The hoon for the week that was to April 29

Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The Kākā

TLDR: This week’s news in geopolitics and Aotearoa’s political economy I covered via The Kākā for paying subscribers included:

• An Inland Revenue Department study of Aotearoa’s 311 wealthiest families with combined wealth of $85 billion and annual income in 2020/21 of $14.6 billion has found just seven percent of their income was taxed as personal taxable income that year because of the lack of a capital gains tax; Special report on Wednesday and Wednesday’s Dawn Chorus

• That meant their effective tax rate was 9.5% across all their income, even after calculating their payments of GST, which compares with an effective tax rate of 30% for a PAYE salary earner of $80,000 per year. Those 311 families alone would have paid $3.4 billion more in tax in 2020/21 if they had paid the same tax rate as middle-income New Zealanders; Special report on Wednesday and Wednesday’s Dawn Chorus

• PM Chris Hipkins hosed down talk of a Capital Gains, Wealth or Flood Levy tax in Budget 2023 on May 18, saying in a speech to business leaders he wanted to produce a ‘no-frills’ Budget that paid for flood repairs by cutting spending elsewhere and using unallocated spending announced in previous years. Thursday’s Dawn Chorus,

• Hipkins emphasised in his speech the Government’s focus was on getting inflation and interest rates down, while ramping up net migration to 100,000, which effectively put a floor under the housing market this week, along with lower long-term mortgage rates and a loosening of LVR rules announced by the Reserve Bank. Friday’s Dawn Chorus

• PM Chris Hipkins acknowledged the Government is flying blind on net migration to Australia after the weekend announcement of a four-year pathway to dual citizenship for the 300,000 New Zealanders living there since 2001 and the ones eyeing up going for bigger salaries and after-housing-cost disposable incomes; Monday’s Dawn Chorus

• Hipkins told reporters the figures couldn’t and haven’t been modelled, although he was still confident the much-more-assured pathway to citizenship would not increase the numbers of New Zealanders migrating to Australia, even though net migration of NZ residents trebled to over 1,000 a month in the year to the end of September.

What we talked about on the ‘hoon’

In this week’s podcast above of the weekly ‘hoon’ webinar for paying subscribers at 5pm on Friday night, I talked with co-host

Peter Bale

in Oslo and special guests:

• Robert Patman
  from University of Otago, who came on from 5.10 pm to 5.25 pm to talk about the latest on Sudan, China vs US and AUKUS;

• Max Rashbrooke, who came on from 5.25 pm to 5.35 pm to talk about the IRD tax reports and the political reaction;

• Nick Goodall from Core Logic, who came on on from 5.35 pm to 5.45 pm to talk about the housing market and this week’s LVR news; and,

• Josie Pagani came on from 5.40 pm to 5.50 pm to talk about politics and tax, along with her column in The Post.

Peter and I also talked about the news in geopolitics this week, including Hugh Grant saying in court that Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun broke into his flat (The Guardian) The Hoon podcast version is produced by Simon Josey.

Thanks to the support of paying subscribers here, I’m able to spread the work from my public interest journalism here about housing affordability, climate change and poverty reduction around in other public venues.

Other places I’ve appeared this week

My podcast for The Spinoff this week

An interview with David Parker - I interviewed Revenue Minister David Parker on Wednesday afternoon in Wellington for When The Facts Change, my weekly podcast for The Spinoff.

I was on TVNZ’s Breakfast show on Friday on Hipkins’ Budget speech

Chat thread of the week

I also host regular discussions on the chat section of The Kākā for paying subscribers

Ka kite ano

Bernard