RE: Cost of living crisis, tax relief; Christopher Luxon (Times, March 16).
Will Kiwis, in the grip of a cost of living crisis, learn from the Ukrainian crisis and elect a comedian? [Opposition Leader and Botany MP] Christopher Luxon jests, ”Labour believes they can spend your money better than you can”. An old joke with a new twist: National believes it cannot spend your money better you can.
So, no taxes.
Mr Luxon writes adjusting the tax margins for inflation won’t make anyone rich. No, but it will make the well-off better off and, looking at the numbers, do 2/5 of 5/8 for the low-income earners.
If we want to live in a safe and decent society, we need laws and a framework – the state. That costs money, and more of it as society gets more complex and people demand more.
It stands to reason those who gain the most should pay the most, it’s a much greater adjustment to scurry from a grand house in Orakei to a cave than from an ex-state rental in Otara.
Mr Luxon is focussed solely on winning the next election. He has no responsibilities for the present, expresses no valid concerns where humanity is heading. Thirty years of lies from the fossil fuel industry has left us dependent on some vile regimes, like Saudi Arabia, which recently beheaded 81 people in one day.
It has financed putrid Putin’s unforgivable war in Ukraine. The very worst of human behaviour is invincibly bad and the best is labelled socialism. In the background is a climate crisis, with tipping points seemingly inevitable.
Meanwhile Labour seems intent on losing the next election. No rational, informed person believes Maori myths and knowledge is science, or that Three Waters is “nothing to be scared of”, or co-governance is what the
British government offered in the Treaty of Waitangi, or that separatism will take us where we need to be.
Okay, Mr Luxon is not promising to take NZ back to the 1840s, but his simple ideas chime more with the 1940s than the 2040s, which is when children born today will be voting, and cursing our greed and stupidity.
Dennis Horne
Howick
