Incoming prime minister echoes Jacinda Ardern’s promise to cut back Labour’s agenda to focus on cost of living issues
“The public feel we’re doing too much, too fast,” he said, in a series of early-morning radio interviews. “We need to focus in on some of those bread-and-butter issues that New Zealanders are certainly focused on at the moment, including issues like the cost of living, the effects of the ongoing global inflation pandemic that we’re experiencing at the moment,” he told RNZ.
New Zealand’s inflation rate remains high, with food prices up 11.3% year-on-year in December – the biggest increase in more than three decades. Among those possibly facing the guillotine, however, is the effort to merge New Zealand’s public-funded media entities into a single, BBC-style giant. There has also been speculation about the future of Three Waters: a large-scale reform of ageing water infrastructure that has morphed into a controversial proxy debate over co-governance with Māori of public assets and Indigenous sovereignty in New Zealand.
“I think overall there are some New Zealanders who perhaps aren’t contributing their fair share,” he told. Early in Ardern’s term, she had ruled out a capital gains tax, land tax on family homes, or wealth tax. Critics on the left said those decisions, along with strict fiscal responsibility measures, hamstrung the government when it came to achieving large-scale social reforms, like the mass building of state housing.
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