Cooking Books the Edmonds’ Way

If you think you are about to read about recipes from the latest Edmonds cookbook, you are sadly mistaken. This is not so much about a cookbook as cooking the books. The subject is someone by the name of Edmonds but there the similarities end.

The Edmonds in question is Barbara; the best option Labour has to masquerade as opposition finance minister. To give Barbara her due she does have experience in tax law and tax policy. She studied law at Auckland University and then took a position with Inland Revenue in Wellington doing tax policy.

Edmonds says she was never a fan of tax and that she learned through her law studies that tax was a major factor in the fall of the Roman Empire: it was through over taxation. It is therefore somewhat ironic, in my view, that she joined the Labour Party; the party whose raison d’être is to tax the population, particularly the rich, in as many ways as possible.

Edmonds’ expertise in tax law unfortunately doesn’t extend to her portfolio overall. This was evident recently when she produced a graph purporting to show that, in its second term of office, Labour reduced New Zealand’s debt levels by $31 billion. In nominal terms the graph appeared to show the Labour Government repaid debt faster than any government since 1972 – an extraordinary feat in the midst of a pandemic.

The facts are that during its second term Labour had a smaller tax take and borrowing increased by billions more than Edmonds claimed the government had reduced it by. Finance Minister Nicola Willis said the incident was “either a case of fiscal ignorance or wilful deception”. Edmonds’ reply was to accuse Willis of being desperate to distract from her own mismanagement of the economy.

Labour seized on the fact that Willis had changed the main indicator that shows whether the government is running a surplus or deficit in a way that took ACC out of the equation thereby making the deficit look smaller. They ran ads accusing her of “cooking the books” and “no amount of spin can cover this” was the accompanying text.

In another piece of irony, the error in Edmonds’ chart was a result of Labour’s own book-cooking. This occurred in 2022 when Grant Robertson changed the government’s main debt indicator to include the assets of the Super Fund. Again, this made the debt look smaller.

Labour Party MPs either have short memories or don’t believe the old saying “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” applies to them. Edmonds has since fixed her graph gaffe but the damage has been done. She has cooked her goose in a way you won’t find in the more reputable Edmonds cookbook.

In the role of finance spokesperson, she needs to look at the ingredients that go into making a successful recipe for the economy; otherwise, she might end up with no more than a burnt offering that will not go down well with the public’s appetite.