"The Growth Agenda"
That's how John Key describes it.It involves rolling back the RMA as legislative priority second only to tax cuts. It involves:
"infrastructure bonds" [Crown debt]
"public-private partnerships" [tolling by Australians]
Peter Cresswell:
OF THE FEW DETAILS released that actually describe what they would do in that first 100 days (and who now expects details from this lot?), all they really establish is they will make it easier for the government to "Think Big" -- requiring projects of so called "national importance" to be consented in ninety days, or else.
That doesn't help you or I get our projects built and our property rights protected, but it would allow the government to steamroll over people' property rights to push through projects like the Waikato pylons.
They don't want to protect your property rights. They don't want to make it easier for you to build, they only want to make it easier for them to build, using borrowed money.
Money borrowed for their tax cuts. That's the priority.
Cullen has left the Crown in a cosy fiscal position - certainly relative to the public at least. The private sector is carrying historically large debt while the Crown is now (!) in a net credit situation. Our sovereign entity is in a strong financial position relative to many other national governments.
So, the thinking goes, Jo Voter will say: yeah, fuck it, let's borrow a bit more on the government tab while I get my money back through tax cuts and I can use that $50 a week to pay off the credit card and start doing some serious shopping.
Labour will go hard on Cullen's record and target National's "muldoonism" in this campaign. They have to paint them effectively as:
untrustworthy
risky
radicals
But being Labour it will be under the rubric of:
New Right Tory Scum
- a vibe that inevitably seeps out. Cullen's "rich prick" being a classic. They will lose to the natural third term swing away from the incumbent government if they can't cut through and scare the horses back to the Labour Kraal.
So, should we be alarmed about National's policy to promote PPPs and tolling and increasing government debt? Or should we be alarmed that it is Labour's policy to promote PPPs, tolling and that they just blew the surplus?
posted by Tim Selwyn @ 9:39 am
3 comments
3 Comments:
Just a comment on the tolling of roads.What is wrong with it? If you don't wont to pay then don't use it as they always have an alternative route.I have seen how road tolls work in Queensland and they don't seem to grizzle because look at the state of their tolled roads.Tolls helped pay for the 5 laned M1 from Brisbane to the Gold Coast and what a magnificant motorway and all the other tolled roads quality make ours look like backblock farm tracks, and if you don't want to pay tolls over their you just use the non tolled roads that go to the same place be it slightly later.
Cullen has left the Crown in a cosy fiscal position
No he has not.
What have we got after a decade of fabulous growth? A country still living in the 1950's.
From what I've read, New Zealand has a problem (getting worse) with productivity; we are not very productive. I see two main ways to increase productivity: either work more or work more efficiently (working smarter). Thanks to Working for Families and similar income redistribution rubbish, there's now a significant disincentive to working more. My next-door neighbour is a case in point - a boilermaker who simply can't be bothered doing overtime any more because it cuts into his several-hundred-dollars-a-week subsidy from WFF. Working smarter is a whole different problem which involves better education and higher skill levels. Employers don't know what NCEA actually *means* in terms of a prospective employee's suitability for a job, so now we're screwed on both counts.
In a period of unprecedented good economic times, we've hamstrung ourselves with benefits for the middle class and an education system with no meaningful assessment or measurement of achievement. Get rid of WFF and institute some real learning standards again (including the possibility of failure) and maybe we'll then be able to see where we are going.
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