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PoliticsJuly 6, 2017

Analysis: contrasting the spending of Key’s National and Clark’s Labour governments

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With the election shaping up to hinge on the question of tax cuts versus spending, economics expert Brian Fallow crunches the numbers.

This story was first published on interest.co.nz

Tax cuts versus spending. The divergent fiscal priorities the two main parties will take to the electorate in September have been on display in the budget and the opposition reaction.

The government has opted to apply the benefits of a period of above-trend real growth, a recovery in inflation and exceptionally favourable terms of trade primarily to boosting households’ disposable incomes, chiefly through adjustments to income tax thresholds.

By April next year we will have had seven and a half years of bracket creep pushing an ever-growing share of household incomes into higher tax brackets. It is hard to quarrel with some unwinding of that passive or stealth tax increase.

The adjustments over-correct the lowest threshold for inflation but fall short of doing so for middle one. It would have had to rise from $48,000 to $53,500 not $52,000. The top threshold, above which sit the one in five taxpayers who contribute 62% of the income tax take, is left unchanged.

And while the budget’s increase in Working for Families tax credits will be helpful in the lower reaches of the income distribution, the abatement rate has also been raised. As a result a household with a sole breadwinner on the average wage and eligible for Working for Families would face an effective marginal tax rate which has risen to 55c in the dollar – or 67c if she is still paying off a student loan. Getting to keep only one in every three extra dollars earned is tough.

Labour’s response has been that all those years of fiscal drag have also been accompanied by a tight-fisted rein on government spending, the cumulative effects of which leave any number of public services seriously underfunded.

Why is the government dishing out $1,000 a year of tax cuts to those on higher incomes, they ask, when people are living in cars, and mental health is in crisis and (insert portfolio issue here)?

The government’s reply invariably takes the form: How can you talk of underfunding when we are spending (insert some nominal aggregate sum projected over the next four years)?

Comparing National and Labour spending records

But, especially at a time when the population is growing rapidly and inflation is no longer AWOL, it is real per capita measures of government spending that are more relevant.

So the time series measurement that tracks spending in real per capita terms, and the shifting shares of spending by the major classifications, which Toby Moore at Victoria University of Wellington and Derek Gill at the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research have compiled, is a valuable contribution to the fiscal debate.

Now that we have had a ninth budget from the current government it is possible to compare its record on this score with that of the previous Labour-led administration.

The difference is stark.

The government’s operating spend in the coming year will be just 0.6% higher in real per capita terms than in the fiscal year just ending. And it will be 3.5% lower than it was in fiscal 2009, the last year of Michael Cullen’s tenure as Finance Minister. That in turn was 24.5% higher than it had been in 2000, before his first Budget.

That point-to-point comparison and the difference between plus 24.5% and minus 3.5% is a bit unfair to National, however. The change of government coincided with the nastiest recession since the 1970s, which boosted welfare spending in Cullen’s last year and meant a correspondingly higher starting point for Bill English.

It also ignores the fact that the peak year for government spending in real per capita terms, and measured against the size of the economy, was the fiscal year 2011 when the Christchurch earthquakes hit an economy in the feeble early stages of recovery.

Looking instead at the average real per capita spending over the terms of the two governments, the VUW/NZIER data indicates a decline of 11.7% between Labour and National.

The declining trend in core Crown expenditure since the 2011 peak, both in real per capita terms and as a share of GDP, is even more stark when you consider that it has coincided with a relentless rise in the share of the budget taken up by New Zealand Superannuation.

In 2009 super accounted for 12% of the budget; in the coming year it will be 17%. In real per capita terms super will cost the taxpayer 35.5% more in fiscal 2018 than it did when National took office, against a comparatively gentle 7.5% increase over Labour’s nine years.

The effect is almost entirely demographic. The entitlement parameters have not changed over the 18 years we are looking at.

For the biggest ticket item, health, the opposite applies. Real per capita health spending next year will be 4.6% higher than in 2009, but that in turn was 26.7% higher than in 2000. At least the health spend has increased in real per capita terms under the present government and held its own as a share of the budget.

Spending on education, by contrast, will be 7.7% lower in real per capita terms in the coming year than it was in 2009. Welfare spending, which peaked in 2010 in real per capita terms as the recession flowed through to the labour market, will have fallen 22.5% by the coming year, the Budget forecasts.

The National government’s aversion to debt continues

The government’s interest bill in real per capita terms continues to fall, too, and in the coming year will be the lowest since 2010. In dollar terms finance costs peaked at $3.8 billion in 2015.

But even with 10-year bond yields trading well below 3% the National government’s aversion to debt prevails. Finance Minister Steven Joyce has emphasised that while the budget forecasts growing surpluses in the operating balance before gains and losses, a jump in capital spending on infrastructure is set to keep net cashflow roughly in balance and the ratio of net debt to growing nominal GDP continuing to decline.

Currently 23% of GDP (when the rich country average is 71%), National’s target is to drive it down to between 10% and 15% of GDP by the middle of the 2020s. Labour and the Greens have set a target of 20% in five years.

The Treasury’s projections, which include National’s planned tax cuts next year, have government revenue wobbling in a narrow range around 30% of GDP over the next 10 years, while spending continues to shrink from 28.8% of GDP now to 27.2% over the next five years. Labour and the Greens envisage a spending limit of 30% of GDP.

So there is some gap between the spending and debt trajectories of National on the one hand and Labour and the Greens on the other.

It will be interesting to see when Labour releases its alternative Budget whether the gap is enough to cover its preference for increased spending without cancelling National’s planned tax cuts, should New Zealanders vote for a change of government.


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National transport 48hours

PoliticsJuly 4, 2017

Argh! National has said so many dumb things about transport and housing in the last 48 hours

National transport 48hours

It’s just been a very bad start to the week from the government when it comes to statements on transport and housing, weeps Hayden Donnell.

National has a long and proud tradition of being wrong about everything when it comes to Auckland. Its ministers have consistently had to be dragged screaming out of the 18th century to back any borderline sensible transport project in the city. Gerry Brownlee spent years angrily weeping at the sound of the words “City Rail Link”. Steven Joyce can’t get to sleep unless he funds at least three economically unfeasible roading projects in Wellsford every afternoon. The party’s approach to housing has been equally stroke-inducing. Nick Smith once said he wants to make Auckland’s houses more affordable without making them cheaper. He refuses to support any of these good ideas:

* A housing warrant of fitness

* A capital gains tax

* Jailing all Boomers

* Regulation to combat negative gearing

But even by those standards, National’s last 48 hours have been discouraging. They began with Joyce, now our finance minister, calling someone a “public transport activist ????” on Twitter.

It’s sad that Joyce still sees paving everything except human skin and golf courses as a mainstream transport philosophy. By now, politicians shouldn’t be looking at advocates for trains, buses, cycleways, and pedestrianised streets like they’re locust-eating radicals. Calling someone a “public transport activist” should be like calling someone a “cheese-loving insurgent” or a “Daily Blog hating revolutionary”. Pro-public transport belief should be seen as normal.

Maybe Joyce has been listening to state propaganda department Mike Hosking. National’s highest-ranked non-MP recently posted a Mike’s Minute where he concludes only 2% of New Zealanders use public transport. “Here’s some truth,” he says. “We don’t like buses. We don’t like public transport. We like cars. And cars need roads.”

There are a few things to note here: Hosking is using nationwide public transport stats. Those include figures for New Zealand’s small towns, where public transport is a choice between catching buses that arrive roughly twice annually or getting a piggyback from Tim Shadbolt.

Comparing that to Auckland is criminal stupidity. It’s like saying London’s Underground is useless because people don’t use enough trams in the outer suburbs of Berwick-upon-Tweed.

But more than that, the reason we seem to like cars, and roads, is because our government is run by people like Joyce and Hosking, who love building roads, and driving cars. When given the opportunity, New Zealanders use public transport. Look at the success of our small concessions to sensible transport planning. The Northern Busway now carries half of all commuters from the North Shore at peak times. Trains are now so packed at rush hour that people are literally fusing together during their journeys. This might sound crazy, but what if our transport choices are in some way a reflection of government’s transport planning priorities?

Anyway, Mike is meant to be an idiot. Simon Bridges is supposed to be smart. He signed the public transport-infused Auckland Transport Alignment Project with outgoing karaoke star Len Brown last year.

But lately he’s been showing signs of strain. It started with a weird performance in Parliament, where he defended the undeniably terrible East-West link by getting extremely petty with Green MP Julie Anne Genter.

Today he talked to the Herald about possible improvements to Auckland’s infrastructure ahead of the America’s Cup in 2021. Could we get rail to the North Shore? Rail to the airport? Literally anything to do with rail? Probably not, said Bridges, but a section of motorway may be widened.

Meanwhile, Nick Smith gave an equally depressing interview to Radio New Zealand. He conceded some vaguely forgivable stuff about affordable housing quotas in Special Housing Areas, then got worked up at Guyon Espiner for asking whether he’d done enough to get affordable houses on the market, arguing convincingly he’s “not a miracle man”. He went on to say he was encouraged that house prices in Auckland had flattened out at a cool median price of $865,000, which is virtually nothing if you compare it to the cost of buying a solid gold Lamborghini or setting up a habitable base on Mars. It was both one of Smith’s better interviews, and a supremely sad reminder of the dire predicament facing everyone in the city earning less than $2333 a week.

Of course none of this matters. National are still polling 3000%. Andrew Little always looks like he’s about to simultaneously give voters a parking ticket and the cane. We’re likely in for at least three more years of slightly backward, and occasionally mind-liquifyingly dumb transport and housing policy. The question is though, why does it have to be like this? Why can’t we have nice things? Why can’t we be like every other functional major city in the world, and base ourselves around dense housing and a decent public transport system? It seems incredibly annoying, but I’m probably being uncharitable. After all there are much bigger crises facing Auckland than just broken transport and housing.


This content is brought to you by LifeDirect by Trade Me, where you’ll find all the top NZ insurers so you can compare deals and buy insurance then and there. You’ll also get 20% cashback when you take a life insurance policy out, so you can spend more time enjoying life and less time worrying about the things that can get in the way.

This election year, support The Spinoff Politics by using LifeDirect for your insurance. See lifedirect.co.nz/life-insurance

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