Kyota.

Chelsea Daniels here, host of the Front Page.

We're taking away breakover summer, but to help build the gap, we're re issuing some of our most significant episodes of twenty twenty five on behalf of the Front Page team.

Thanks for listening and we look forward to being back with you On January twelfth, twenty twenty six.

Kyota owned Chelsea Daniels and This is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald.

Should the ultra wealthy pay more tax?

It's a debate that's continued for decades, even centuries, from ancient Athens to present day.

The idea has been a constant when it comes to addressing inequality, yet no government in the last few decades has been brave.

Enough to impose one.

It's a staple of the Green parties prepared posed budget which promises bold moves to make sure everyone has a warm home, decent ki and the care and.

Support for a good life.

But who pays and is leaning even more left than center doing wonders for the party's polling.

Today on the Front Page, Green Party co leader Chloe's Swarbrick is with us to discuss whether it's time for the wealthy to fund the rest of us.

First off, Chloe, your Green's on Tour road show is taking the party's Green budget directly to communities.

What are the most common concerns or questions or stuff raised with you?

People know that the wheels are falling off.

You know, if you diagnose the problem of the world that we're living in today or the country that we're living in today, you know, half a million New Zealanders are using food banks every single month, one hundred and ninety one New Zealanders or leaving the country every single day, and a pharraicle correctly two thirds of them are between the ages of eighteen to forty five.

If Nicola Willis has concerns about the aging population and the challenges that that may face in terms of fiscal propositions for us, then we need to actually be having sensible, rational conversations.

And that was just only underscored by the iid's Long Term Insights briefing from a few weeks ago, which told us that the rational conversation in politics isn't if we change the tax system, it's how we change the tax system to make things fairer.

But look, you don't need to be an economist to know that things are pretty dire and pretty diabolical out there at the moment, and New Zealanders are feeling it every single day.

So I'm also really proud of the fact that we've been going out there and saying we're not as here to complain in solidarity with those complaints, but also to put some solutions on the table.

So for us, that's looked like obviously free early childhood education, free dentistry, free GPS in the primary healthcare space, and also helping the transition into a climate resilient economy, because you can't just be talking about climate adaptation without also talking about how we curb our climate changing emissions.

And this government's making some deeply irresponsible and frankly stupid decisions with, for example, the two hundred million dollars that it's decided to invest in new fossil fuel subsidies.

It's taxpayer money.

Yeah, so the.

Party's promising you mentioned, free early childhood education, free dental care, free GP visits.

I mean, what do you say to critics who find all of this to be fiscally unrealistic.

I'd say that if we were advocating for or fighting for free compulsory education or free hospitals these days would be called the exact same thing.

It'd be called wasteful spending, would be called Marxists, and all the rest come at us.

The reality is that we've done really big things in the past, and the nineteen thirties and forties, after World Wars and the Great Depression, we came together as a country and decided to build a nation which looked like the foundations of public healthcare, public education, and public housing.

And we paid for that responsibly by higher taxes on those who had profited handsomely during a time of hardship for many.

Right now, we're in a situation where the top one percent in this country hold twenty three percent of all of the country's wealth, and IRD research from twenty twenty three told us that the top three hundred eleven households pay an effective tax rate less than half of that of the average New Zealander.

It's not fair.

And when are we going to be able to have a rational political debate about how we fix and change these things?

I mean, there's a reason that the conservatives on the other side of the political debate are not even willing to engage in the terms of this debate.

They simply want to shut it down and that should tell New Zealanders everything that they need to know.

I'd also add that in the government's first hundred days, one of the first things that it did, as quietly as it possibly could, was revoke or appeal the enabling legislation to require ird to report on the fairness or on fairness of our tax system.

One the way there is I think Nobel Peace.

Prize winning economists have recently called for a global tax on the ultra wretch, arguing that even a modest two percent wealth tax on billionaires stay not even just millionaires billionaires.

Could raise substantial revenue international.

Now, how does the Green parties proposed wealth tax compare And do you see New Zeraltters having a kind of a leadership role in this global argument at the moment?

I mean, we absolutely could be taking leadership position if we want to do.

Unfortunately, I think with this current government we're saying far more of a shredder than we are any kind of vision for the nation that we'd want to build.

And this is the point that I made in the budget debate.

You know, this kind of cut, cut, cut after callous cut, whether it's in conservation or frontline of what's necessary for communities or climate resilience or adaptation or whatever.

It's not only cruel and unusual, but it's not how you build a country, it's how you break one.

And that's where I kind of come back to those basic economic principles.

You know, it's really deeply ironic and profoundly nonsensical for the government to be talking out one side of its mouth about productivity and growth while actively kneecapping precisely those things with its fiscal strategy, where it is pulling back on government investment and the things that drive that productivity and that growth, let alone fear distribute of those things.

But to your question on how our tax proposals would work, so we put on the table a proposal for a wealth tax, which would only apply to the top approximate three percent in this country.

So for anyone with an individual net wealth over two million dollars, so for a couple it's over four million, and that's net wealth, so it's minus obviously your mortgages.

Ratherwise, you'd pay a two point five percent tax above that two million dollars net wealth individually, and doing that along the suite of other reforms, and using debt sensibly to actually pay for productive investment in our infrastructure, as opposed to the tax cuts of Nicola Willis, which have generated zero jobs and in fact only continued to minimize the opportunity for young New Zealanders.

We can build an economy that works for people and planet.

They are further entrenching a system, mister Speaker, which sees our nurses, our firefighters, our teachers pay an effective tax rate almost double that of the wealthiest in this country.

And not only is that so deeply un fear and so deeply inequitable, that it robs us of the very productivity that they tell us that they care about, it robs us of the investment that we could be making and that infrastructure that all.

Of us need.

The fundamental problem with the economy and the tax system in altero in New Zealand is that we overtax work and we undertaxt indeed oftentimes do not tax at all wealth.

We're hearing these terms rich ultra riches as a term that I've heard pop up recently as well.

How does the Green Party define rich in this context of tax policy, where do we draw the line for who should pay more?

I mean we we've drawn the line and our proposals as that termillion dollar figgre termillion dollars individual net wealth puts in the top three percent in this country.

So I think you're doing pretty all right.

And this is where I think we just kind of need to come back to these really fundamental points.

Right there are very few people in this country individually afford to pay for the cost of building a school or a hospital, or even closer to home for a loved one's cancer treatment when tragedy befalls us.

That is why we pull our resources together and we create this thing called a country, because we're not five million random individual people or running around this country doing our own thing.

We actually need each other and we can build this infrastructure by working together.

So yeah, I mean, maybe it's a bit of a red hearing to try and define what we perceive rich to be, but we've decided to draw the line in terms of our wealth taxes currently at that two million dollar net individual wealth.

What about Nan and Pop who bought say, a villa in Mount Eden for ten of tomatoes in the.

Seventeenes or something, and they're obviously going to be above that.

What happens there.

Yeah, so in terms of people who are, you know, asset wealthy but don't necessarily have the cash flow, they would be able to have this eventually paid off in the same way that rates can accumulate against the kind of property to the point that it's sold or the point at which somebody passes on.

So we'd have those sameatures and our wealth tacks.

Critics often claim that higher taxes on wealth will drive high net worth individuals to leave the country, and this is probably a few gimes and that's why we simply can't do anything about it.

No, No, what evidence do we have that something similar wouldn't happen here?

Like would there be some kind of brain drain?

I mean we're seeing one at the moment anyway.

That's kind of the point.

But would we be seeing different individuals leave and we don't mind them leaving, but we want the young people to day It's frankly ludicrous.

Look, I'm not going to pretend that it is easy to change the tax system.

Of course it's not.

But ease should not be the reason that we do something.

Fairness and equity and the fundamental principles and values that we have as New Zealanders, that is that we care about each other and the planet that we live on should be the driving force behind why we do things, and we've done people should and we've done hard things in the past.

So I mean, yeah, just a lot of the the arguments that are often floated around.

For example, Norway.

At the top of my head, I think there's approximately two hundred and thirty six thousand millionaires and billionaires in Norway, and there are approximately thirty high profile individuals who made a big song and dance about leaving the country as a result of their wealth tax changes, and that resulted in a huge amount of hysteria, but again a drop in the bucket in terms of the reality of it.

So I think we just need to come back down to earth as far as this debate goes, and ask ourselves why do people want to live here?

It shouldn't be a race to the bottom to shred the social safety in there and the infrastructure that all of us ultimately rely on.

All the country falls apart and people end up with less social cohesion and we have more people sleeping rough down the bottom of Queen Street outside of luxury stores.

The reason that people should want to live here is because of our great quality of life, and we are losing that because we are not investing in it.

What about people?

And you've probably heard this one before as well, because I've heard it a few times.

I've worked hard to get here.

I ask anyone, Well, firstly, I would say the hard working news.

Some of the hardest working New Zealanders that I have met are single mothers working multiple jobs, paying double the effective tax rate if the multi multi millionaires and billionaires in this country.

So yeah, I mean, any politician who wants to claim to be fighting for the hard working New Zealanders should be fighting for those who make their income from work, not from near wealth accumulation.

By the way, I read some critique about the Ears.

So you've got this thing five thousand dollars per passenger private jet tax proposing, and I've read something that's somewhere that said, look, it'll it'll force people to fly commercialism And I actually laughed out loud at that because these people are not like five thousand.

Dollars to me, for instance, I don't know.

About you, but that's I don't have that just totally will really do you know what I mean?

But these people who have private jets, I'm going to say, they will drop that on a lunch kind of same things.

So little in the multiples of that that it costs they actually use the private jet to get here in the position.

Yeah, I mean, do you have any data or any idea how many of those private jet passengers are actually coming here every month?

Yeah?

Every year.

I believe it's between two hundred and fifty to three hundred, so it's not that many.

But again, this is about kind of drawing a line in the sand or making a point of principle, because we've seen similar policies applied in other jurisdictions.

I just think that it is insane that we are at a point in time where regular people, low income, metal income regular people are trying their best to use reusable straws and reusable cups, and billionaires are allowed to set the planet on fire.

That's kind of the end of it for me.

Oh yeah, well, Jeff Bezos's wedding the other Oh yeah, I was keeping a close eye on that guest list, thinking like, oh right, you have to see Oprah this.

Yeah, I mean, in New York City recently, attacks the rich message helped Zoran Mumdani to win the.

Democratic mayoral primary.

Do you say this as a sign that public sentiment is shifting globally in favor.

Of wealth taxes.

Yeah.

I think there's a few things that we can take from Zoran's win.

The first, you know, I really applaud the approach that he took post Trump's win.

He went into communities within New York and the equivalents of kind of electorates or borrows or whatever they call them over there, and he asked people why they had flipped from the Democrats to voting for Trump, because that seems to be a question that many of us in commentary land are asking.

And what he found, strangely enough, was people citing the cost of living and basic economic issues, and they felt as though they had voted for decades and decades, their entire lives for the Democrats to do something about it, and they hadn't.

So it was kind of a hail Mary, something needs to change.

So we're just going to grasp for the closest thing that looks like a meaningful transformation or a meaningful change there, and that is why he ended up coming out with such strong fundamental economic policies of how you basically rebuild society, of how you rebuild communities, of how you provide people with actual economic freedom, which then results in those social freedoms.

So you know, will be completely transparent about the fact that backwhen I was at university, I was enamored by the idea of libertarianism, which is actually the ideology encapsulated best by the activity right now, because.

I was like, oh, yeah, course it makes sense.

We'll just get to run around, live our own lives, don't interrupt other people doing their own thing.

But the more that I thought about it and I read a second book, you then start to realize that that social freedom is a losory.

It's not real if you don't have access to the material basics to be able to participate in society to survive, let alone to thrive.

So that's where he came out, obviously with the kind of tax the rich stuff, but also those basic propositions for free public transport services, for free early childhood.

Yeah, I think that what that tells us is in a nutshell tempered centrism which has failed people for decades, for forty decades, as they've been subjected to trackle down economics is a breeding ground for effectively right wing radicalism, and the antidote to that is to ensure that everybody has their basic needs met.

It's not rocket science.

On our numbers, the opposition parties Labor, the Greens, Antiparty Malori would be in a position to govern if an election was held today.

Let's break the numbers down.

National is on thirty point seven points.

That's down two point two on our last poll in March.

Labor is a head of National sitting on thirty three point two.

That's a slight increase of zero point nine.

The Greens into Party Maiti are both up.

The Greens one point six points to eleven point six while to party Maliti has nudged up zero point five to five point five percentage points.

Well, the Green Party is currently pobbling really well, we can go high the double digits.

Now, which is I mean, this far out from election isn't too bad, all right, and that's ahead of ACT in New Zealand.

First, in the recent post fresh Water and urn z read research poles.

Rather, what do you attribute this surge and support to?

First thing, I say, I'm always so reticent to provide commentary on poles.

Oh, I mean, it feels.

Like reading the tea leaves and it's kind of like, you know, everyone's always like when it's good, Oh yeah, it means that we're doing great, and when it's bad, we don't actually pay that much attention.

That's what internal pole, but our and another thing is just my basic experience.

You know, in Auckland Central in twenty twenty, I was put behind on all the poles, and then of course we ended up making history.

Because the real pole is people realizing not to watch the poles, but we are the poles.

We have agency and we can actually change things here.

But I guess to try and read the tea leaves and the vibes that are out there.

The sense that I'm getting from folks across the country is people are much like as we're discussing around Zoruns, when people are looking for what the next iteration of our economic framework looks like.

People know that the wheels are falling off of the way that things are currently operating.

So there's obviously a heck of a lot of frustration.

And I'm really proud to be co leading a party that is putting genuine solutions on the table.

And this is about also understanding the kind of fundamental principles of the Green Party.

Two, because it's a moral panic that I get asked about every few months or so where people are like, oh, you're talking about social policies.

That's not Green Party stuff.

Your name is green, your color is green.

So just to give you some insight, the Green Party or Green parties all around the world have the same four core charter principles.

What differentiates the Green Party in Altered or in New Zealand is a recognition of ten tooth your waiting is our foundational constitutional text.

From that flows firstly the notion of ecological responsibility.

Resources are finite, even those resources that do regenerate need time and space and God forbids and planning Chane Jones in order to regenerate.

If you accept that as the first principle, that makes you know in terms of the flow on effects for society, it makes sense to go, well, we need to share those resources and a somewhat fair, a just and reasonable and rational way.

That's not a social responsibility or social justice on the internet.

The third is appropriate decision making we like devolving decision making powers down to the level where it actually affects people.

It's why I'm such a massive nerd for local government.

And the fourth is non violence.

Of course we're happies and we don't like going to war, but if you dig into that a little bit deeper, it's basically about how do you create these systems and settings and blueprints and ways of operating as a country and governance and making decisions that don't neglect people or their perspectives so that further down the track they go, this thing doesn't work for me, and I want to uproot the entire thing.

Do you reckon?

The Greens have bounced back.

I mean, yeah, we're back, baby, But I think I think that you know, my aspirations, our aspirations as a party, will not be met until we live in a country where every child is able to live a good life, until our rivers are clean, and you know, our native wildlife is flow perishing.

It was utterly mind lying to know to be in a discussion or a debate or whatever you want to call it the other day with an act Party MP where you know, the proposition of bringing back the more was on the table through genetic engineering, and it's like, yeah, cool, like novel whatever, get it.

Yep, science is awesome, but like we're putting our eggs in the basket of something that literally sounds like Jurassic Park.

Meanwhile, seventy five percent of our current native wildlife is at risk of extinction.

The government is approving in fast tracking coal mines and kiwi habitats and cutting predator free twenty fifty and Department of Conservation funding make it make sense.

I was like, mama's got a lot of meat on.

Look.

Finally, if Chris Luckson called you tomorrow, he said, look, I've had a good look at your green badga not bad, but I'll let you pick one thing to implement tomorrow.

And he's got a genie out of the back, so don't worry about logistics.

What would you choose?

Oh, I think espe the wealth tax as a starting point.

You know, if we're talking about economic transformation and fairness, which is deeply into related to climate justice, then we need tax reform.

And regardless of whatever side of the political spectrum that you're on at the moment, as the IID themselves said, and you know they're not politically beholden.

The sensible, rational, mature political debate at the moment is not if we have tax reform, it's how we do tax reform.

Thanks for joining us, Chloe.

Thank you.

That's it for this episode of the Front Page.

You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzid Herald.

Dot co dot MZ.

The Front Page is produced by Ethan Sells and Richard Martin, who is also our sound engineer.

I'm Chelsea Daniels.

Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.

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