I’m seething about these tax changes and it’s not just the fact that Labour lied to us; it’s the whole bigger picture and the implications for ordinary New Zealanders.
This Government is attacking middle New Zealand with all these housing initiatives and tax reforms – it’s mums and dads being hit, not property oligarchs. According to February 2021 stats from MBIE, 80% of landlords in New Zealand own just one rental property. And 96% own four or less.
In other words, six out of seven properties are provided by private landlords and NGOs. This begs the question: who is going to provide the houses if landlords give up?
The 96% of the landlords that own four or less properties are hardly rich listers, but they are being treated like economic terrorists and scapegoated for successive governments not solving supply.
Investors are being labelled ‘speculators’, ‘tax cheats’, and are now accused of running potential rent cartels, to name a few recent characterisations in the press and from Labour. Property investors are suffering the most sustained attack by this Government: loss ring-fencing, the cost of Healthy Homes, ridiculous tenancy rules, 60% LVRs, and now interest non-deduction rules and 10-year bright-line rules. Soon to be added, if we read between the lines, are rent controls and removal of interest-only loans. The latter is very serious.
And when investors start to exit the market, which they will, who will provide the housing? The state? That’s called socialism. That’s what that is – the government seeking to centralise and control, and stifle private initiative, stop a middle class trying too hard, and especially stop any one group getting too far ahead. The reward for trying hard, being smart, sacrifice and investment is wealth. This Government calls it a wealth gap, and sees this as a problem, not a means to greater productivity and self-determination. It’s socialism, and envy politics is part and parcel. Turn the poor against the rich, using labels like ‘speculator’ and ‘tax loophole exploiter’.
The solution is to vote against these socialist (but well-meaning) zealots; vote against these ideological academics, that went straight from school to university to politics, and apart from one of them working in a fish and chip shop, none of them have run large businesses and built productive business units in their lives. Yet they are running our country.
Look at how they run the health system for example, and the gaping holes and problems there.
They just want to take from the rich and give to the poor, seek out victims to virtue signal to, hug and apologise to the world. But they don’t know how to consult and facilitate the very clever and efficient private sectors. They are so arrogant, they think they know better; they shoot from the hip with poorly thought-through policy like these tax changes, rather than from informed discussion in select committees and taking advice through community and expert consultation.
Make sure you educate your peers and mates on the utopian problems that come out of Marxism and this socialist government.