Eleven new taxes! Thirty-two tax, levy and cost
increases! Depending on which social media post reaches you
first, New Zealand is apparently being mugged by either the
government we have or the government we might
elect.
Granny went looking for the
receipts.
There are serious questions here. Labour has
announced an expensive programme and should show clearly how
it will be paid for. National and ACT are entitled to
challenge the sums. Equally, the present Government should
be judged on who benefited from its tax and spending
changes, who paid more elsewhere, and whether some apparent
savings merely shifted costs into another column.
But
political accounting becomes rather slippery when every
proposal from a possible support party is called Labour
policy, while every extra dollar collected by the current
Government is dismissed as merely a fee, levy, charge or
inflation adjustment.
Where did National’s eleven
taxes come from?
National’s campaign website lists
eleven supposed taxes: capital gains, a 45 percent top rate,
asset, inheritance, digital, gift, business, rentals, land,
ute and streaming taxes.
The interesting part is the
small label underneath each one. Several belong to the
Greens, Te Pāti Māori or Opportunity—not Labour.
Distrust of possible coalition negotiations may be
politically understandable. But distrust is not evidence
that an unadopted proposal is—or will become—party
policy.
An MP advancing an idea does not automatically
make it adopted party policy either. Parties have processes,
caucus decisions and published manifestos for that. If every
backbench suggestion counted as government policy,
Parliament would need a much larger stationery
cupboard.
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The one clear new Labour tax policy is its
targeted capital gains tax: 28 percent on gains made after 1
July 2027 when residential investment or commercial property
is sold. The family home, farms, KiwiSaver, shares,
businesses, inheritances, gifts and personal belongings are
exempt. Labour says the revenue will be ring-fenced for
health.
That policy deserves scrutiny. So do
Labour’s spending estimates, revenue assumptions and
promise to hold core Crown expenditure and revenue at about
33 percent of GDP. But one announced tax does not become
eleven merely because policies belonging to several parties
have been tipped into the same campaign
wheelbarrow.
Then came the list of
thirty-two
A different list, shared by Labour MP
Ingrid Leary and attributed in the post to Dianne Platt,
counts 32 tax, levy and cost increases under National. It is
not an official Labour policy document, and I have not been
able to identify a public source explaining the compiler’s
method.
The list is not invented from nothing. It
includes real changes: the trustee tax rate, ACC levies,
waste and emergency-service levies, road-user charges,
registration and passport fees, visa and visitor charges,
prescription charges, changes to tertiary support, the end
of the first-home grant and restored interest deductibility
for residential landlords.
But it is not a list of 32
new taxes. It mixes taxes with levies, fees, withdrawn
subsidies, benefit changes, service reductions, mortgage
costs and general inflation. Some changes were scheduled
earlier, some were adjusted with costs, and some affect only
particular users. Calling them all taxes would be no fairer
than National calling every possible coalition-party
proposal a Labour tax.
The meme’s broader point
still matters: households do not experience a special moral
distinction between a tax, a levy and a compulsory charge.
Money leaving the bank account has much the same emotional
texture. The honest description, however, is a list of
government decisions and rising costs—not 32 identical
taxes.
The ledger has two columns
The more
useful question is not who can assemble the longest list. It
is who gained, who lost, and where the costs
went.
National’s personal income-tax threshold
changes gave relief across a wide range of working
households, although the dollar benefit was generally larger
for people earning enough to use all the shifted thresholds.
Lower-income households received less because they paid less
income tax to begin with. Some families also benefited from
changes to tax credits.
Property investors were a
particularly clear beneficiary. The Government restored the
ability to deduct residential-property interest, reaching
100 percent from 1 April 2025, and shortened the bright-line
test. Renters, first-home buyers and people without
investment property did not receive that particular benefit.
Meanwhile, the first-home grant was removed.
At the
other end of the ledger, people who depend heavily on public
services or targeted assistance are more exposed when
programmes, jobs and subsidies are cut. A well-paid
household may pocket a tax reduction and absorb a higher
registration fee. A low-income household may receive a
smaller tax benefit while feeling prescription charges,
transport costs, reduced services and lost employment much
more sharply.
That does not prove every cut was wrong
or every programme should have continued. It does mean the
phrase ‘tax relief’ cannot tell us whether the overall
shuffle was fair.
Some savings simply move the
bill
The repeal of Three Waters is a good example of
why government savings and household savings are not
necessarily the same thing. Water infrastructure still needs
to be repaired and replaced. Returning responsibility to
councils did not make leaking pipes, treatment plants or
borrowing costs disappear. It changed who carries the debt,
raises the revenue and explains the rates bill.
The
same principle applies more broadly. Cut central funding for
a service and the cost may reappear in council rates,
household fees, private insurance, unpaid caring, lost
productivity or a longer hospital queue. The Crown ledger
may improve while the family ledger quietly develops a
limp.
And then there is tobacco
The tobacco
story deserves its own article, but it belongs briefly in
this ledger because it shows how money and public health can
pull in different directions.
The coalition repealed
major parts of the previous smokefree legislation: the
future smoke-free generation, the sharp reduction in tobacco
retailers and the requirement for very-low-nicotine
cigarettes. It also reduced the excise rate on heated
tobacco products. At the same time, it strengthened several
youth-vaping rules, including higher penalties, restrictions
on displays and a ban on disposable vapes.
So this is
not accurately described as the Government simply abandoning
every tobacco control. But it did remove three of the most
substantial anti-smoking measures while giving a tax
concession to heated tobacco products. Any short-term
revenue or commercial calculation should be placed beside
the long-term cost of smoking-related disease, lost work and
premature death. The tobacco industry’s gain does not
remain neatly in the tobacco column.
Inflation
deserves its own column too
Not every increase is a
fresh political choice. Fees, wages, construction, insurance
and imported goods all rise with inflation. Governments
sometimes inherit scheduled levy changes or increase charges
because the underlying service costs more.
But
‘inflation-related’ is an explanation, not an
invisibility cloak. A government promising no new taxes
should still state plainly which fees and levies will rise,
why, and who will feel them most. Likewise, critics should
separate genuine policy increases from general price rises
instead of counting everything that moved upwards as a new
tax.
What happens when a claim is
corrected?
The eleven-tax claim has continued after
Labour publicly disputed it and after reporting identified
that most items were policies of other parties rather than
adopted Labour policy. That raises a question larger than
this particular campaign.
Parliamentary privilege
protects robust political speech for good constitutional
reasons. It should not become a free composting service for
claims that have already been shown to be false or badly
misleading.
If a factual claim is spread prominently
and is independently found to be deliberately false, the
correction should appear with equal prominence—not in
six-point type underneath the parliamentary compost heap.
Newspapers have long understood, at least in principle, that
corrections matter. Political advertising and parliamentary
debate should not be held to a lower moral standard simply
because elections are competitive.
So, who benefits
and who pays?
National can fairly say it reduced
personal income tax and seeks a smaller share of the economy
for government. Labour can fairly argue that public services
and infrastructure support growth and that its tax base
needs additional revenue. Neither side gets a free pass on
arithmetic.
The best educated deduction from the
Government’s reshuffling is that households with steady
taxable earnings benefited from threshold changes; higher
earners who could use every threshold received the full
dollar amount; and residential property investors received
one of the clearest targeted gains. People with very low
incomes received less direct income-tax relief, while people
reliant on public services, training support, first-home
assistance or jobs funded through government contracts were
more vulnerable to the cuts and shifted costs.
That is
not proof of a secret plot to hand everything to the rich.
It is the predictable distributional effect of choosing
broad income-tax relief and property-investor deductions
while reducing or charging more for selected services. We
should be able to describe that effect without turning every
disagreement into either class warfare or a blue-and-red
shouting match.
Eleven taxes? Not as National presents
them. Thirty-two taxes? Not as the circulating list presents
them either.
What we do have is a genuine argument
about the size of government, the tax base, public
investment and who carries the burden. That argument
deserves real figures, adopted policies and equal prominence
for corrections.
Because the question is not simply,
‘Will somebody tax me?’
It is: after all the tax
cuts, levies, fees, deductions, cancelled programmes and
shifted bills have changed columns—who is actually better
off, who has been hurt, and what kind of New Zealand are we
paying for?
Sources checked for this draft
•
National Party —
Labour’s promises do not add up / 11 taxes
•
Labour
Party — Fiscal Strategy
• Labour
Party — Capital Gains Tax policy
• Labour Party —
2026 election policies
• Stuff
— Make it make sense: fact-checking National’s tax
claims
• Inland
Revenue — Interest deductibility on residential
property
• Inland
Revenue — Implementing Budget 2024
initiatives
• Ministry
for Cities, Environment, Regions and Transport — Local
Water Done Well
• Office
of the Auditor-General — Trends in councils’ financial
and infrastructure strategies
• Ministry
of Health — Smokefree coalition commitments and youth
vaping
• Ministry
of Health — Heated tobacco products Cabinet and briefing
material
• Ministry
of Health — Recent changes to Smokefree laws
•
Ministry
of Health — Smokefree Aotearoa 2025 Action
Plan
• Scoop
— Lynne Samkin’s earlier opinion
article
Author bio
Lynne
Samkin is a pensioner, dog breeder and small-farm owner
living in the Tararua district. She holds a Bachelor of
Computing Systems and writes from the perspective of an
ordinary New Zealander interested in how political and
economic decisions are experienced beyond
Wellington.
