Social Credit is calling on the government to remove all taxes on fuel.

In an address to a meeting in Whanganui last night, party leader Chris Leitch said the high price of fuel was strangling small to medium sized businesses and putting undue pressure on the budgets of low and middle income families.

Those families were getting hit with a double whammy due to the extra they needed to find for fuel costs, and the rising prices of the goods and services they purchased, the price of which was being forced up by fuel price hikes.

Cutting government taxes would reduce the price of fuel by 75 cents per litre, bringing prices on food, clothing, and everything else in the shops down, leaving more money in consumer's pockets, and restoring small business profitability.

The loss in revenue to the government could be replaced by copying what the third largest economy in the world, Japan, is doing and accessing funding from the country's central bank.

Currently the Bank of Japan holds 46% of Japanese government debt, which is costing the government zero in interest payments.

By comparison New Zealand taxpayers pay $5 billion every year in interest on the government's borrowing, most of it going to overseas pension funds and the American owned Aussie banks that dominate the New Zealandbanking landscape.

Ends

© Scoop Media