Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

PROMISES, PROMISES

As I write these words we have a general election looming. And when a general election is looming, all political parties start making promises to the electorate. Te Parti Maori, New Zealand First, Act, Greens, Labour, National – all of them are telling listeners, readers and viewers what wonderful things they will do for us. Even tiny fringe groups try having their say – the Freedoms Party (Brian Tamaki’s lot) and TOP (too nebulous to even categorise).

As the promises keep rolling in, my gorge rises. It is, as always, a lolly scramble. It reveals the very worst and narcissistic side of every candidate. Those candidates with the money behind them (always from the bigger parties) rush to pose for the TV lenses with factory workers, farmers, nurses, businesspeople, shopkeepers, random people in the street – all the while trying to present themselves as plain folks who are just concerned for plain folks. Why, for the cameras they even eat sausage rolls or share yoghurt with schoolchildren! One major party announces its economic plans and its proposed budget. The other major party denounces it, tears it apart, and proposes its own economic plans and budget. There follows a tit-for-tat to no particular purpose.

Let’s narrow it down to this country’s two major parties. The National Party knows that being tough on crime is always something that appeals to a large part of the electorate. So they go hard on crime in all their propaganda. Labour, which has now been in office for two terms, has tended to downplay the issue of crime or claim that it’s just “fear mongering” and the statistics are exaggerated. But suddenly Labour announces a plan to recruit and put on the streets more police. Or (note I’m being impartial here folks) Labour announces plans for reforming parts of our education system – especially at the primary and secondary levels. So National suddenly announces its plan to reform the way reading is taught in junior classes.

See what I mean by tit-for-tat?

Quite apart from this, there are two issues that are rarely discussed openly. Any party that is already in office should be very cautious in electoral campaigning. After all, a party in office has already had time to activate policies. If the party suddenly starts touting new policies as an election is nearing, the obvious question is “Why did you suddenly think up these policies when you already had three [or six] years to announce them?” The onus will always be on the party in office to prove that it is not simply bribing voters.

Second problem is this. No government really owns money. Money that can be allocated by the government is money that has been raised in taxes. In other words, it is the public whose money is being spent. This is true even of money which a government has acquired as a loan from an international fund – ultimately it is the public [taxes] that has to pay back such loans. So when, leading up to an election, a party announces some attractive policy, it is usually failing to explain what taxes would be needed to implement the policy. 

Case in point: A party suggests that dental care will be free for all up to the age of 30. Now do you think dentists will say “Jolly good. We’ll do the work for free!”? Nope. It means new taxes - and plenty of them - will have to be devised to compensate [or pay] dentists. And if there isn’t enough in the [publicly-paid] kitty to cover this, then either new taxes will have to be raised or other taxes will have to be curtailed – meaning that some other existing policy will have to be underfunded. Again showing I'm strictly not partisan in this, I note another party imagines it will conjure up money by allowing foreigners to buy houses in New Zealand, and then tax the buyers. What this obviously means is the the price of houses (already vastly inflated) will shoot up even further, making houses more unaffordable to New Zealanders than they already are - and the harvest brought by taxing foreign buyers will not cover the expense the policy will cost.

Ideally, every political party should, by law, have to explain in detail, in their canvassing, how much each policy will cost in terms of taxation. But for some strange reason, no political party will ever embrace such a policy.