Government’s pamphleteer The Spinoff is getting itself excited over Hipkin’s ‘big announcement’ next week, conjecturing on Twitter:
Ardern ruled out a CGT under her leadership. But now Hipkins is in charge, and there's a big announcement coming next week…
Hipkins has proven himself far too wily I think to be announcing a capital gains tax before an election, despite a capital gains tax on overseas shares is probably preferable in these bear share markets over Michael Cullen’s hotch potch Foreign Investment Fund regime, and albeit Spinoff’s wet dream here is for a CGT on property.
We’re in one of the worst property markets for decades, there’s no point scaring the horses with this hoary old chestnut for nil tax take short term, and we have the 10 year brightline anyway, plus, as I will write in my next post, Grant Robertson’s appalling landlord interest deduction limitation rule dooming thousands of lower socioeconomic and beneficiary tenants to emergency housing, a fact which Hipkins will be wanting to deflect attention from: but it’s no surprise to me households in emergency housing has doubled since the phase in started for that fecklessly reckless policy.
I think far more likely in an election year where the only topic the majority of New Zealand is feeling is the stampeding cost of living, will be a universal tax free income threshold. It’s a policy I agree with, and which New Zealand is unusual in not having. Symbolically it’s stating you should be able to feed your own family before being forced through the tax take to feed total strangers. And it’s an easy way to give the low income working poor a great lift up to meet their living budgets, but with it also not being welfare. And a tax cut for all, to boot.
It’s a policy that National and ACT would find hard to attack.