Free Press: Act Party Bulletin

Stealth Taxes in the Spotlight

It’s been five long years since National’s tax cuts, and it feels like the taxman’s grip is tightening. There’s a reason: bracket creep. Inflation means our earnings go up on paper, pushing us into higher tax brackets whether we have any real increase in spending power or not. ACT Leader David Seymour has revealed research showing an extra $1036 has been taken per average household through bracket creep since 2010. We think that if the government wants to tax us more, it should do so openly. Indexing tax brackets to inflation would end stealth tax increases.

Charter Schools a US Success

Critics of Partnership Schools say charters are failing in the US. They point to a 2009 Stanford University study with ambiguous results. Since then, Stanford has updated its findings. Successful education techniques have proliferated. Effective schools have grown while ineffective ones have closed. Charters now outperform public schools across the board. Recent news from Massachusetts shows students are learning four times faster in charters than in public school students for reading, and six times faster for maths. And the biggest benefactors have been children living in poverty. Free Press is quietly confident that Partnership Schools will help address New Zealand’s educational inequality.

A Funny Thing about the Critics

For Partnership School critics, failure is doing no better on average than public schools. This means no better on measurable features of schools. They put no weight at all on other factors, like parental choice of education style, school culture, the standards set, and so forth.  That speaks volumes.

Fireplaces and Emissions

A few months ago, a report on New Zealand’s air quality was released by the Secretary for the Environment and the Government Statistician. And on 5 March, Parliament’s Commissioner for the Environment released an informative commentary on this report. The paper is technical but, in summary, we seem to be applying the wrong air quality standard. Because Auckland is coastal, a major proportion of measured particulates come from sea spray, which is not a concern at all. The Auckland Council has a misplaced obsession with eliminating the remaining domestic open fireplaces in Auckland they would be better to focus on diesel vehicle emissions.

Auckland Convention Centre

It’s no secret that ACT doesn’t like the convention centre deal. The government shouldn’t be involved in what amounts to crony capitalism. But that doesn’t mean that just because New Zealand First rocks up with a private member’s bill to cancel the deal, breaking existing contracts with all manner of unforeseeable consequences, that we would support them. The public rightly dislikes the sense of a tail wagging the dog. We respect the proportionality of Parliament. The convention centre deal was made in the previous term of government, and would have to change dramatically before a Party with just one MP could justify torpedoing it at this stage.

Northland

We are under no illusion that ACT might pick up another seat this weekend!  Our focus is building our profile for 2017. It looks like a close race in Northland, even though the self-styled force for the north looks to be degrading even faster than Cyclone Pam as it reached New Zealand.  Loyal ACT supporters have indicated that, in order to preserve ACT’s leverage in Parliament and in the hope of getting some job-creating RMA reform, they will probably give their vote to the National candidate this time round. We have no problem with that – we will be after their vote in 2017.

ENDS

© Scoop Media