The Spinoff: Public-sector leakers are playing a dangerous game

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When a Cabinet paper about foreign housing investors became at least the fifth major document to be leaked since Christopher Luxon took office, Kieran McAnulty saw an opportunity for a gag. “I walk my greyhound twice a day and she has less leaks than this government,” Labour’s housing spokesperson told Newshub – leaving thousands of viewers to add a mental “boom – tish”, while others fumed about the death of the distinction between “less” and “fewer”. 

This is, however, a serious issue. As Newshub’s Jenna Lynch pointed out, leaks of Cabinet papers – highly sensitive proposals being placed in front of the nation’s ultimate decision-makers – have generally been “incredibly rare”. But alongside the foreign housing paper, this government has already seen the leaking of David Seymour’s proposed Treaty “principles” and advice about the repeal of Fair Pay Agreements, among other documents.

Is it wise for public servants – by far the most likely culprits in each case – to act in this way? As a journalist, I know leaks can be vital – and valid. Time and again, politicians and state bodies embark on morally dubious courses of action. And it is not always realistic to expect public servants to resolve issues internally. Confronting one’s superiors is often, as the phrase has it, a career-limiting move. And sometimes principled objections are simply brushed aside.

Leaking assumes particular importance in contentious cases where there is no prospect of timely disclosure of the relevant information. Take Guyon Espiner’s revelation that associate health minister Casey Costello had asked for advice on freezing tobacco taxes, a story based on documents RNZ had “seen” thanks to persons unknown. Because Official Information Act (OIA) requests for policies under active consideration are almost always refused, it is hard to see how else this information could have been made public. 

But given the extraordinary nature of the story – a health minister advocating policies likely to damage health – disclosure was clearly in the public interest. The story revealed a senior minister repeating corporate propaganda about cigarette companies being “on their knees” and nicotine posing no greater problem than caffeine. It exposed the fact that misleading the public is not, under this government, a sackable offence. And it may have helped strengthen Luxon’s resolve not to freeze tobacco excise. (In her defence, Costello did ultimately recommend a continued increase, at least for this year.)

But not all leaks are so valuable. The leaked advice that repealing Fair Pay Agreements would harm vulnerable workers was, frankly, unsurprising: anyone paying attention already knew those were precisely the people the agreements were designed to help. And the documents were likely to emerge eventually. Since the government was never going to abandon the repeal, the leak served no purpose.

Indeed it could, as part of a wider trend, cause real damage. Of course confidential documents emerge under all administrations; in opposition, National’s Nicola Willis got wind of Labour’s plan to remove GST from fruit and vegetables and – to a more limited extent – the Treasury’s research into wealth taxes. But the leaks are now starting to become torrential.

Ever since the National-led coalition won power, rightwing commentators have been warning of a conspiracy by public servants – sometimes in cahoots with the “leftwing” media – to obstruct Luxon’s plans. Commentators have even begun talking about “the Blob”, a conspiracy theory borrowed from Britain’s Tories, who conjure feverish images of an amorphous network of public servants and journalists blocking their every move.

There is little truth to this, here as elsewhere. Public agencies can, and do, abuse their control over information to “go slow” on ministerial projects – but they are just as likely to do this to leftwing politicians as rightwing ones. The New Zealand Transport Agency under Julie Anne Genter is, reportedly, one of the totemic examples.

If unjustified leaks continue, though, the conspiracy theories will take on the sheen of truth. And the consequences of diminished ministerial trust in the public service could be severe. 

This government already has a low-level dislike, sometimes veering into contempt, for public servants. (If you don’t believe me, just listen to Chris Bishop on the subject of Kāinga Ora officials.) Should ministers start to feel, with some justification, that they cannot trust public servants with confidential information, they will hold their plans and information ever-tighter, diminishing scrutiny and leading to more sub-par policies. Or they may seek counsel elsewhere, effectively privatising advice. An oppositional relationship with civil servants will be cemented, leading to further moves to diminish the public service and bulldoze through policies against agencies’ advice.

A public-sector leak should be a last resort, employed only when it is absolutely justifiable in ethical terms and there is no other prospect of the information becoming public. Most Cabinet papers, after all, are released once they have been approved and have thus made the shift from proposal into firm policy. (In very few countries does this happen, incidentally.) In the same way, many documents eventually fall under the ambit of the OIA. Which opens up the safe, time-honoured and legitimate method of getting state information into the public domain: quietly telling a journalist which documents to request.

The Post: Employment law changes all about who is in control

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Does this government seek the “contractorisation” of the workforce? That question has been posed to me, post-election, by people alarmed at what might happen to employment rights under the new workplace relations minister, ACT’s Brooke Van Velden.

Putting a libertarian in charge of dealing with trade unions is, of course, mildly provocative. And there’s no doubt that times will get tougher for working people.

Fair Pay Agreements, which would have boosted wages and conditions in poorly paid industries, have been scrapped. A below-inflation minimum-wage increase leaves the poorest workers going backwards.

And large employers will soon be able to sack staff without justification in their first 90 days on the job, even though a 2016 Treasury report on this practice found it doesn’t significantly increases hiring rates, but does ensure “many employees face… increased uncertainty about their job security for three months after being hired”.

New Zealand’s ‘Shaky Isles’ nickname, in other words, applies not just to geography but, increasingly, to employment rights.

For decades now, firms have been making their employees redundant and replacing them with contractors. Last week NZ Post reportedly sought to join the trend.

The attraction, for employers, is that contractors aren’t entitled to four weeks’ paid holiday, 10 days’ sick leave or KiwiSaver contributions. They don’t get minimum wages or protection against dismissal; they can’t bargain collectively for a fair slice of firm revenue.

Conservatives like to paint all this in the glowing light of ‘flexibility’, arguing it gives workers greater freedom. But that paint is whitewash. Sure, there is ‘flexible’ working for highly paid, highly skilled contractors who choose that life. But that has nothing to do with badly paid, badly treated workers who have had a sham form of contracting imposed upon them.

The genuine contractors are those who decide who they work for, and how they work; they determine the profits they make and the risks they take. When, by contrast, a firm dictates all or much of the above, the ‘contractor’ is just a disguised employee.

As with many things in life, it’s all about control – and those who have little control suffer. One in three workers, the Council of Trade Unions estimated in 2013, has a precarious job.

Precarity may now spread further – if the government can get its plans straight. The National-ACT coalition agreement promises to “maintain the status quo” that people who have signed a piece of paper saying they are a contractor cannot then challenge that document in court.

Embarrassingly for the government, this is the exact opposite of the status quo. Currently, people can challenge such a declaration. And it’s vital they can do so.

Individuals desperate for work, who are at their most vulnerable, can readily be coerced into saying they’re contractors, even if they’re really employees. So employment legislation, like some other laws, assumes that certain rights are ‘un-waivable’: they cannot be signed away.

In response to The Post’s questions, Van Velden wouldn’t say how the coalition agreement got things so badly wrong, nor what the government actually intends.

But she’s obviously exercised by court cases like that brought by Uber drivers, who – quite reasonably, and like their colleagues overseas – are arguing that because the rideshare firm essentially controls their pay and the conditions under which they work, they are not contractors but employees. The drivers won the first round of their case, which faces an appeal by Uber next month.

Van Velden laments the “uncertainty” this creates for employers. But the solution she clearly has in mind – to take away the right to challenge one’s employment status – would create certainty for corporations only by removing it from workers.

It would evoke John Key’s infamous ‘Hobbit law’, which let Warner Bros dictate New Zealand legislation and prevent film workers from doing what the Uber drivers have just done. Even partners at law firm Buddle Finlay, hardly militant trade unionists, argue such moves would expose more people to exploitation. And with no minimum wage to prop them up, lower-end pay rates would fall.

All this is, admittedly, a complex area: not everything about Uber drivers, for instance, fits the classic profile of an employee. But the previous government was at least trying to create certainty the right way: by protecting the most vulnerable.

With the support of Business NZ, ministers had floated various ideas: for instance, a court determination that one worker was an employee could be applied to all their equivalent co-workers, ensuring rapid and widespread justice.

Chris Hipkins, however, fed those ideas into last March’s now-notorious ‘policy bonfire’, preventing Labour from setting the agenda on precarious work. ACT is now filling the resultant void. Only up to a point: whatever libertarians outriders might wish, full-scale “contractorisation” isn’t yet on the agenda. But the direction of travel is clear.

The Post: Backdowns on smokefree rules suggest tobacco lobbyists are in the House

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It is not an ideal start to one’s ministerial career to have misled the media. Yet that seems to be the situation in which the associate health minister, Casey Costello, finds herself.

Interviewed this week by RNZ’s Guyon Espiner, the New Zealand First MP denied having “sought advice on”, or even discussed, the idea of a freeze on tobacco taxes. Yet Ministry of Health documents show she “proposed … to freeze the excise on smoked tobacco for three years”. And when asked last year whether she would like advice on such a proposal, Costello signed off on a document with “yes” circled in response.

Quite apart from this apparent contradiction, freezing tobacco taxes would be an appalling policy: even as the price of staple foods rises rapidly, the Government would be taking steps to make tobacco more attractive relative to milk, bread and other basics.

Yes, tobacco excise helps empty the wallets of poor, addicted smokers. But the “weight of evidence”, according to Ernst & Young research, is that price rises are “the single most effective tool for reducing tobacco use”. The financial toll on the remaining smokers is surely best reduced by quit-smoking programmes, not continued addiction.

Costello’s move comes on the back of the extraordinary reversal of the last government’s smokefree plan, a move seemingly guaranteed to ensure that under National more people will die from smoking than they would have under Labour.

Ministers are apparently bemused by their hostile media coverage, privately bemoaning the lack of any “honeymoon” period. But much of the negative reporting simply echoes public shock at the smokefree reversal.

Although technically a NZ First manifesto pledge, it was not actively campaigned on by any party; indeed, National’s Shane Reti had promised to keep core parts of the smokefree legislation.

Commentators are also naturally asking how ACT and NZ First became so ardently opposed to legislation that would have saved thousands of lives and billions of dollars. Claims that it would have triggered a massive surge in black-market cigarettes, quite apart from not being a knockdown argument, appear unsupported by evidence, unless you count tobacco-industry-funded research as “evidence”.

While we will never know exactly what or who influenced David Seymour and Winston Peters, we do know that two former high-ranking NZ First officials, David Broome and Apirana Dawson, now work for tobacco giant Philip Morris. We know that Shane Jones invited Dawson to the Government’s swearing-in ceremony, and “took soundings” from him when developing policy.

We know that Costello used to chair the Taxpayers’ Union, a lobby group that has taken vehemently pro-tobacco-industry positions without disclosing that it receives money from British American Tobacco, one of the worst of the merchants of death.

We know also that another influential right-wing group, the New Zealand Initiative, is financially backed by British American Tobacco and Imperial Brands, which sells – ironically – “Winston” cigarettes.

So there are clear grounds for being concerned about the tobacco industry’s influence on current politics – and good reasons to reform our transparency laws so we can see whether tobacco firms, and indeed others, are lobbying government.

In New Zealand, lobbying is an entirely unregulated industry, despite its immense proximity to power. Aside from the publication of a few ministerial meetings, and some heroic reporting, we have no clear idea who is influencing whom.

Most developed countries have started letting sunlight into these closed rooms, requiring lobbyists to disclose contacts with decision-makers. Not New Zealand, though. We also lack a mandatory code of conduct for lobbyists and a ban on former ministers going straight into lobbying, as Labour’s Kris Faafoi notoriously did.

Indeed the issue caused Labour such trouble – especially following Espiner’s reporting last year– that it launched a wide-ranging review of our lobbying regulations, or rather their absence.

In opposition, National appeared to back a mandatory code of conduct, while advocating a one-year stand-down period for ministers before they can lobby and “a transparent, publicly accountable register of who's doing the lobbying and who they're lobbying for”, as Nicola Willis put it.

Has their resolve held? In a letter this week to Health Coalition Aotearoa, justice minister Paul Goldsmith said officials were still working on a code of conduct for lobbyists, but only a voluntary one. And the wider review of lobbying regulation was just “one of many priorities the Government must consider, and specifically in the Justice portfolio where it has a heavy work programme”, he added.

Such language often presages abandonment – but absolutely should not in this instance. It is vital to a democracy’s health that citizens can see who is influencing whom, so that pressure is brought to bear on ministers to hear from a broad and equitable range of voices, not just those of the powerful.

Labour had enough problems with its integrity. It would be a terrible shame if the new Government failed at the first chance to prove its own.

The Post: Innovative, technologically savvy – not words you’d normally associate with councils

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For Nat Fraser, a vision-impaired resident of the Tawa hills, getting the groceries home used to be a tricky business. Living well away from conventional bus routes, she struggled with the long uphill walk home laden with shopping bags.

“I still need to have one hand using my cane,” she says – so carrying the shopping in the other created a safety hazard. “I don’t like not having one hand free. Then if I trip up, I haven’t got anything to save myself.” Her limited budget, meanwhile, largely ruled out taxi use.

Then, in May 2022, came Tawa’s trial of “on-demand” public transport: five 14-seater minivans that don’t follow fixed routes but can be hailed, using an app, from 600-odd locations around the suburb. Rides are a flat-rate $2.50.

I tested the service myself a few weeks back, in the company of Greater Wellington Regional Councillor Thomas Nash. Having caught the train to Tawa, we downloaded the app, requested a ride, and waited a few minutes for a minivan to hove into view. “It’s a big Uber, basically,” Nash said cheerfully as we climbed on board.

The comparison is inexact but telling, because – love it or loathe it – Uber is widely held to be everything governments are not: innovative, disruptive, technologically savvy. We typically think of the state as slow, out of touch, unable to deliver anything except bog-standard, mass-manufactured services – like conventional public transport.

The Tawa on-demand trial, however, tells a different story. Like any innovator, the regional council had spotted a problem. While standard bus routes served many Tawa residents well, other homes were as much as 25 minutes’ walk from a stop.

The suburb’s steep hills often made walking and cycling impractical. And, in the absence of public transport for the “last mile“ between the train station and home, some residents were driving the whole way into town, worsening congestion and emissions.

But cost and geography – Tawa’s winding roads can defeat standard-length buses – made adding normal bus routes infeasible. So the regional council turned to the on-demand services increasingly used by public bodies the world over.

The results, according to a council paper from June last year, were impressive. Patronage rose from 500 trips in the first month to 5500 a year later. Customer satisfaction was 96%, and surveys suggested almost two-thirds of users would otherwise have travelled by car.

When Nash and I did our test run, we were the only people in the minivan, but the regional council says just under half of all on-demand trips involve multiple passengers – and thus genuinely look like a public-transport service, or perhaps an Uber Share, rather than just a cheaper taxi.

Like all innovations, the on-demand service has thrown up surprises. Commuters, expected to make up the majority of users, in fact hail just one-third of all rides.

Other major patrons include schoolkids and – more strikingly – the socially isolated. During lunch at the Tawa café where the minivan deposited us, Nash told me most users “are actually older people and people who otherwise would have struggled to get around”.

They may not be able to drive, or cannot afford to, or cannot physically manage the walk to a bus stop. Nash had heard “really touching stories” of people who wouldn’t otherwise leave the house “being way more socially active” thanks to the service.

Given the immense social cost of loneliness, which can be as bad for your health as smoking, this is good news not just for the individuals concerned but also the public purse – and society as a whole. “Public transport shouldn’t just be about people who work Monday to Friday going to their jobs,” Nash said. “It should be about connecting people.”

It’s not cheap, of course: the on-demand service costs $12-$13 per trip, as opposed to $9.90 for standard bus trips. But the regional council hopes to bring that figure down.

Delighted by the trial’s results, the council has extended the service for another year, and rolled it out to parts of Porirua. A “game-changer”, Nash added, is that Labour, before it lost power, made on-demand services eligible for the same central-government subsidies as conventional buses.

The service will have to keep evolving: I was told, anecdotally, that the app doesn’t perfectly fit together the jigsaw puzzle of multiple journey requests, and sometimes drivers have to override it to make sure everyone gets to their destination in time.

But innovation is almost always incremental. Users like Nat Fraser say they “just love” the service. And it’s a signpost towards a world where public bodies rapidly innovate, and, far from being helplessly buffetted by global forces or retreating to conventional answers, they find new ways to solve the public problems that life constantly throws at us.

The Post: How we progress by reaction and counter-reaction

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As the year turns, my thoughts turn likewise to the withering appraisal that the poet John Dryden, writing in 1700, delivered on the century that had just passed. “All, all of a piece throughout,” he wrote in The Secular Masque. “Thy wars brought nothing about / Thy lovers were all untrue / Tis well in old age is out / And time to begin a new.”

In a similar vein, few New Zealanders will look back on 2023 with fondness – except perhaps those leading the National Party, for whom the exultation of electoral success may rapidly be eroded by the frustrating grind of actual governance.

National will also find that an unfeasibly large part of 2024 is taken up with an ugly debate about the political importance and meaning of the Treaty of Waitangi/te Tiriti o Waitangi. It is not a debate that I suspect Christopher Luxon really wants, but since he has agreed to support – at least to a first vote – ACT’s bizarre attempt to rewrite the Treaty along libertarian lines, it is a debate he is going to get.

This move, alongside attempts to rewrite legislative references to the Treaty and reverse schools’ guidance on gender and sexuality education, has led some to proclaim this the most right-wing government since the 1990s. But although true, this simply implies that Luxon is more right-wing than John Key – hardly a very high bar.

Luxon’s agenda is also a predictable reaction to recent politics. Governments always push against their predecessors, and Jacinda Ardern’s administration was – in intent if not in delivery – more left-wing than Helen Clark’s one. Recent attempts at co-governance and devolution to Māori, however half-hearted, have surpassed anything Clark initiated; and so the backlash is stronger.

This can make life frightening and unpleasant for Māori, transgender people and others. But it doesn’t have to spell bad news forever.

When negative steps are taken, progressives tend to fear they will be made permanent, as if the immediate past was the peak of a mountain that will never be regained. And some societies do decline, for long periods, if their self-correcting mechanisms are inactive or overridden.

A free and trusted press, for instance, plays a vital role, informing the public and curbing power’s excesses. Societies where the media are either repressed, as in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, or distrusted by half the electorate, as in America, can suffer permanent damage.

More commonly, though, history progresses by reaction and counter-reaction. In 16th-century Europe, the Protestant Reformation challenged a corrupt Catholic Church. This was met by a Counter-Reformation that sometimes took violently negative forms, as with the Spanish Inquisition, but also positive ones, as the church reformed its worst practices.

Backlashes always occur. Indeed when I was at university – a slightly more recent bit of history than the Reformation, even if it seems an eon ago – one of the key political texts was a book by Susan Faludi entitled, quite simply, Backlash, which described the 1980s counter-reaction to the 1970s women’s movement. As Faludi wrote last year, that backlash “has never relented” – but progress can be achieved in spite of it.

Very little of this ebb and flow is easily predicted. Most people have famously limited foresight, largely because they take a single trend and extrapolate it remorselessly forward. Professional futurists, by contrast, provides scenarios in which competing forces vie: a less satisfying, but more accurate, way to think about the years ahead.

The near future may, for the rights of Māori and others, prove to be a step backwards – but also a platform for progress. Opposition to co-governance and Māori political structures may stem partly from racism, but many New Zealanders are simply unsettled by change or unclear on the concepts. This is hardly surprising, given the last government’s notorious reluctance to actually define or defend co-governance.

The upcoming debate will be a chance to explain that ‘by Māori for Māori’ services and structures – in education, healthcare, welfare and elsewhere – are simply the means for an indigenous people to recover the ways of governing themselves that they enjoyed pre-colonisation; that they do not imply ‘segregation’, since there will be countless social spaces in which different ethnicities continue to mix; and that, by allowing Māori to live more authentically and healthily, co-governance and devolved services will create widespread benefits for everyone. Attitudinal surveys, which show New Zealanders becoming more accepting of the Treaty over time, are a solid base on which to build such arguments.

This is not to imply that the coming years will be all sunshine and roses. The nastier side of the New Zealand psyche is no doubt emboldened. But there is also a chance to create, out of the current backwards ebb in politics, a forward-moving flow. The future is never pre-written.

The Post: Time to hold the Government to account for the social costs of its spending decisions

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The problem with left-wing governments, Margaret Thatcher once said, is that they always run out of other people’s money.

What the Iron Lady wouldn’t admit, of course, is that if Labour parties’ budgets get stretched, it’s generally because they’re cleaning up the social and environmental messes left by their conservative predecessors. And that’s something to watch when our new Finance Minister, Nicola Willis, delivers her mini-Budget next week.

One of the most profound problems in New Zealand politics, and one that retards our national progress, is that financial deficits are eminently visible but social and environmental ones are not. If the government spends more than it earns, the result is unambiguous: a single number, universally relevant, written in black and white (and red). It’s easily grasped, as is the consequence of running one such deficit after another. So that’s what we talk about.

Inside government, the same problems apply. To borrow an example from Craig Renney, Grant Robertson’s former right-hand man, the Treasury can tell you, just about down to the last brick, how much it is costing us to build Dunedin Hospital – but not what it cost the city’s health all those years we delayed construction, services worsened, and people sickened and died.

Some social – and environmental – deficits can of course be defined, and have numbers attached to them. But there are thousands of these issues, they are poorly measured, people disagree about which ones matter most, and often – because they affect the most vulnerable – they remain invisible to the median voter.

So they don’t receive the same obssessive attention, inside or outside government, as the need to turn red ink to black. Labour tried, tentatively, to fix this with its wellbeing approach, but got stuck with 100-plus measures of social and environmental failure – too many to ever be tractable.

All this has a troubling consequence: it lets conservative parties off the hook. The last National government ran a tight financial ship, but was permitted to pile up appalling social deficits.

State houses were sold off, allowing the shortfall to rise by another 14,000 homes. Middlemore Hospital had sewage running down the walls. Dirty dairying left the country with sick, algae-ridden rivers and lakes, some of the most polluted waterways in the developed world.

Cold, damp housing filled children’s lungs with respiratory illnesses. Countless social services went unfunded. National’s books were balanced – but on the backs of the poor. And because social and environmental deficits always become financial ones – sick children need costly hospital care, polluted lakes require multi-million-dollar clean-ups – it also bequeathed us a long-term budgetary hole.

That’s not to say that Labour came in and spent every cent wisely. It didn’t. Funding for health and education has doubled, or nearly so, sometimes with little to show for it. Hence a core dilemma of New Zealand politics: the unpalatable choice between a National Party willing to run up social and environmental deficits and a Labour Party with no clear idea how to close them.

But, in Labour’s defence, it did wipe $1.8 billion of district health board deficits. It settled billion-dollar pay-equity claims for health and education workers, and built or bought 13,000 public homes. It doubled capital spending, helping close New Zealand’s colossal infrastructure deficit, and raised beneficiaries’ incomes. Yes, it ran financial deficits post-Covid – but so did National post-GFC.

Next week, Willis will emphasise Labour’s alleged financial woes, but our attention should be on any social and environmental shortfalls she sets in train. To rework Thatcher’s famous line, the problem with conservative governments is that they always run into other people’s misery.

To hold National to account, we will need to continue the project of measuring the wellbeing impacts of every decision – and, as with Dunedin Hospital, non-decision.

Beyond that, we may need to choose, collectively, 10 indicators that matter to us most profoundly – issues where failure cuts deepest and success is most precious – and, by reporting on them repeatedly, give them the same weight as the budgetary numbers.

These 10 targets, spanning – for instance – employment, life expectancy and river quality, could be enshrined in legislation, just like their financial counterparts.

Why 10, specifically? When I posed this question last year to Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, a godfather of wellbeing economics, he said we should pick a handful of measures “that are at the centre of societal debate”.

These issues could be selected via opinion polling, but to get the public’s considered view – what they think after hearing others’ arguments, reflecting, and shifting their position – the task might be best handed to a citizens’ assembly.

A randomly selected group of 100 demographically representative Kiwis – the nation in a room, as it were – could decide on the 10 measures, their work getting updated every few years. And maybe then the shortfalls facing people and planet might get the same attention as the dollar signs.

The Guardian: Labour failed but New Zealand can’t put a wealth tax ‘back in the bottle’

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Licking its wounds from October’s election defeat, the New Zealand Labour party faces an internal struggle over a question that could define its recent past and its future electoral prospects: whether to campaign for a tax on the assets of the country’s wealthiest individuals.

Insiders say party members still feel “anger and disappointment” about the “captain’s call” by leader Chris Hipkins to rule out running on a wealth tax in this year’s election.

At the urging of key Labour ministers, officials had spent nearly a year working on plans for wealth taxes, a policy whose re-emergence on the global scene symbolises a newfound radicalism among leftwing parties.

Until recently, most developed nations have relied on taxing income, including wages, salaries and more irregular forms like capital gains (the profits made on selling assets). But concern about soaring wealth inequalities, and the work of French economist Thomas Piketty, has reignited interest in taxing assets like property and investments.

In the 1980s a dozen European countries had wealth taxes – a small annual levy on the largest fortunes. Today, only Switzerland, Norway and Spain do, alongside a handful of South American nations. France dropped its equivalent several years ago, in favour of a tax on high-value property.

But the idea is attracting renewed interest even in places like the US and Britain. “Wealth taxes have moved from the fringes,” says New Zealand-based tax consultant Terry Baucher. “Piketty has given them a boost … They have come back into vogue.”

The wealth tax contemplated by New Zealand Labour would have required couples to pay an annual levy of 1.5% on any assets they held over a $10m threshold. The estimated $3.8bn in revenue would have funded income-tax cuts for the vast majority of Kiwis. Labour’s potential coalition partners, the Greens and the indigenous-led Te Pāti Māori, ran on similar platforms.

But for Hipkins, known within the party as “Chippy”, the tax lacked popular appeal – “Chippy just didn’t think he could sell it,” one party source says – and he ruled it out in April this year.

This came as a blow to many in the party, including MPs who said on the campaign trail they had “not given up” on a wealth tax.

Nor have party members. Pro-tax reformers are now running for key positions on Labour’s policy council, and seeking to put pressure on the leadership. As one Labour MP puts it: “I think we’ve uncorked something here that can’t be put back in the bottle.”

For them, the policy seems like a slam-dunk. Though hardly anyone would pay the tax, it would generate billions of dollars a year. And in contrast to a capital gains tax (CGT) – something New Zealand also lacks – it would raise revenue instantly, whereas a CGT could take as much as a decade to generate similar sums.

Polls earlier this year showed a majority of Kiwis back a wealth tax. But at the same time, Labour’s pollsters were warning that, in focus group after focus group, support had crumbled because people found the policy hard to grasp and the counter-arguments persuasive.

One person familiar with the findings says: “Leaving aside common mistakes about the way the current tax system works, the moment someone said, ‘What about a farm on the East Coast, what about a tech start-up?’ – or any other scenario they could think of where someone was asset-rich but cash-poor, they started to unload on it [the wealth tax] in a way that was very hard to get them to pedal back from.” By the end of these discussions, very few would support a wealth tax.

An unreleased post-election poll, meanwhile, suggests a wealth tax would have cost the left slightly more votes than it gained. It is, nonetheless, an issue that won’t go away, as Labour – like its global counterparts – seeks to raise revenue for spending pledges without over-burdening standard income taxes.

As one Labour source says: “I can’t see how the party can go to another election without something [on taxing wealth].”

The Post: Watch out for the rise of conservative conspiracy theories

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For a government ostensibly opposed to “cancel culture”, our new political masters sure like cancelling things, don’t they?

Policies to prevent smoking; discounts for cleaner cars; rules to stop renters being arbitrarily evicted: they’re all on National’s chopping block.

The real descent into the culture wars, though, comes with the rapid embrace – by National’s coalition partners and political outriders – of populist conspiracy theories.

The deputy prime minister, Winston Peters, fired the first salvo, claiming media were “bribed” by Labour’s $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund. In the absence of any shred of evidence that the funding biased reporters, this is clearly a conspiracy theory of the most repellent kind.

Which makes it all the more disappointing that our new prime minister, Christopher Luxon, not only failed to refute the allegations but tacitly encouraged them, saying the funding “leads to perceptions of bias” and that it “doesn't really matter” whether the perception is real or not. When your deputy is pushing conspiracy theories, Mr Luxon, the truth does matter.

To make matters worse, Peters is emboldening his conspiratorial base by implying that revised World Health Organisation rules are some kind of threat to New Zealand’s sovereignty. In fact they just streamline action against future pandemics, and are already subject to the “national interest” test he’s blustering about.

But it’s not just Winston. In Wellington, vague claims circulate that all kinds of budgetary problems, hidden by Labour, will come to light with this month’s fiscal update.

By law, though, everything that could have been disclosed was disclosed in September’s pre-election financial statement.

Some items – known technically as fiscal risks – didn’t have specific numbers attached to them, as their costs were either uncertain or commercially sensitive. But these are known unknowns, of the kind declared and bequeathed by every government to its successor, rather than deliberately concealed time-bombs.

More worrying still is the importation of foreign scare stories. Writing in alarmist tones, the right-wing Taxpayers’ Union this week warned supporters that “media and bureaucratic forces” were “already working to undermine the new government”.

The lobby group also suggested that Luxon and co were about to be “ground down” by the “Wellington blob”. A daft but innocuous term, one might think – until one realises it comes straight from the playbook of the UK’s Conservative Party, for whom it denotes a vast, sprawling conspiracy.

In Conservative fantasy-land, every one of their policy disasters – most notably Brexit – is caused not by their own incompetence but by a “Blob” of obstructive public servants who, alongside their media allies, conspire to undermine right-wing plans. The “Blob” is also blamed for somehow terminating the careers of various Conservative politicians.

The name is silly, but its implication serious. This is yet another sally in the populist culture war that paints public servants, academics and journalists as enemies of the people. And it leads to ugly places: the vilification of the judiciary, assaults on human rights law, and, above all, an entirely unfounded impression of some vast and elitist conspiracy thwarting the people’s will.

In the US, predictably, this theory takes ever-more insane forms. Leading right-wingers – among them the Trumpian Congressman J D Vance, author of the bestselling Hillbilly Elegy– claim that American life is controlled by an imaginary nexus of media, academia and bureaucracy known as “the Cathedral”.

In New Zealand such narratives are, thankfully, marginal. But they must be confronted early on, lest they take hold.

Ditto certain policy ideas. Right-wingers have recently begun to suggest that new ministers should be able to immediately dismiss government agencies’ chief executives, lest the latter act as a handbrake on reform.

The fact that this idea is warmly endorsed by New Zealand First’s Shane Jones, a man who dislikes close scrutiny, should be warning enough. Even leaving aside the absence of evidence that chief executives are causing such problems, this plan would be a recipe for politicising the public service and creating a cadre of yes-men and women unwilling to point out flaws in ministers’ plans. Which, ultimately, would lead to weakened policies, money wasted and lives damaged.

The public service is not, of course, perfect, and agencies can certainly go slow on ministerial projects they dislike, repeatedly and spuriously raising the need for “further research”. But these delays affect left-wing ministers as well as right-wing ones.

Focused politicians, in any case, have always been able to push through these minor thickets. If this Government fails, it will do so on its own terms, not because of a vast bureaucratic conspiracy.

Our public sector should undoubtedly become more transparent, and rebuild its hollowed-out capacity, as it seeks to restore public trust. But that is part of a natural process of evolution in the agencies of the state. There is nothing deeply rotten underneath them, no malignant conspiracy, and we should not indulge anyone who suggests there is.

The Spinoff: 12 graphs that show New Zealand isn’t doing as badly as you think

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How would you describe New Zealand right now? According to recent analysis, the nation is either “wet, whiny and inward-looking”  (new prime minister Christopher Luxon), “beautiful but mediocre” (think-tank head Oliver Hartwich), caught in “the Great Centrist Drift” (political writer Danyl Mclauchlan), or, quite simply, “broken” (all commentators everywhere). Welcome to New Zealand in late 2023, political mood: depressed.

It’s not just the commentators: most Kiwis think the country is on the wrong track. Even centre-right voters seem unenthused by a new government that – in essence – won power as the lesser of two evils. On the left, meanwhile, the coolest or most credible political stance has long been one of despair. Savvy-seeming people compete for the most extreme take: inequality “skyrocketing”, the planet “on fire”, the whole situation “f**ked”.

There are many reasons not to be cheerful, especially where the climate is concerned. Yet this attitude can blind us to all the things that are getting better. And when we fail to celebrate our wins, that defective self-knowledge diminishes our sense of our own capacity, shrinks our horizons, inspires defeatism.

Let us consider, then, what might be termed the Upturn: the trends already heading in the right direction, or about to do so.

Greenhouse gas emissions

New Zealand’s carbon emissions are, at long last, falling. We should have celebrated this news, shouted it from the rooftops. Yet it was received with no fanfare – barely even a solitary bugle. So it bears repeating: New Zealand’s carbon emissions are falling.

This is due in part to forces outside our control – full hydro lakes and high petrol prices spring to mind – but also to policies like the clean car discount and the rising carbon price in the Emissions Trading Scheme, as well as renewables generating 90% of electricity for the first time in four decades. The Zero Carbon Act has, more broadly, reframed the debate from “should we do anything about climate change?” to “what should we do about climate change”?

In short, Jacinda Ardern, James Shaw and others have, under pressure from activists, bent the curve. New Zealand has finally begun reducing its contribution to the planet’s over-heating.

Emissions, of course, are still not falling fast enough, farmers seem determined never to pay for their carbon pollution – and any progress could reverse under National. But the EV market, which Labour invigorated, may now have enough momentum to keep growing even without the clean car discount; renewable energy schemes will keep coming online; and the public demand for National to “do something” may be just about sufficient. There is, at least, a base on which campaigners can build.

Child poverty

Next to climate change, economic inequality is one of New Zealand’s gravest challenges. Again, the mood is sombre: just look at the foodbank queues. But while there is undeniable hardship, especially among the very poorest, over the last decade the rates of deprivation have on some measures halved. This is one of the great unacknowledged success stories of New Zealand life, the result of a growing economy and increased employment (under National) and all of the above plus sweeping benefit increases (under Labour).

Will these achievements continue? Again, possibly not, given the new government’s intention to increase benefits much more slowly than the last one did. But Christopher Luxon is rhetorically committed to meeting 2028 targets that would require us to halve child poverty again, reducing it to one of the lowest levels in the world. There is bipartisan support for the goal – and something against which to hold National accountable.

Race relations

The election saw a distasteful rise in anti-Māori rhetoric. But does that reflect a large or permanent tide of hatred? Not necessarily. Two points of data from the New Zealand Election Survey, taken in 2002 and 2020, show that not only is each age cohort becoming more comfortable with the Treaty of Waitangi’s prominence over time, every new cohort starts from a more accepting position than the previous one. Bigotry and an anti-Māori backlash are undeniably present, in the form of Julian Batchelor and others. But such sentiments may not rest on a solid foundation: in the long run, New Zealand appears to be getting less racist.

Smoking rates

In the last decade, smoking rates have halved for nearly every ethnicity: a stunning endorsement of health campaigners’ successes. On the other hand, Māori and Pacific Peoples’ rates remain far higher than those of Pākehā. The rise in vaping, especially among young people, is also troubling. But there is, overall, progress on which the likely new health minister, Shane Reti, can build – and he’s signalled he won’t junk everything in the last government’s plan for a “smoke-free generation”.

Ram raids

Short-term problems are also solvable. At times in the last 12 months ram raids have felt like a never-ending nightmare, the result of a deeply ingrained dysfunction with no apparent fix. But in fact the raids are already well down, thanks in part to “circuit breaker” programmes that give perpetrators same-day, wrap-around social support and boast an 80% success rate in preventing re-offending. It turns out the government can tackle complex issues. It could even learn a lesson here and make these circuit breakers – and programmes like Kotahi te Whakaaro – part of standard practice.

Justice reform

Nor is progress in the criminal justice system limited to the short term. The over-representation of Māori in prisons has long been a stain on the nation’s conscience, and is far from being resolved. But previously unpublished figures, compiled by the statistician Len Cook, show that a young Māori man’s chances of being sentenced to prison have fallen to their lowest level since WWII. This is thanks in part to the gradual turn towards a less punitive system, spurred by the advocacy of reformers like Moana Jackson, and the abolition of things like borstals and boys’ homes, notably cruel forms of detention that once loomed large in the lives of young Māori men.

School attendance

Another issue that bedevilled the last government may finally be turning a corner. Educational attendance plummeted in Covid’s aftermath, as schooling patterns were disrupted and the cost-of-living crisis forced young people into work. Last year, regular student attendance – defined by the Ministry of Education as students being at school at least 90% of the time – fell to just 39.8% in term two, the period when children are most absent due to winter illness.

In term two this year, the rate was 47% – hardly great, but an improvement nonetheless. And the definition of “regular” is stringent: any child who misses six days with a cold fails to make the cut. Including those kids, the attendance rate is three-quarters: again, nowhere near good enough, but less disastrous than sometimes suggested. And National’s intense focus on this issue will, presumably, help get the figures back to something acceptable.

Emergency housing

The families forced by the housing crisis into government-funded motels have seemed a permanent fixture in the nation’s polyvalent woes. But as more social housing has come on stream – some 13,000 places were built or bought under Labour – the numbers have begun to drop. From a peak of 4,911 families in emergency accommodation in December 2021, the tally has fallen to 3,396 in August this year. That is still 3,396 too many – but a reduction of 1,515, or nearly one-third.

Public transport use

The Covid lockdowns piled woe onto public transport systems already seen by some as terminally inadequate. But as the Auckland and Wellington figures demonstrate, patronage is returning to pre-lockdown peaks, and for some modes of transport – the capital’s buses, for instance – has even exceeded its 2020 levels. Both regions have ambitious plans to boost patronage still further. How well that survives the new government’s pro-car orientation remains to be seen. Still: public transport, like nature, seems to be healing itself.

In short

What does this data tell us? Not that all is well. Another story could easily be compiled from graphs that point the other way: school results slipping, vaccination rates declining, suicides remaining stubbornly high. Nor has progress, such as it is, occurred at a speed commensurate with the challenges we confront. In some cases the green shoots, barely above the surface, are tentative, tender, easily harmed.

But if – to use a different metaphor – so many problems have turned, or are turning, a corner, others can too. And these are not minor, over-hyped instances of progress: carbon emissions, child poverty and smoking rates are among the most important issues we face. Other positive trends could also be cited: the predator-free-inspired revival of birdlife, for instance, or the thousands of new nurses recruited to ease the health crisis. The Upturn is far from comprehensive, but it is real.

Nor has social and environmental progress come about through chance or natural forces. It has been won by those who have agitated, argued and fought for a better world. Activists, business leaders, politicians and public servants have shifted the terms of debate, and progress has followed, though more hesitantly and erratically than is ideal. Much good has been achieved in the last decade, across multiple governments. Much more may lie ahead.

The Post: Higher rates for the rich, and other ideas for local govt’s funding crisis

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If our local councils are to repair water pipes, mitigate and adapt to climate change, and generally improve their communities’ quality of life, should that extra cost fall on Remuera or Otara? Khandallah or Kilbirnie? Merivale or Riccarton?

This urgent question confronts a handful of “high-growth” councils, notably those in urban centres facing both increased demands on their infrastructure and a looming financial crisis.

Auckland has just been through a painful round of cuts, Wellington proposes to slash infrastructure spending while hiking rates, and Hutt City warns of budget blowouts. Pressures are acute elsewhere, too.

Conservatives argue they all need to rein in their spending. But although any organisation can trim costs, and learn to avoid white-elephant projects, the problems are not really on the expenses side.

The much-abused cycleways, for instance, actually deliver benefits – lower emissions, healthier people – far in excess of their costs – potentially by a factor of 10, researchers argue.

Blow-outs on big infrastructure projects like Wellington’s Town Hall remain a concern. Better project management is urgently needed – but that, in fairness, is a New Zealand-wide problem.

The real issue is that local councils don’t have the revenue they need to upgrade pipes – forecast to cost $1 billion a year in Wellington alone – and generally support their communities. Under fiscal pressure, Wellington has just ditched a $25 million plan to switch swimming pools to low-emission heating, robbing the future to make ends meet in the present.

The standard local-council solution to these problems is to demand more from the Beehive: a share of GST proceeds, rates paid on central-government buildings, funding for new pipes.

But while these requests are understandable, they really just shuffle revenue from one part of the state to the other, without expanding its ability to provide the public goods on which our shared prosperity rests.

In my view, councils have a democratic mandate to seek innovative revenue-raising powers. In Wellington’s recent citizens’ assembly, for instance, a representative group of 40 ordinary residents urged the council to petition the Beehive for new funding tools.

After all, local councils, according to Statistics New Zealand, generate a tiny amount of revenue – just 2% of GDP, the same figure as in 1920. And rates make up a higher proportion of their income than in any comparable country, Local Government New Zealand says.

This could be augmented with tools like a “value uplift” levy, effectively an extra tax on residents when new infrastructure – better roads, parks, other amenities – boosts the worth of their property. Councils could, as Wellington is currently considering, also tax unused land at higher rates, discouraging land-banking.

I would propose two further ideas that challenge the current financial orthodoxy.

The first would be to levy rates at a higher percentage on wealthier properties. This would imitate income taxes, where there is widespread support for a “progressive” approach: as someone earns more, the amount they pay on each extra dollar rises from 10.5% to as high as 39%.

A core concept here is ability to pay. Flat-rate income taxes don’t work: a 25% levy, say, would leave someone on $60,000 with a miserly $45,000 for expenses, whereas someone on $600,000 would still have $450,000 left. The former should (and do) pay less, while only the latter can afford to pay taxes at 39% – or indeed more – to fund public goods.

Yet we do not extend this widely accepted principle to local council rates, which are levied at a flat rate either in dollar terms (a $500 charge for every resident) or in percentage terms (everyone pays 1% of the value of their property).

So my first proposal would be to change the law to allow councils to levy progressive rates, so that those living in Remuera villas and Karori mansions contribute more to the cost of repairing water pipes and fighting climate change. Asset-rich but cash-poor residents could defer paying the rates until they are in a position to do so, as many councils already allow.

My second proposal is that, except in rare circumstances, we stop building new houses by concreting over nature. Not only is greenfield development environmentally damaging, it is for most councils an economic disaster.

While local authorities do get financial “contributions” from developers, this never fully recoups the immense cost of providing new roads, pipes and wiring to greenfield sites. According to economists Sense Partners, each new greenfield dwelling could cost a council thousands of dollars.

By contrast, densification – more homes in city centres – requires very little investment in infrastructure already built to service the massive daytime demands of workers, while vastly expanding the revenue base. The likely several-thousand-dollar net benefit to councils from each high-density dwelling is the exact inverse of the typical greenfield house’s net cost.

Turns out that the smart thing to do socially and environmentally is also the right financial move. Who’d have thought?