Damien Grant on Labour’s CGT

Damien Grant writes:

The current leader of the opposition, Chris Hipkins, stumbled into a policy release on the party’s capital gains tax. The term policy is generous. This was a marketing plan sketched on the back of a napkin that had been used to wipe the lipstick off a chardonnay glass after drinks at a Fabian Society soiree on Courtney Place.

I digress. The policy amounts to a few pages in a glossy press-release with less substance than a frozen coke. The details are sketchy. If you own property in July 2017, and sell it after that date, you pay 28% of any increase in value; with no allowance for inflation. Family homes are exempt.

Damien no doubt recalls how Labour came up withs its policy to build 100,000 Kiwibuild homes in the back of a taxi.

Labour wants to use the money from this tax to subsidise visits to see the doctor; which makes no sense as the cost of this policy will hit in year one but, as the Institute explains, income from a capital gains tax will take many years to build up.

There is a cash shortfall on Labour’s own analysis in the early years which, like everything else in this policy, the resolution is left to the imagination. Sydney Sweeney’s dresses are more transparent.

I wonder how long it took Damien to find a way to mention Ms Sweeney!

Chris Hipkins is asking us to reinstate him to Premier House. For us to believe that he has learnt from his catastrophic reforms of the education sector that thrashed more than a dozen polytechnics, the fall in literacy and numeracy during his five years as education minister and his gross mishandling of the covid vaccine roll out.

This policy announcement, like the ones before it, are not the product of serious consideration.

It’s more a media stunt than a policy.