Louis Houlbrooke
Communications Officer
New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union
Another busy week fighting for lower taxes, less waste, and more transparency on your behalf.
Revealed: Shane Jones’ hypocrisy over regional Jetstar services
Last month, Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones claimed he was “incredibly disappointed” that Jetstar was cancelling its regional services.
So we wondered what the self-proclaimed “champion of the regions” has done to support those services while crisscrossing the country as Minister for Regional Development, so we asked his office.
Twenty-eight days after our original information request (the maximum time allowed under the Official Information Act), we can now confirm Shane Jones has not flown with Jetstar since he was elected in 2017. It seems the ‘regional champion’ is too good for cattle class.
If politicians insist on using the swanky airline for all their taxpayer-funded travel, they shouldn’t cry crocodile tears when the budget option scales back services.
We’re calling on Shane Jones and all MPs to save money by using Jetstar for travel. The government’s massive travel budget could have quite an impact on Jetstar’s capacity to serve the regions that Mr Jones claims to champion.
Another IT boondoggle…
The government has signed off on a $13 million taxpayer-funded research grant for Te Reo voice recognition technology.
According to the Ministry for Business, Innovation, and Employment, the project is hoped to allow people to ask Siri or Alexa things like how to “find a choice as kai of panipopo”. This will “ensure a New Zealand identity is firmly embedded in the digital world”.
It’s a classic case of taxpayer money being poured into a shiny, fashionable IT project that is a nice-to-have at best. We say these projects should be left to private companies who have an incentive to keep costs under control and develop technology that people will actually use.
Someone on the median wage would have to pay income tax for 1,500 years to cover the cost of this project. We say the money could have been used to provide more much-needed measles vaccines or tax relief.
This is the same “Strategic Science Investment Fund” that last year allocated $5.4 million for research into shoe leather.
The fact Minister Megan Woods is proudly putting out press releases about this kind of corporate welfare leads us to wonder whether she has taxpayers’ interests at heart.
Corporate welfare for Rio Tinto would be disastrous
The previous government’s $30 million bailout for Rio Tinto (the $36 billion corporate that owns the Tiwai Point smelter) was meant to be final. Now the company is angling for another handout.
This would be a disaster for taxpayers. The last thing we need is for international corporates to see New Zealand as a soft touch for corporate welfare. There’s even a risk that companies will make false threats of closure in order to secure taxpayer dosh.
Rather than doing favours for individual companies, the government could make it more affordable for anyone to do business, by cutting regulatory taxes and lowering the company tax rate (which, at 28 percent, is one of the highest in the OECD).
ETS delay is good news
The government has made the right decision by allowing farmers to develop their own emissions pricing system, instead of forcing them into the Emissions Trading Scheme.
Bringing agriculture into the ETS quickly would have punished the economy and hurt farming communities – even while agricultural production shifted offshore, with only a minuscule net impact on global emissions.
Politicians must not allow their desire to combat to develop into an “at all costs” mentality. The government should also continue to monitor developments overseas to ensure climate action isn’t simply pushing domestic farming to other countries.
