Andrew Dickens: New Zealand needs smart leadership- but no one's offering

So we're off and running with an election 40-odd days away and both parties promising the world.

Labour is out of the gate with their policy of free dental care for the under 30s.

A policy they, themselves, said was unachievable just a month ago. A policy that needs more dentists, but we only train 60 a year and it takes 6 years for them to be in the workforce. Everything is against this policy and Labour knows it, which is why they won't even try to do it until 2026, and only if they get back in.

It's almost as if Labour doesn't get what's driven the electorate off them over the past 3 years. Pie in the sky word salads that are barely possible if not impossible. They were given an incredible mandate just to repair what pandemic lockdowns did to us but instead, they started chasing unicorns.

My pet peeve is the Light Rail that might bother some shop owners, so they thought- let's just stick it underground at eye-watering cost. And you want us to take you seriously.

To win, National just needs to seem capable and the first reactions to their near $15 billion in tax cuts seemed favourable. But that is waning.

On Friday, Matthew Hooten rubbished it and called it cynical. On Saturday, tax experts said it breaks tax treaties overseas. On Sunday, even Heather du Plessis-Allan was saying the foreign house buyers sales tax figures were ludicrous, and they are.

Nearly $900 million of tax cuts are dependent on foreign buyers suddenly buying half of all the $2 million dollar plus houses available. It's starting to have that "made up a month ago and costed on the back of an envelope" feel.

Meanwhile, a question they've never answered is whether spraying nearly $15 billion into the money market will be inflationary. So tax cuts are inflationary because they increase the money supply the same way money printing and borrowing does. They need to be timed very carefully.

The only way they would not be inflationary is if you reduce Government spending by the amount you're giving back in tax cuts so that spending is net zero. But they're not doing that, which is why they've invented the foreign buyer tax and casino tax.

And the other problem is productivity. We're running at nearly full capacity. Look at our participation rates and particularly the food price index. There's no room for job growth to drive prices lower. Meanwhile, giving the people more money means you give the people the ability to afford higher tomato prices and inflation carries on and becomes embedded even if you do slash Government spending.

National is running on the promise of being prudent financial managers. A prudent manager would bring in the bracket changes when inflation has abated. But they're not.

To that end, National shows themselves to be just as hostage to ideology as Labour is. Just promise tax cuts. it always works.

A letter to the editor on Sunday called National and Labour Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dumber, and said give your vote to someone else. However, the other parties seem like Tweedle-Dumbest.

So as I've been saying all year. New Zealand deserves some smart leadership but no one is offering it.

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