Machinion Post

Wellington, Aug. 13 - Asked on Morning Report what new taxes a re-elected National government would introduce, the Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, pointed to "existing policy": the scheduled rise in the fuel excise tax, and raised the possibility of an accommodation levy. No other new revenue measure was named. The exchange was brief, and this newspaper does not pretend it amounts to a costed policy. But it was the Prime Minister's own choice of example, and it deserves to be taken at face value rather than waved away as an aside.

What is at stake is not this one radio answer but the account the country is owed of how a structural deficit will be closed. New Zealand is not running a temporary shortfall that will vanish with a cyclical upturn. Tax cuts already delivered have narrowed the revenue base at the same time as spending pressures in health, defence and infrastructure continue to build. Voters are entitled to know, before they vote rather than after, whether that gap will be closed chiefly by restraint, by new revenue, or by some stated mixture of both. A radio interview is a thin vessel for that answer, but it is the vessel that was offered.

There is a fair point buried in the Prime Minister's reply. The fuel excise increase is legislated and tied to road funding through the National Land Transport Fund; it is a user charge for a particular purpose, not a lever for general revenue, and calling it a new tax invites confusion. An accommodation levy, aimed at visitors rather than residents, has a defensible logic and precedent overseas. Neither point should be dismissed. But neither answers the question actually asked, which was what new taxes would be introduced to meet the country's wider fiscal needs. Pointing to a charge already on the books is not a plan; it is the absence of one dressed as an answer.

The tax policy and the deficit are the Minister of Finance's responsibility, not the Prime Minister's to settle in a morning interview. The Minister has been candid in the past about the scale of the structural problem. She should not allow that candour to be undone by an offhand answer that leaves the impression there is nothing further to say.

Wellington, Aug. 12 - Two government technology projects are again in difficulty. One required a revised business case after a negative rating from official reviewers. A second has struggled simply to restart. Both fall under an effort to overhaul what officials themselves describe as a siloed system, in which agencies have long built their own IT rather than sharing common platforms. This newspaper takes no pleasure in reporting it, but the pattern is not new, and it is not cheap.

What is at stake is not a matter of technical housekeeping. Every dollar spent revising a failed business case, or restarting a stalled build, is a dollar that cannot go to hospitals, to schools, or to reducing the deficit this country still carries. The Minister of Finance, Nicola Willis, inherits a fiscal position in which spending must be justified line by line. Information technology has too often been treated as an exception to that discipline, a cost of doing government business rather than a capital decision to be weighed like any other.

The strongest case for the overhaul deserves to be stated plainly. A government that lets forty agencies each build their own payroll, case management or identity systems will duplicate cost many times over, and will find integration harder with each passing year. Centralising that effort, if it can be made to work, is not an unreasonable ambition, and this newspaper has said as much when the policy was announced. But an ambition is not a delivery record. A negative rating followed by a revised business case, and a second project that cannot yet restart, are not early teething troubles in a young programme. They are the same failure mode this sector has produced for a decade, dressed in a new organisational chart.

The Government has not shown, in what has been made public, that the overhaul carries a credible mechanism for saying no. Business cases can be revised indefinitely without anyone being required to ask whether the underlying project should proceed at all. Restarts can consume budget without a public account of what the earlier attempt cost. Until Ministers are willing to cancel as readily as they are willing to revise, the overhaul is a management structure without a discipline, and structures without discipline tend, in this sector above all, to cost the earth.

Wellington, Aug. 12 - The Climate Change Commission has found what most councils along the coast and beside our rivers have long suspected: that delay in adapting to a changing climate is leaving communities and their assets exposed to costs that will only grow. A local government leader has called it bonkers that the Crown will pay to clean up after a flood or a cyclone but will not pay to keep the flood or the cyclone from doing the damage in the first place. Put that plainly, the complaint is hard to answer.

What is at stake is not a small sum, whichever way the ledger is read. The Crown has already met large bills for storm and cyclone recovery in recent years, and there is no reason to think the climate will grow kinder. Every dollar spent moving a road, strengthening a stopbank, or buying out a flood-prone property before the water rises is a dollar that need not be spent, several times over, after it has risen. That is not a partisan claim. It is arithmetic, and the Minister of Finance, Nicola Willis, will know it as well as anyone in the Beehive.

The strongest case for caution deserves to be stated fairly. The Treasury's books carry a structural deficit, and every portfolio can produce a persuasive case for more money now to save money later; that is the nature of the case, not the exception. Adaptation spending, unlike a bridge or a hospital, does not deliver a service the public can see and use tomorrow. Without a costed national plan setting out which assets are worth protecting, at what price, and who pays, first the ratepayer or first the taxpayer, an open commitment to prevention risks becoming an open commitment to spend, which this newspaper has no more patience for than the Minister ought to have.

The answer is not to write that blank cheque, and it is not to keep doing nothing until the next storm settles the argument by cheque anyway. The Government should demand of itself what it would demand of any council: a plan, costed, with a funding split agreed before the next flood rather than argued over after it. Until that plan exists, this newspaper cannot call for new money. But the report is right that the present arrangement, all the willingness in the world after the damage and none before it, is not a policy. It is an admission that none has yet been made.