Remember this billboard from 2008:
John Key’s party didn’t make too many promises when they got elected in 2008 (their promises were as blancmange as their campaign), but these were two of them.
You didn’t get lower taxes—instead, GST was put up.
And we didn’t see fewer people leaving the country in disgust—instead, we’ve had more.
A brighter future? More than 40,ooo people every year since John Key took office have been saying “No.”
In 2008 John Key stood in Wellington’s Cake Tin stadium lamenting the departure of a stadium-full of good New Zealanders every year under the stewardship of Helen Clark.
Yet very year since John Key took office, the numbers leaving for better things elsewhere have failed to reduce. Instead, they’ve climbed. And now with 53,330 New Zealanders last year seeing more opportunity overseas than here at home—a record high number at a time when things overseas are hardly optimistic—it’s clear that more than a stadium-and-a-half full of NZers have looked at what John Key’s government has done to New Zealand and concluded they have done nothing to give them any hope.
We’ve all heard the “Catch up with Australia” mantra. But with govts like we’ve endured in recent years, NZ can’t even catch up with Tasmania! We’re clearly going to need some actual ambition for New Zealand, and damn so0n.
Or else with figures like those below, we’re going to need a bigger stadium.
4 comments:
The GST increase was fully compensated through income tax cuts. We ought not damn Key for that bit.
Before the revenue neutral tax change, which put total revenue up by over a billion a year, this Government put many taxes up, including alcohol, petrol. We have also had 2 new taxes forced onto us, the rubbish tax and the ETS.
This is the opposite of the tax decreases we were promised and badly needed. The 2008 promise of gettin rid of the zoning laws to make out very expensive housing more affordible has not been kept either. Nothing has changed from comrade Clark's regime.
@Eric: Yes, Mike is right. We didn't wave goodbye to higher taxes, we got them.
We received "a pledge to deliver about $50 a week to workers on the average age.” We didn't get them.
We got a promise of “an ongoing programme of personal tax cuts." It wasn't fulfilled.
We were told “National will not be going back on any of these promises, as we fully costed and funded them.” They did, and they weren't.
This was called “a credible economic package to take account of the changing economic climate.” It was, said Bill English, a “tax cut programme [that] will not require any additional borrowing."
They were wrong on everything. And they have no excuse.
Less than a month after sending my CV to an Aussie recruiting firm, I got an e-mail on a Friday afternoon with a job offer in Queensland starting three days later for double what I'm earning now.
I had to decline the offer due to current commitments, but come January it's going to be mighty hard to say no if I get a similar offer (which appears likely, unless Australia runs out of minerals before then).
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