Politics
Taking out the trash
by Jane Clifton
Why there’s a bloody great jumbo bin parked outside parliment
Every year, during the period between Easter and Anzac Day, those of us of A Certain Age always get a flashback to the Springbok tour. It’s all the jumbo bins lining the streets, sometimes forming a sort of Maginot Line from road to pavement. Blessedly, instead of bloodied motorcycle helmets, today’s skips contain only unwanted household stuff – bits of our homes and gardens and general lives that once seemed so vital, now needing to be replaced or dispensed with altogether.
Metaphorically speaking, there’s a bloody great great jumbo bin parked outside Parliament, too. National has contributed its once fundamental belief in market rents, and its diehard conviction that somehow, someday, ANZUS could be restored to us via modified US ship visits.
Now it’s Labour’s turn. Only it’s being furtive. Bit by bit, in the dead of night, it is dismantling its visceral opposition to accounts-based savings plans for superannuation and hiding the debris.
It isn’t going to admit this. The big new plans to link tax cuts with KiwiSaver are a matter of shame, guilt or desperation for the government. Even if the scheme is announced, as Winston Peters has indicated it will be this coming Budget, Labour will never consent to its being portrayed as a step toward individual accounts.
But it’s a door opened that will be hard to jam shut once voters get a taste for individualised compulsory savings – which would be the whole point of linking tax cuts to KiwiSaver in the first place.
It’s amusing to see Labour withhold all comment about this proposal as being “Budget Secret”. The whole notion of Budget secrecy went out in the Easter skip at least a decade ago, when post-Muldoon and -Rogernome politicians realised that Budget surprises were bad for the economy, and politically unpopular.
This is still “secret” because it strikes such an odd chord with Labour’s traditional position on such matters, that the Beehive sales force must be floundering for the right set of excuses for it.
Winston has no such qualms, and has all but claimed paternity of the new baby. His referendum for compulsory super savings went down like the Titanic during the Bolger years, but he has never given up the cause. His contention that, had we retained the Kirk super scheme, we’d all be wealthy investing Titans, the Belgian dentists of the South Pacific, is hard to dispute. New Zealand First, with its bootstraps Tory-work-ethic origins, favours individualised accounts for such savings, and sees this next Budget as its big chance to launch us in that direction.
Winston’s pre-gloating last weekend does not, of course, mean it will definitely happen. Labour might wait till the pre-election Budget, or even discover that the whole thing is just too hard to pull off. But there are signs that, if Labour doesn’t make a big compulsory savings gesture now, NZ First will enter into an inconvenient new phase of its relationship with the government: a pre-election one.
NZ First can read the polls. Continuing to back Labour as loyally as it has so far may not be its best option for survival. The old “keep the buggers honest by being querulous on populist issues” kit is being dusted off. No sensible minor party ever threw that out in the skip just because the Beehive gave it temporary accommodation.
In danger of losing three parliamentary battles on key legislation already this year, Labour doesn’t need more numbers nightmares.
The idea of linking tax cuts and pension savings has been in the wind for some time, but seemingly only as an outside idea, fostered by a few commentators. When I asked Michael Cullen’s office for a chance to discuss it with him late last year, I was told he wasn’t interested in talking about it. Silly me, I assumed that meant he wasn’t interested in doing it.
And I may have been right. He may not have been interested. He has been distinctly uninterested in making personal tax cuts of any kind. But needs must.
Even though Labour has pre-spent much of the money that might have been available for tax relief, the electoral appetite for it seems undimmed. Politicians can explain the fiscal realities till the cows come home; voters still see “billion-dollar surplus” and think, “Where’s my share?”
A sound argument against tax cuts has always been that they inevitably pitch the economy into that Tar Baby clinch with interest rates and inflation and the currency and the balance of payments and the whole hell-in-a-handcart eddy. Because tax cuts get spent, and spending is how we got into this pickle in the first place.
The beauty of putting them into servitude with KiwiSaver is that they get, obviously, saved. No inflationary impact. Even the siren song of plasma TVs and Jimmy Choo shoes is powerless. It’s about as close as you could get to an economic puritan’s idyll: Jam Tomorrow. But for a change, jam you can actually see in your account.
Voters might grumble. We all need more cash, now. But, like the $1000 upfront gift already in the KiwiSaver scheme, it’s as good as money for nothing, so you’d be mad not to accept it. (Of course, it’s not money for nothing, but it feels like it, which in politics is usually close enough).
Page 1 2 
