MCC Election Debate
This is not a word for word transcription of the event, nor is it an analysis from PPC. These are the overall points discussed, in the words of mostly the MPs and partly of our PPC content contributors to fill in the gaps of transcription. Our contributors have attempted to give each candidate equal and unbiased coverage. The colours allocated to each candidate are indicative of their respective political party. Over the course of the debate, issues and topics were raised by the host, Lloyd Burr. The featured opinion spectrums are subjective placements of the candidates' positions based on what they said during the debate, which can be found here.
Quick Pitch – One minute to introduce yourself & why New Zealand should vote for you
David Seymour: The exact quote from last time. We are a party of social liberalism and tolerance. We are economically liberal. I’m standing up for people of this generation who will eventually pay 33% of your income to tax, 12.5% to student loan, 15% of GST that’s 60% of your income paying for Baby Boomers – I’m standing up for this generation, holding the National Party to account on behalf of the tax-payer.
Jacinda Ardern: A vote for Labour is a vote to change the government and create a Labour Green government and not just for change sake. It’s the kind of change that means you will have cheaper education - three years free tertiary housing; warm dry and affordable rental housing, it means being able to have water that is swimmable, drinkable housing. It means genuine action on climate change and finally having a plan to eradicate child poverty in New Zealand. It’s a vote for change.
Jami-Lee Ross: It’s great to be here representing the government because we are creating more jobs in this economy, the health system’s performing better, more children are getting access to healthcare, in the education system the rates of achievement have increased, we’re spending more on public transport, we’re cleaning up waterways. We’re seeing New Zealand prosper better, we’re one of the fastest growing jobs in the OECD. We’re here to support New Zealander’s, and we’re the only party on this stage that treats all migrants equally as well.
Elliot Ikilei: Coming from a heavy duty youth background – dealing with teen suicide, murder, child molestation. The last three decades have been terrible for our families. The past three decades have seen a weakening of justice, democracy and family. That is what the conservatives stand for, that is what we need to build so that we can have what we used to hold so dear.
Damien Light: We believe that it is the role of government to create an opportunity for everyone to thrive, no matter where they come from and who we are. This should be done by creating a fair economy for all and actually getting things done. United Future has worked with both National and with Labour, we’ll sit down with whoever wins and work out what can actually be done. United Future has been talking about all free tertiary education.
Fletcher Tabuteau: The two main parties have put you in a position where you’re paying for university at exorbitant rates. You’re about to leave university and try and find a place to rent, which is beyond your expectations, and homes that you can’t even dream of affording right now. That’s what New Zealand First wants to stop, it’s about the neo-liberal system that David Seymour represents.
Marama Fox: We believe that equitable outcomes is better than equal opportunity. The disparities have existed pretty much since colonization. It is no surprise to us that 71% of the prison population for youth are Maori, because between the 1950s and 1980s 100 000 Maori children were institutionalized in state care where they were abused - and this government currently refuse to have a Royal Commission of inquiry so that we can fix it, fix it once and fix it well.
Geoff Simmons: The Opportunities party were set up because you guys know the problems you have in New Zealand. We can have affordable housing, a thriving economy providing you with jobs, and an economy that rewards people for doing hard work rather than just sitting on their assets. But every time you go to the politicians and say these are the policies that would achieve that, they say - the Baby Boomers would never vote for that. The Opportunities party is set up to give you guys a fair go, to allow you to achieve, thrive and do the things you want to do in life.
James Shaw: We are in the front of the greatest economic opportunity of a generation. Renewable energy, clean energy and sustainable agriculture. The revolutions of those three areas are not only the solution to climate change, they are also rich in jobs, rich in economic opportunity, science and technology– a vote for the Green party is a vote for that.
Issue 1: Auckland Transport - it’s a disgrace; how do you fix it?
Fletcher Tabuteau: So NZ First has a very comprehensive policy on transport. The solutions do include the city rail link, we’re talking about Auckland to the city as well. You need alternative solutions, you guys are literally living in a carpark. You can’t just build more roads - you’ll just get more cars on the road. It would be nice if you could move quicker into hybrid and electric vehicles as part of the solution, so there’s a lot that needs to be done and it needs to happen now.
Jacinda Ardern: Under the government’s current plan I will be 65 before I can take the train to the airport. 30 years is just not good enough - we have such an infrastructure deficit in Auckland that actually the central government needs to stump up. We want to pitch in for rail from the city to Dominion Road, and that’s the starting point to get us to the airport. Surely we can get this done by 2025. And we should be funding it out of the Land Transport Fund which shouldn’t just be for bloody cars. If we did a cost benefit analysis we would invest more in walking cycling bus and trains.
David Seymour: Jacinda’s absolutely right. There has been chronic long term under investment in infrastructure in Auckland. Government needs to start sharing half the GST on construction costs. This would fund more infrastructure and give the council the incentive to actually consent to some houses. We can argue about what exactly to invest in. The City Rail Link in terms of the total impact is negligible. The other thing that we need to remember is there is enormous technological development happening in Auckland. By the time Jacinda is 65 we will have a lot more ride-sharing, a lot more autonomous vehicles, and the best thing to invest in is rubber on road because it’s more adaptable to technological change.
James Shaw: I have no shame in admitting that the green party are public transport nerds. The more of one type of transport you build, the more people will use it. So the way to do it is to say what is the most efficient way of moving people and freight around the city? And the most efficient way is on rail, especially in a city that is growing and has the density of Auckland. So we need to build those first, take cars off the roads and alleviate congestion. The Waterview Tunnel is going to be congested from day one.
Jami-Lee Ross: The Waterview tunnel is going to improve the situation. Jacinda mentioned the government’s plan which is good because we’re the government that has a plan which is delivering the city rail link, we’re the government that has a plan that is electrify Auckland’s rail, we’re the government that has invested 30% more in public transport, we’re the government that’s seen 30% increase in public transport usage. There’s more money and investment going into public transport. We’re not going to solve it overnight. It’s not just about public transport, it’s about a combination of roads and delivering on that for Aucklanders. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking public transport is going to solve everything.
Marama Fox: Alright so yes we have severely under invested in infrastructure. What I don’t agree with is that Auckland is the only place that has the infrastructure problem. There is a formula the government uses to decide which roads of national priority they should fix. If you live in Ruatoria, and you’ve slowed down to one lane, you’ll know that formula doesn’t help you ever. Those 5000 people in Ruatoria are not going to fit the formula, so their road literally is never going to get fixed. The road slip happened 20 years ago. So after you apply your formula, just please apply some common sense. For infrastructure, but for the whole country.
Damien Light: We need to building rail to the airport soon, we need to be building it now, not in 30 years time, and we need to get that money from somewhere. Central government needs to stump up. Auckland Council needs to get more funds from other places, rates themselves are not sufficient. The CRL is going to take a lot of busses out of the central district. These busses will go to places in Auckland that are not rail served. So the CRL enables more public transport in general.
Elliot Ikilei: We’ve discussed this a lot, but we never actually get to transport. What we wanna do is to build an environment where everyone feels safe on the bus, safe on the trains. The Christmas in the Park drama with ruckus on the trains is unacceptable. The Conservatives want to create an environment where you feel safe on the bus and the trains. You’re not going to get followed, you’re going to be able to go from place to place, and it’s going to be all good.
Geoff Simmons: We need to put money in the most cost effective place. We also need to give Council more options for funding, we’re suggestion congestion charging. Also suggesting putting fringe benefit tax back on car parks in the city. You need to pay it on a bus ticket, but not a carpark - it’s crazy. The last thing is we need incentive to build really good quality medium density developments in the central city so people don’t need to own a car. Our tax plan is about encouraging development in the central city.
Audience Issue: How will your party improve NZ’s overflowing Mental Health system?
Jami-Lee Ross: We need to keep investing more money, and in the health system more generally, and in mental health services as well. It’s also about providing opportunities and assistance to people early on. The government has talked about social investment a lot. That’s about investing early on in people’s lives before they get to a point where they’re in crisis. It’s about more wraparound support for families and young people having difficulty. More money, more support but more importantly, getting in early to people’s lives early on to give them the wraparound support early on. Not being the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.
Jacinda Ardern: We fundamentally need to change the way we deal with mental health services. If someone has a heart attack we treat it as urgent, and yet we treat mental health as expendable. DHB has had 1.8 billion cut out of their services in real terms in eight years. The expendable services are suffering. Our mental health services are our police, not our health systems and that’s wrong. We should start treating it as an absolute priority.
Marama Fox: So we did a thing a few weeks ago called emotional intelligence. If teachers are trained in emotional intelligence, parents are raised with emotional intelligence, then we teach emotional resilience to our young people. We need to work at both ends, at the beginning from birth, and also at the other end. We need an investment right now. When you have women turning up to ED services because they are scared they will not make it through the night without taking their life and are trespassed, then something is wrong. From the bottom up, teach emotional intelligence.
Elliot Ikilei: Three decades of National - Labour policies have removed a lot of the elements that created strong young people. Your generation suffer more dysphorias and disorders than any other. The mental health situation in New Zealand is really bad. Where I come from, you cannot get decent help.
Geoff Simmons: What we propose is reducing the amount of testing so there is more time for emotional intelligence training. We’re proposing halving the superannuation for the richest half of superannuatants and giving families under 200 dollars a week if they’ve got a kid under three and free full time early education. That is the stuff that’s proven to improve mental health long term.
James Shaw: Mental Health services is under a lot of pressure at the moment and also a political football. There should be an inquiry which is independent of political parties so that you can come up with a solution for cross party support. It happened for health in general in the 90s. For students, the rate of mental health pressures has been increasing and part of the reason for that is that you are under increasing pressure around finance. Accommodation allowance hasn’t moved since 2004 - that’s $40. We need to do something to enable students to actually study and relieve some of that stress.
Fletcher Tabuteau: The budget for mental health has been going backwards since National got in, the indications of that are; youth suicide which has gone up. We know what the problem is, we need to put money back into looking after New Zealanders.
Damian Light: Early intervention is absolutely critical. On the other end, people with mental health problems are a high proportion of the prison population, but they have no help reintegrating back into the society. We need to do more work to integrate these people back into the community, and not just left out in the cold.
Issue 2: Housing Affordability - Is generation rent the new normal or is it something that we can get back?
James Shaw: It is entirely possible that young people can own their own homes again in New Zealand. We can get back to a more normal situation, but we do have currently in this country the most unaffordable housing in the entire world, which is absurd. What you will hear is that a solution that is focused on supply, one of the problems is the current government focuses solely on supply side. But we also need to look at the demand side. There has been a fire hose of capital from countries that have experienced, huge quantitative easing, record low interest rates and in some cases corruption. New Zealand is a very safe place to park your cash. You need to manage both supply and demand. It’s actually both, it’s a very complex situation. If anyone says they have a silver bullet to it, they’re lying.
David Seymour: [Can the market fix the housing crisis?] The number of homes produced in New Zealand per capita has halved in the last forty years, even in the so called building boom. You can talk about the demand side all you like, but ultimately you can’t really fix demand. You can talk about tax, but The fact of the matter is if there’s far too many people and not enough homes, putting a 30% capital gains tax means you still make 70 grand a year from speculating. We have to get back to the rate of home building that we know is possible. First of all you’d change the Land Use Planning Rules. The next thing you’ve gotta do is actually fund infrastructure. We should be sharing the GST on construction with the Council, if you did that for Auckland you’d actually fund the transport deficit. The peak of home building in 1974 happened when the average baby boomer was thirty. We should build houses at the same rate that they did.
Jacinda Ardern: [Why did you abolish the Capital Gains Tax?] We’ve already talked about extending the bright lines test, which in effect, the same rule applies. If you’re flicking off a home that’s not your own and you’re doing it in five years, then you should be taxed. We’ve said we do not treat all forms of income in New Zealand fairly. If you own an investment property, you can write off your loss against your income. We need to deal with negative gearing. We need a review of taxation across the board to treat all forms of income fairly. There are things we could do now that could make a difference. If you’re based overseas, and you’re investing in our domestic housing market to make money, that is not okay. I want migrants who live in NZ the same rights of access, and they are suffering the same as everyone else. Equally it’s not fair that we don’t have enough supply, we don’t have enough houses that are for first home buyers. The first labour government did it in scale and we can do it again. At least 10 000 houses per year, and that’s what we’re committed to.
Fletcher Tabuteau: In terms of supply what Seymour failed to mention was that the government was involved. The government needs to get involved in building low value homes again. I wonder what your impression will be on me when I say exactly the same thing that Jacinda just said. Right now you have 20 - 25% of the Auckland market being used as an investment tool by overseas speculators, instead of letting you live in them. One simple solution is taxing those people who are not New Zealand citizens, not living or renting the home - tax the crap out of them, and make them put it back on the market.
Marama Fox: Rent freeze for the time of your lease. If you lease for three years your rent should not go up for three years. We believe that we should have some sort of system where you can capitalise on an accommodation supplement, or an IRR so that you can use that as a deposit to put something on a home If you don’t live here, don’t buy here, if you’re a foreign investor it’s our land and there's not enough of it to go around. If you wanna live, come and build a house. All social housing providers should add to the stock of housing. Housing developers have had to put in everything - roading, lights, footpaths. As a result, there’s negative fiscal motivation to build a house for $300000. So, in those developments there’s not one house under $900000. The only people in this city who are building affordable housing are social housing and iwi. Hello Pt England - that’s a Treaty settlement.
Jamie Lee Ross: The Labour Party talks a big game in building more houses. But when it comes to Pt England, Mt Roskill the Labour party are opposed to it. We’re building 10 000 houses a year in Auckland. We’ve got 10 000 houses a year being built. It’s easy for Fletcher and Jacinda to have a crack at foreigners. Only 4% of houses are purchased by those living offshore not planning on living here. We’re completing 85 000 houses across the country this term of government. We need to get in and support those building the housing, and we need to stop talking about what is actually 4% of the purchasers. We’re putting more money into infrastructure, grants for first home buyers. We have started taxing those that are speculating on property more.
Geoff Simmons: You guys are facing a lifetime where you won’t be able to buy a house. We also have an economy that’s crippled by all of the money that’s going into speculation on housing that business can’t afford to invest to provide you with jobs. We also have this crippling foreign debt that’s putting the entire economy at risk. This is actually really fucking serious. The Opportunities Party is the only party that has a solution to this. We’re talking about a tax on all assets, you look overseas, banning foreigners doesn’t work, capital gains doesn’t work, taxing all assets means 80% of people are better off. It’ll drive investment into the productive economy rather than a speculative economy.
Damien Light (United Future): There’s a lot of bickering but not a lot happening. We’re not building a lot of houses, because they’re landbanking. Landbanking is a big issue. If houses aren’t being built you won’t be able to buy it. We want housing developments to have a certain percentage of affordable housing. We want to create a non political housing summit to investigate the barriers. What do we need to do to remove the barriers so you can build them.
Issue 3: What is your party’s proposed strategy towards mitigating the effects of automation in the workforce?
James Shaw: The number one employment activity of men on Earth is driving cars. We’re quite rapidly eliminating driving as a human activity. This is an enormous churn for the workforce. Ultimately what it means is the end of the employment based economy. Where are we going to get our income, who’s going to buy this shit that robots make? - That’s one of the greatest challenges that we’ve got to face in the coming 15 years.
Jami-Lee Ross: Society adapts and society changes. When the world improves we adapt as a country. The way in which we train people adapts changes and we change as a country as well. We are investing more into science, into technology we are seeing people adapt and move already. We have one of the lowest unemployment rates, that’s going down. And that’s a positive. We need to keep building jobs. Society will improve, society will change, it always has and it always will.
Jacinda Ardern: Andrew Little said it is such a risk that in two decades time, 46% of the jobs that we have now will be completely changed. We need to plan, if you don’t plan people are hurt. The thing that will make the biggest difference hands down is education. We treat education as if there’s an end point to it. We have to treat education as a conveyor belt that people will jump on and off throughout their life. Three years free tertiary was about helping people coming out of school and helping people retrain. We’ve got to rid of National Standards, teaching kids to test and have to change that.
Geoff Simmons: We think we should also get rid of testing at secondary education - NCEA Level 1 and Level 2 and just have one lot in the last year. The major issue is the welfare system. At the moment the welfare system penalises people moving in and out of work. We’re moving towards an economy where people have short bursts of employment. We need to help people move in and out of work. People need not to be stigmatised. An unconditional basic income is the only way to do that, and that is the long term vision for the Opportunities Party so people always have a small amount of money to provide security for them.
Elliot Ikilei: The economy we live under is a fiery economy, finance, assurance, real estate style economy. National and Labour have both failed quite a lot. I support Seymour’s ideas around the charter schools, which are quite flexible in how to build minds. Singapore actually came first in the STEM subjects. We need to take some of that and be hitting our kids with it. Strong powerful education.
Marama Fox: I think we need a collaborative education system that talks to people from the cradle to the grave. We need to have more innovation where Universities work with High Schools, where High Schools students look outside the academic squares. Some of us actually like the trades and the arts. We need to couple that with small to medium size business. Automation is going to happen but we can plan on boutique business, small and medium high end product where we have research and development driving us and coupling that together with collaborative educational networks.
Fletcher Tabuteau: This is a really long term issue. But one of the things that makes me most angry right now is one of our tax rules - if you’ve got more than one job you pay secondary tax even though you’re making hardly any money even with two jobs. The other thing is education is definitely part of the solution. What Seymour an Elliot fail to realise is our public system could be flexible, responsive, could do everything we need it to do except Hekia Parata won’t let them do a thing.
Damien Light: The kind of jobs we’re talking about in ten twenty thirty years time, we don’t even know what they are yet, so we can’t teach you. Yes education is the key but it’s life long education. All of the educational institutes need to work closely with industries to understand where they’re going. We are going to have to adapt. Tertiary education should be free full stop.
Issue 4: Freshwater
Marama Fox: What we currently have is an allocation model of water to anybody who put their hand up first, 60 years ago. It was allocated for about 30 years. That’s corporate welfare. This country spends more on corporate welfare than actual welfare. The corporates then pollute the rives because they don’t care about it and that is welfare fraud, because then we have to spend more taxpayer dollars trying to clean it up. The land literally leeches toxins. Out standard is not swimmable, it’s drinkable.We live by river. All of us hold it sacred. We need to return them to their pristine state and charge the corporate polluters to do so - they did it including your regional and local councils.
Jami-Lee Ross: We are pouring tens of millions of dollars a year to cleaning up freshwater. We’re pouring 100 million dollars into freshwater clean up and it will see results. If you want to talk about water allocation - other parties are talking about charging for water and that’s a legitimate debate to have. But agriculture uses water and wine uses water - they should be honest with New Zealanders and say it’ll more unaffordable for us to trade agriculture and wine products. We’re putting more money into freshwater clean up, we are working to achieve a cleaner New Zealand. Don’t let the other parties say we’ve done nothing.
Fletcher Tabuteau: This is like the housing crisis for the national party. There’s no problem. You can’t just set a higher standard and then change the way we measure it making it easier to reach the standard. As of sending water overseas - NZ First put a piece of legislation in the house, turning water into a commodity under the minerals act, which meant as soon as you export that water you put a tax on it. We just went straight to the heart of the problem New Zealanders are angry about right now - big multinationals coming in and taking our water for free - we can stop it right now.
James Shaw: The companies that take natural gas or petroleum out of the ground pay a royalty. Companies that take water don’t and then they can monetise that. The reason why we have to spend money cleaning our waterways is because we continue to pollute them. The idea that taxpayers have to pay for cleanup costs of another industry is privatising the profit but socialising the cost. That’s why you need to charge for water, you’re internalising the cost. Teaches people to be efficient with their use of the resource, and it internals and external cost.
Elliot Ikilei: Air and water are two vital components of life. Conservatives love life. The idea of water being sold to an entity is despicable to us. We do not say why water should be given. That said, we do understand that farmers do need it, that the steel mill need that water also, so we understand it has to be part of the economy of New Zealand We need to be sure we’re approaching this very carefully - that’s it’s a balance between economic growth and also giving it away.
David Seymour: A lot of this debate is hard. If you want to be a good environmental custodian you have to do good science. Historically, we’ve had a series of different standards for measuring water quality around the country. Nick Smith has been trying to rationalise this into one standard of measurement. Some people complain about this, but we have to do better with this in terms of our debate. If you want to clean up effluent run off and urea you need to have some hard conversation and some hard trade offs. What do you do for the Farmers that are going to be put out of the business - you’ve gotta decide how you’re going to compensate them. If you take a step back and confront how important these trade offs are, the government isn’t doing a bad job.
Geoff Simmons: I just want to challenge the bullshit you’re getting from Act and National. You don't have to trade off the environment and the economy.We need to charge for water and we need to get polluters to pay. We can give the money to people who are doing good stuff, and that will include businesses. Some of the farmers who leech the least are the most profitable. So actually there isn’t a tradeoff, if we give them the right incentives then they actually want to use the nutrients. Giving farmers the right incentive can improve the economy and the environment. We don’t have to have this tradeoff.
Damien Light (United Future): National’s water standard is better than nothing. But it’s needs to be better we need actual proper drinking water. We’re happy to support National’s improvements but it needs to be better.We’ve been campaigning for proper freshwater in lakes for years. The regional councils have to have the ability to charge polluters, and actually make them pay. We also need to be following up and making sure the regional councils are held accountable. We need to resource the people going after polluters.
Jacinda Ardern: We’ve had a policy on the idea of a royalty for water for about six years. Coming back to the water quality issue more generally - yeah absolutely, we should be basing thing on science, but when you look at the standard that we’re about to apply - we’re almost going to ignore nitrate levels and low flow. You could dive into a river and come up covered in slime, and that would be considered swimmable. If we wanna get real we need to look at intensification of farming. It should not just be a committed activity. We have blue baby syndrome in South Canterbury because of this issue - not in our backyard that is unacceptable. Fence intensified dairy areas.
Issue 4: Inequality - How is it that people in this country with jobs are living in cars. How do we fix it and balance the scales.
Marama Fox: This is not a new issue, poverty has been endemic in this country for 175 years. This country is not egalitarian for Maori and Pasifika, ‘cause it’s never been right. It’s been legislated against by the colonial government. Some of those pieces of legislation stayed in place for 100 years. There is intergenerational abuse, failure, incarceration. We have what people like to call unconscious bias. We also have casual racism - that’s the palatable way of calling it institutionalised racism. It exists, it has done so under these governments equally for the last 150 years. Disparity exists whether you like it or not but nobody wants to talk about it because we’re not allowed to be racist towards anybody else except for Maori because we’ve been doing it for 150 years.
David Seymour: I just want to say that inequality is an important problem. You have to look at some data and understand the problem. The fact of the matter is if you go to the household labour force survey, there has been almost no increase of inequality based on spending. What has changed is the percentage of income that the poorest 10% of households spend on housing. Gone from 20% thirty years ago to 50% now. The housing market has fundamentally failed because of the regulatory environment governments’ put on it. In terms of charter schools, we believe in giving you education options because where we are now is not fair. I can introduce you to children who were told that because they were Maori they were going to fail - charter schools address this. We need to fix the housing market and the education market to get a truly equal New Zealand.
James Shaw: I completely agree with David in the sense that the real incomes of the people in the bottom third have gone backwards because the things that they spend money on, particularly housing and utilities, have been increasing much faster than their incomes. The cost of living has gone through the roof. That’s the squeeze. The middle thirty percent, it’s pretty marginal for them as well. The real incomes are getting squeezed, and there’s a new generation of landed gentry. An ownership class is getting all of that wealth, so you’re getting massive wealth concentration. We talk about income inequality, but it’s not it’s between people who earn and people who own, and that is the real inequality within New Zealand.
Jacinda Ardern: We have to start thinking about assets and who holds them and and treating it fairly. Don’t ever believe governments can’t do anything about it. Times when we’ve seen child poverty change; the early 1990s with the black budgets and the second time was when we bought in working for families. We have unfinished business and there are only two parties in parliament committed to working on child poverty and that is Labour and that is the Greens.
Damian Light: Regarding the middle income New Zealanders, housing is a big issue - we need to address that. Education is a big issue. We need to change the way we tax families. Families with children can combine their income for tax purposes. The bill is before parliament. It’s a small law change but it’s going to help families. We need to look after the middle income as well.
Jami-Lee Ross: Inequality in New Zealand in my life-time has grown the most under one term of National and two terms of Labour. Both sides are to blame. The best thing any government can do is to improve the education system. We have seen greater achievement rates in the education system, and then going from the education system to getting a job. People that have jobs are more likely to succeed in life, and they’re more likely to be out of deprivation. That’s the reality. Education and job creation are what we’ve been doing, it’s what we’ve seen results on.
Geoff Simmons: Inequality is actually really bad for growth, that’s the difficult thing that National can’t get their heads around. When you don’t take care of your kids they grow up as burdens rather than productive taxpayers. When you have a taxation system that favours those who sit on assets then again you create that landed gentry. We don’t need another review of the taxation system. We know what the answer is, let’s get on and tax assets and use that money to reduce income tax so that we can actually be rewarded for hard work.
Elliot Ikilei: It is both their faults. Since the 80s that’s what we’ve seen. We’ve seen our families especially in south, east and west auckland, actually starting to suffer immensely. Now we have this new term called the working poor - they wake up every morning knowing that no matter how much they work they’re just coming under the bills that they need to pay. What does that do to the psychology - some terrible things. We know that inequality is coming. We know we need to look at the economics system forced upon us by Labour and refined by National.
Fletcher Tabuteau: Inequality is tearing apart the world. What’s happening is the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. If you take the 50 richest people in the world, they have more money than the poorest 50% combined. It’s holding back growth, our economy, it’s bad for business.
Quickfire Rounds
