Election 2023 - what policies would you like to see?

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Forums › Politics › Election 2023 - what policies would you like to see?

blackjack17

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#298873 23-Jul-2022 15:52

Means testing super.

Too many high income, high asset people are receiving a state benefit which could be spent elsewhere. I work with a number of 65+ people that hare on 6 figures with multiple houses and are drawing full pensions. This is only going to get more unaffordable

Reducing working for families and the accommodation supplement.

It seems mad that people that are in full time work on average salaries are receiving a benefit. Phase it out while bringing in a tax free threshold.

Increase salaries of public servants

Nurses, teachers, fire fighters, doc workers.

Increase public transport usage.

Make public transport a core part of Waka Kotahi's role. Get on with light rail in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, stagger projects so that construction can move from project to project and achieve economies of scale.

Build, develop and fix our health system.

Our hospitals are falling down. A&E visits can take several hours to be seen. Address obesity, ban smoking and the focus on reducing the harms of alcohol.

Address antisocial behaviour.

illegal parking, loudspeakers, noisy cars/motorbikes, littering, graffiti, red light running, cellphones while driving. Make these behaviours unacceptable again, have police be seen and be seen doing things.

Remove tax on fresh foods

Have always been against this one but with the cost of food, I feel it just needs to be done. Could be made cost neutral by increasing taxes on foods that aren't healthy.

Buy back unsustainable land.

Create a fund of say $200 million a year to buy back land that is not sustainable/could have recreational use and put back into DoC estate to be reforested, tracks put in and huts.

Pest control

Double down on pest control. 1080 as far as the eye can see. Predator proof fences where appropriate. Greatly increase DoCs funding

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#2976468 2-Oct-2022 22:05

Things are going to get MUCH worse.

1. The government increased GP funding by less than 2% inspire of everything going up. About 50% of our GPs are within 10 years of retirement, squeeze them financially and they will walk early. New Drs don't want to be GPs, the hours suck, they can't get locums to take holidays, the administration and bureaucracy is getting worse.

2. The government is screwing Tertiary education. Local polytechs no longer teach basic courses for many trades now. Universities are scaling back sciences, high schools teach STEM courses badly. You can also not teach subjects when you don't have staff qualified to teach them. Any one "good" should seriously be looking overseas.

3. The sense of entitlement. Just look at Stuff, almost every week they do an anti-landlord hit piece. You then get the "mob" demanding all rentals be taken off landlords at the point of a gun. The government has responded by making a lot of tax changes to punish landlords . Would I buy any rentals anymore...god no, and to be honest we are looking at selling some and investing it in Australia. If ALL landlords did that there would be about $600 BILLION leaving the economy, ie about 20 years of what the government spends on Health, Welfare, and Education.

4. Removing Tax on fresh food will do ZERO, all of the administrative overheads will quickly absorb any savings. The GST on $40 worth of fresh food is $5.30. Then come all the arguments of what is "fresh", are Salmon steaks fresh ? How about Flour, its not like you have any alternative, What about Frozen foods, they are far cheaper during off peak season than "fresh".

5. Pensions, why should people who have worked hard, paid more tax and continue to work and pay tax not be entitled. All that will happen is that properties will be put into trusts, potentially overseas, and people will continue getting the pension. I have been in some form of paid work since I was 7, so 52 years now and have another 6 to go. Exactly why should I be punished ? You have some families who have been 3 generations on a benefit. If you punish people at the top, the people who actually suffer the most are the people at the bottom. Should the top tax rate increase, sure, should the government limit "licensing fees" as a tax deduction to about 5% so the big internationals pay taxes here in NZ, absolutely.

6. How about limiting family support to ONE child ? It will be kinder to the planet for a start.

7. Have Cats locked up, just like dogs, Yes fence the section so cats can not leave the section, they are predators.

8. Apply "healthy homes" to all homes, just because you own it does not make in any more healthy than if it were rented.

9. Stop letting boy racers off fines. You get caught a 2nd time with unpaid fines the car is automatically taken and sold to pay for the fines.

10. Have a class of drivers licence called "non performance", the power to weight ratio is limited, the car must be unmodified, no "boom box" stereos . Make it illegal to sell or supply vehicles outside of the owners "class" of licence with exception for legitimate businesses (eg trucking firms), no licence, no can own a vehicle.

11. First time prisoners, their sentence should be 1-5 NCEA subjects, or completion of an apprenticeship , do it faster, get out faster, but take away the excuse of "no education" for their crime. Get them drug/alcohol rehab, teach budgeting , gardening, cooking, home maintenance (painting, replacing tap washers, cleaning, etc) and keep them away from long time criminals so they have a chance.

12. At risk family, have social workers pick the kids up for school, get the breakfast at school and lunch, make sure they are properly clothed for school, have "homework clubs" after school so they can get 1 to 1 help.

13 Tax cyclists. No matter how you think it we will always need roads. Feel different, then I hope you never have need of emergency service , nor suffer from a disability. Not sure how tradies and goods and service will work either without roads. After this comes the question of who will pay for the roads, cycle ways, etc etc etc.

14. Tax plastic, if it takes $10 to recycle 1Kg of plastic, then add the plastic tax and then pay for it to be recycled. I just got some vitamin, 30 in a bottle, 90% was empty space, I fitted 240 tablets into one bottle, so 7 bottles out of 8 were not needed, did I have the option of buying in but...no, even though the company greenwashes their products with branding.

15. Want to import trained staff, go for it, the cost is 100% of the cost of training someone locally. Too many employers fail to train anyone, blame the government for staff shortages and then expect to get special exemptions to import labour so they avoid all the training costs.

16. University graduates, for STEM/Medical etc start writing off some of their student debt if they stay in NZ. If they head off overseas by the time they pay off their student debt they have lives overseas and are far less likely to come back and benefit the country that paid 60-70% of their training costs.Same with various Trades, Kiwibuild failed because we have no trades to meet the demand, they had already gone to Australia for better pay and conditions, and then the training facilities had scaled back too so we could not train increased numbers.

17. Minimum % of NZ goods MUST stay in NZ. Indias milk industry is MUCH bigger than NZs, but they only export less than 10%, we export 90%. Keep 85% of dairy in NZ and the prices will drop, same with Timber, Fish, foods, etc etc etc.

18. Stop overseas companies from having more than 49% of any business in NZ. If they want more than 10% then the BUILD the business , add shops, add production, add jobs.

19 Any Patents must remain 100% NZ owned, the company can own them, but they can not be bought by anyone overseas, too much of our tech gets bought out for large sums (for NZ) but peanuts for overseas corporations. Apple computers make more profit per quarter than NZs entire GDP. Covid proved we ned to be more self sufficient than we are.

20 Put money and jobs into the regions, yes I know if you draw a line from New Plymouth to Hastings, about 50% of NZ lives north of that line. Add in Wellington and Christchurch as far as the politicians go the rest of us are not worth much, thats why they have allowed so much industry to migrate to Auckland from the regions, keep Auckland happy, keep being elected. Christchurch proved how vulnerable we could be to a natural disaster, spread the risk.

Thats my start of the list....

GV27

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#2976496 3-Oct-2022 08:30

Oh, this gets hard. So many of mine are just basic "stop leaving stuff on seen" and undoing decades of basic administrative neglect and laziness.

Super is a difficult one. Millennials are now approaching 40, they've already got a couple of decades of work under their belt, they've paid through the nose for tertiary education and housing, had to put off kids and have smaller families and frankly it's getting pretty late in the piece after clearing all that stuff to tell them that they'll also have to totally provide for themselves in retirement (while they spend a decent chunk of taxes underwriting super for everyone older than them). I'd prefer to keep universality but increase the age gradually, and eventually the demographic issue will solve itself.

Tax is easier. I want a government to be compelled by legislation to increase the brackets by the mid-point of the RBNZ PTA window (2%) or actual inflation - whichever is higher - every twelve months. No more leaving the tax brackets fixed for a decade at a time and dining out on the inflation driven component of people's earnings to boost your fiscal chops. It would also give governments a real incentive to get hold of state sector inflation and costs; they can't just keep passing the buck on that and hoping taxpayers keep getting pay rises.

Reform WFF and abolish the Accommodation Supplement: The people best placed to give kids a well-rounded upbringing can't afford to do it and are having fewer kids and the ones who don't care are going to do what they want anyway. It's not fit for purpose anymore and the abatements are punitive, so there's little incentive to work harder to provide more for your family.

Copy the Australian student loan repayment scheme. It's far more sensible than ours, and kicks in at a sensible level (roughly our full-time minimum wage) whereas ours kicks in at half that and at a more aggressive rate. It just sucks.

Remove FBT on Electric Vehicles to drive fleet uptake. Would also be a good get just as the EV utes and other heavy vehicles come onto the market. I'd also give more aggressive EV subsidies to smaller (Class A/B) vehicles than bigger ones.

Extend the ECE Subsidy: Parents have to return to the workplace to make ends meet and keep a roof over their head far earlier than when the ECE subsidy was first created, and it basically hasn't been updated since. Double it, extend it to two years and over. Otherwise you're lumping the people who are trying to work with a daycare cost that people who won't work don't have to pay. There's not a lot of fairness there if you want people to provide for their kids or keep having them.

A population strategy: So we can decide whether planned levels of migration are workable with proposed infrastructure and the likelihood of said infrastructure actually being built. It would also acknowledge that inflating GDP by adding more people doesn't work well if the bulk of them end up in Auckland and rapidly lowering living standards in the city through housing shortages and congestion, but that's out of sight and out of mind for Wellingtonians so we keep getting the short straw. If governments won't deliver on the infrastructure to support planned growth then maybe we can elect ones that will.

The sad thing is none of this is really controversial. It's just decisions that lazy or gun-shy politicians driven by short-term polling won't make because they aren't going to trigger a quick sugar-rush of popular approval. If we'd had a competent civil service and government setting the agenda, this stuff would have happened years ago.

GV27

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#2976548 3-Oct-2022 08:59

sir1963:

6. How about limiting family support to ONE child ? It will be kinder to the planet for a start.

Because the people who actually care about the kids they have will just have less of them and the people who don't care will still not care and keep having kids whether they can provide for them or not. You're not going to achieve anything other than having a higher proportion of kids in households where parenting is a trivial concern.

I'm all for people having fewer kids if they want to but there are huge numbers of good, caring parents who have smaller families for financial reasons like absurd living costs compared to previous generations and it's not really a choice people get to make anymore. But the people you're targeting with that kind of reform will just do what they want anyway. I'd rather give families more support so we have more kids overall but a higher proportion of them in households who might care about them.

If population pressures are an issue, then I see that as a migration policy setting problem, not something we resolve by inflicting higher living costs on capable and loving parents.

sir1963

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#2976559 3-Oct-2022 09:55

Having MORE kids that are uncared for is why we now have Ram Raids.

Take money off beneficiaries, pay their rent directly

Lower the benefits and feed the kids at school so they ARE being fed

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PsychoSmiley

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#2976730 3-Oct-2022 11:37

Dial back restrictions on pseudoephedrine.

ezbee

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#2976840 3-Oct-2022 15:06

Unfortunately, it will probably end up being a fight over tax cuts.

Where we need to strengthen our Health, Education/Career Training, Public Transport,
Infrastructure for a future where importing cheap 'qualified' labour is not so easy.

Global demographic trends, global competition for young is going to get stronger.
If you don't train your own then you end up paying double
in social ambulance at bottom of cliff too.

Those with patience to give young often entitled a chance of training or apprenticeship,
you are doing god's work, and I salute you.
Its tough when they crawl in on Monday morning.

Plus we need to pay for the past pandemic measures, and refill coffers.

See what happened to UK and Liz Truss over her tax cuts, its not pretty.
Even market does not believe this trickle down for once.
Tory MPs threaten rebellion against Liz Truss over mini-budget
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/02/tory-mps-threaten-rebellion-against-liz-truss-over-mini-budget

Nevertheless, I expect a bold tax cutting proposal comming.
It will be the wildest most divisive election for a very long time, strap in !

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cruxis

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#2976877 3-Oct-2022 16:51

Death Tax on everyone born before 1970, To help pay for the covid past measures, as they are the ones who benefited the most from them.

https://news.anz.com/new-zealand/posts/2020/12/Intergenerational-divide

https://www.newsroom.co.nz/ideasroom/we-cant-ask-young-people-to-pay-the-price-alone

Rikkitic

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#2976892 3-Oct-2022 18:08

cruxis:

Death Tax on everyone born before 1970, To help pay for the covid past measures, as they are the ones who benefited the most from them.

Life tax on everyone else. You are using up our resources.

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos

Kyanar

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#2977011 3-Oct-2022 22:23

sir1963:

3. The sense of entitlement. Just look at Stuff, almost every week they do an anti-landlord hit piece. You then get the "mob" demanding all rentals be taken off landlords at the point of a gun. The government has responded by making a lot of tax changes to punish landlords . Would I buy any rentals anymore...god no, and to be honest we are looking at selling some and investing it in Australia. If ALL landlords did that there would be about $600 BILLION leaving the economy, ie about 20 years of what the government spends on Health, Welfare, and Education.

No you aren't, because you can't. Australian residential real estate cannot be purchased by non-residents. You would have to either live here, or build new properties - the problem with which is well known when the construction industry is crying about how unless fixed price contracts are abolished, they're all going under.

But it is comical talking about senses of entitlement with the way you're phrasing your statement. It doesn't make you look good.

Handle9

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#2977018 3-Oct-2022 22:58

Kyanar:
sir1963:

3. The sense of entitlement. Just look at Stuff, almost every week they do an anti-landlord hit piece. You then get the "mob" demanding all rentals be taken off landlords at the point of a gun. The government has responded by making a lot of tax changes to punish landlords . Would I buy any rentals anymore...god no, and to be honest we are looking at selling some and investing it in Australia. If ALL landlords did that there would be about $600 BILLION leaving the economy, ie about 20 years of what the government spends on Health, Welfare, and Education.

No you aren't, because you can't. Australian residential real estate cannot be purchased by non-residents. You would have to either live here, or build new properties - the problem with which is well known when the construction industry is crying about how unless fixed price contracts are abolished, they're all going under.

But it is comical talking about senses of entitlement with the way you're phrasing your statement. It doesn't make you look good.

NZ citizens are exempt from FIRB approval. There’s additional stamp duty for non-residents but it is possible as an NZ citizen.

GV27

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#2977028 4-Oct-2022 06:28

Also, houses don't get knocked down when investors sell them. They either get sold and rented out by someone else or they get bought and someone lives in them.

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sir1963

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#2977032 4-Oct-2022 07:25

Kyanar:

sir1963:

3. The sense of entitlement. Just look at Stuff, almost every week they do an anti-landlord hit piece. You then get the "mob" demanding all rentals be taken off landlords at the point of a gun. The government has responded by making a lot of tax changes to punish landlords . Would I buy any rentals anymore...god no, and to be honest we are looking at selling some and investing it in Australia. If ALL landlords did that there would be about $600 BILLION leaving the economy, ie about 20 years of what the government spends on Health, Welfare, and Education.

No you aren't, because you can't. Australian residential real estate cannot be purchased by non-residents. You would have to either live here, or build new properties - the problem with which is well known when the construction industry is crying about how unless fixed price contracts are abolished, they're all going under.

But it is comical talking about senses of entitlement with the way you're phrasing your statement. It doesn't make you look good.

None of my Tenants pay anywhere close to "market rates", if they did I would be earning an additional 40k or more a year.

You are doing what for others ????

I have been in some form of paid employment since I was 7, so over 50 years now. Why can I not get to enjoy what I have worked for, why can my family not enjoy it too ?

When I got into rentals there was no KiwiSaver. My employer did not double my retirement savings contributions every week, nor did I get tax back from the government for it. I have ben a solo dad, no free child care, no free under 14 doctors visits, most of my wage went of child care because I chose to work. I have a disabled son. If I did not do for myself, no one else was. I have never been on a benefit.

I still study to keep up to date at work, I spend time talking to younger staff about their rights as renters, consumers, etc.

So be very careful about who you call "entitled"

And yes I can buy in surfers, by me turning up a week earlier than my wife and she staying a week after me, we will be in the property more than 6 months so also escape the addition tax we would pay as foreign owners, whilst maintaining our pensions here in NZ.

GV27

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#2977034 4-Oct-2022 07:33

sir1963:

You are doing what for others ????

Owning multiple properties as altruism. NZ in the 20XXs.

sir1963

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#2977088 4-Oct-2022 08:24

GV27:

sir1963:

You are doing what for others ????

Owning multiple properties as altruism. NZ in the 20XXs.

Providing for my family, and not expecting others to do so.

I am also the person who pays above average taxes so people on lower incomes can get money from the tax payer.

I am sure you accept all the benefits you have from the tax payer as "your right" and nto care about who is paying for that for you.

sir1963

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#2977091 4-Oct-2022 08:29

GV27:

Also, houses don't get knocked down when investors sell them. They either get sold and rented out by someone else or they get bought and someone lives in them.

I have seen whole streets demolished , and then 2 unaffordable houses stuck on each section.

And I drive past a lot of others when I go to work, houses demolished, small cramped boxed put in their place. No where for kids to play outdoors and parents wondering why they are on the xbox or what ever all the time.

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