
Mortgage interest will be an 80 per cent deductible expense from 1 April, and a 100 per cent deductible expense from 1 April next year. This is relief for renters and landlords alike with the Government taking around $800 million less per year from the rental property market. National wanted to make this change over three years. Labour wanted to phase out deductibility completely. ACT wanted to do it immediately. Now it’s happening 18 months after the election.
Like many things, the Government is not going as fast as ACT would, but it’s going much faster than it would without ACT.
FREE PRESS FOR FREE PRESS
Free Press finished last week with “one thing’s for sure, journalists love to report on their own industry so the questions above will get a lot of airtime in the next few months.” Never have journalists worked so hard to prove Free Press correct.
David Seymour echoed Free Press’s comments. He said, job losses are bad, the internet is hurting traditional media, and it wouldn’t hurt for journalists to check if the product they’re trying to sell isn’t low quality and self-indulgent.
The response? Not one ounce of self-reflection, but far more coverage than similar comments not about journalists would get. As for poor quality reporting, much of the pile on was based on the false belief he’d broken the TNVZ Act by issuing a ‘directive,’ to TVNZ. It’s difficult to imagine how they could have done more to prove his point.
THE 100-DAY ANTIDOTE FOR A BAD DREAM
The coalition Government has completed its first 100 days, including 109 hours of Parliament sitting under Urgency, mostly to repeal Labour’s bad laws. This week Free Press recalls the dream, and the cure.
It’s sometimes easy to forget how crazy life was under Labour. Like a bad dream, we ask ourselves if it really happened. Did the Government of New Zealand close the border for years, lock people in their homes, borrow $100 billion with no enduring asset to show for it, try to reintroduce 1970s-style employment laws, and systematically divide every aspect of public life along racial lines?
Intellectually, we know it all happened. They also divided employers and employees, tenants and landlords, city folk and farmers. They made madcap laws that scared good paying jobs in oil and gas out of the country, crashed attendance in education and productivity in health. They even managed to come up with a resource management law worse than the RMA. You can be forgiven for questioning if it really happened.
One reason we know it happened is the Coalition Government has been serving up the antidote. Labour’s Natural and Built Environment Act and Spatial Planning Act were worse than the RMA. They still promoted sticky-beak culture that stops development and raises costs, they also introduced co-governance to 16 new planning committees charged with figuring out what te oranga o te taio meant. They’re gone, and a replacement law is coming this term.
The last Government limited 90-day trials to businesses with less than 20 employees, and introduced “Fair Pay” Agreements. ACT’s Brooke van Velden poleaxed both those changes. There will be no Fair Pay Agreements and 90-day trials are back at businesses of all sizes.
Labour didn’t feel the need for speed. Without evidence of cost-benefit-analysis they put insulting and infuriating speed limits all over the country, as if potholes weren’t slowing people down enough. Those speed limit reductions now stop, and those done without cost-benefit analysis will be reversed.
Madcap projects such as pumped hydro and Auckland light rail are now gone, along with the idea to be one of two countries in the world with roll-on roll-off rail ferries. The whole approach to transport will now tilt towards building roads that people want to drive on instead of trying to turn us all into model citizens who cycle.
The Māori Health Authority was one of the biggest and worst examples of Labour dividing New Zealanders by race. It’s gone. Throughout the public service a shift is on (although some are yet to get the message crystal clear) that this is a modern, multi-ethnic liberal democracy where every person born or who legally immigrates here has the same rights and duties.
Labour’s Three Waters reforms brought together the madness of centralized bureaucracy with the racism of co-governance. Legislation has been introduced to Parliament that will unwind it, returning assets to councils and restoring one-person-one-vote democracy to their governance.
The experiment of being nice to criminals in the hope they'd be nice back failed. Now the rights of victims come first again. Three Strikes is coming back, the prisoner reduction target is gone, cultural reports are defunded. Meanwhile ACT's Todd Stephenson has a bill to make rehab courses a condition of parole, Karen Chhour is putting serious young offenders on the straight and narrow, and Nicole McKee is cracking down on gangs' illegal firearms.
Finally, we can’t fix the past without time travel, but we can shape the future. While Labour’s years of disastrous overreach into our lives, health, education and business they called their COVID response are (thankfully) behind us, there is still the matter of the inquiry. They set up an inquiry into their own behaviour with terms so limited some people might think it was a coverup. Brooke van Velden is now resetting those terms so that the people have a say, and the truth will out.
Not bad for 100 days' work, all of it ACT policy and some of it driven by ACT. But don’t dream it’s over. The first 100 days is only a small down payment in return for the faith people have placed in ACT to bring real change. We thank everyone who makes it possible and are sure the party will keep working to represent you.
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