Where to from here?

I won a wager yesterday. I had a bet with a friend that the number of new Covid-19 cases in New Zealand would increase from the low of 29 the day before (we had 44 new cases yesterday). These things never plot smooth curves and it was inevitable that there would be some ups and down within the overall trend. However, I remain confident that New Zealand has largely got the spread of this virus under control [update: we are back down to just 29 new cases today], which begs the question, where to from here?

The prime minister appears to have no idea. Jacinda Ardern, at her press conference yesterday, said she will let businesses know the requirements for reopening two days before the Level 4 alert is lifted on 22nd April. It is obvious that Ardern has no experience running a business, because if she had, she would know that many businesses require more than two days to get up and running again - to schedule staff, reorder supplies, restart equipment, confirm orders with customers, arrange deliveries, etc. Not letting businesses know what they will and will not be allowed to do until two days before the lockdown ends adds more uncertainty to already difficult circumstances. The government came up with the impressive-sounding alert levels before we went into lockdown but it is apparent that they still have not developed the detail of what each level means.

The incompetence of this government has been revealed, as if there was any doubt prior, in its confused handling of the pandemic to date. Yesterday the prime minister announced that all international arrivals would be quarantined. Talk about shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted! Why didn't she do this a month ago, or at least at the beginning of the lockdown, rather than now when we've almost contained the virus within the country? It is obviously a knee-jerk reaction to the calls for a border quarantine from the leader of the opposition, Simon Bridges, and his launch of a petition to that effect. It has the appearance of policy-making on the fly and demonstrates a complete lack of forethought.

It is clear that this government does not have, and has never had, a strategy for dealing with Covid-19. It didn't have any objectives for the lockdown (other than the very vague "eliminate") and it appears to have no fixed criteria for how we come out of it. Priorities become obvious when you have a clear strategy and objectives. If the objective was, for example, to keep Covid-19 out of New Zealand, then the first thing you would do is quarantine at the border. The biggest problem of not having a strategy is you don't know whether you're succeeding or failing, and you don't know what to do next. That is why the prime minister is deferring the detail of next stage until it is almost too late - she simply doesn't know. And if you are serious about your strategy you don't prioritise unimportant objectives like vaping regulation in the middle of a pandemic - they simply distract from your primary goal.

The best thing the government can now do is get the hell out of the way. The end of the lockdown provides an opportunity for Jacinda Ardern and her colleagues to pat themselves on the back and say to New Zealanders, "Over to you, now." Let us all get back to our jobs, studies and social lives, and let businesses and other organisations determine how they operate safely, given the relatively modest risks that remain. The authorities should focus on what they should've been focusing on back in February, which is keeping infections out of New Zealand, and tracking and isolating the few cases left within our borders. But I fear our socialist-nationalist-environmentalist government will find that course of action about as appealing as a child sitting on the sidelines of a busy playground.

My Alternative Budget

This past week was Budget Week, when the New Zealand Minister of Finance, Grant Robertson, delivered his first full budget for the new government. It contains billions of dollars in new spending on health, education, welfare and housing, while at the same time maintaining some sanity in terms of containing borrowing and the growth of government spending as a percentage of GDP. Much of the criticism has come from Robertson's side of the political divide, with most saying it did not deliver enough new spending and criticising him for staying with the Budget Responsibility Rules. One so-called journalist dismissed it as 'a triumph of neoliberalism'. The opposition National Party seemed only to join in the dissent of their political opponents with National Party leader Simon Bridges saying Robertson wasn't spending enough.

Given the weaselly lack of opposition and any alternative from the National Party, I thought I would post my alternative budget, which is designed to restore our standard of living to the top echelon of OECD nations. This would be the first step in an ongoing programme of reducing taxation and government spending.

Taxation

Taxation would be 20/20/20/20/12.5, in other words:

• 20% flat rate on salary and wages with the first $20,000 tax free
• 20% on company and trust profits
• GST reduced to 12.5% to offset any regressive effects of the flat rate income tax.

The various initiatives of recent governments that use the tax system as a secondary welfare system, such as Working for Families Tax Credits, would be abolished.

All other excise taxes and duties such as those on petroleum products, alcohol and tobacco would be abolished.

Health, Education and Welfare

Health, education and welfare spending would be capped in absolute terms and gradually reduced by prioritising essential areas of expenditure over the non-essential, e.g. emergency and non-elective surgery over elective. Education would move to a voucher system and all schools would become charter schools, setting their own curriculum and fees. All state welfare benefits would be means-tested and capped in terms of the time people could remain on them. The age of eligibility for state superannuation would be raised gradually and the New Zealand Superannuation Fund would be boosted through the sale of state assets, with the aim of eventually making it (and private pension provisions) self-sufficient.

Housing and Construction

Housing affordability would be addressed by increasing supply through the abolition of the Resource Management Act and simplification of the Building Act. Property and common law rights would be strengthened as would the ability to pursue tortious damages through the courts. Builders would be encouraged to offer lifetime liability insurance with the sale of all new buildings. Growth in the money supply, which is driving house price inflation, would be limited to the rate of productivity growth in the economy.

Energy and the Environment

Restrictions on mining and oil and gas exploration on private land would be removed, and concessions would be granted for more exploration and extraction on public land and in our territorial waters, with he aim of making New Zealand a net exporter of energy. Strengthened property and common law rights, as mentioned above, would become the primary means of protecting the environment.

The Emissions Trading Scheme would be abolished as would the cronyist Provincial Growth Fund.

Transport

Transport would move to be fully user-pays through electronic tolling, distance charging and fares. Publicly owned transport operators such as Kiwirail and Air New Zealand would be fully privatised.

Treaty of Waitangi Claims

The Treaty of Waitangi tribunal and settlements process would be abolished and the law would provide for any outstanding historical claims related to dispossession of Maori land to be pursued through the courts like any other civil case.