Originally Posted by
elZorro
This post is going take a while. I'm under siege!
Slimwin, good to hear the Air NZ staff are still as well paid as they used to be. I was of course parroting a press release from Labour, so I should have added IMHO.
Blackcap, surely there will be a tendency for the board makeup to change, and the govt has so far allowed the company to run its own affairs by and large, even though they had 73% of it. It all depends what sort of a dividend they expected in the past, and now there will be new faces expecting different dividends perhaps. Will National use this as an excuse to also push for bigger dividends?
Cuzzie, welcome to the thread. Would you please have a look back through some of the graphs you are talking about? And also some that I have posted in the past. The current account is not the govt books, it's the books for the whole country, sort of. If everybody thinks things are going swimmingly, they borrow more, and that is what happened during Labour's last term. Interest rates moved down, property was appreciating well, so we all borrowed a bit more.
Except the Labour govt did the opposite. They paid off a lot of old debt. They ran record budget surpluses on their own books. All this time the National Party was extolling Labour to drop taxes and pay back the taxpayers. But Michael Cullen showed extreme forethought and kept paying off the debt, and other ministers used the extra tax cashflow to further stimulate the economy. So although the GFC had started when National got back in, Labour had the govt finances in an excellent state compared to many other countries. Unemployment was also at a low point, so there was a wide tax base. Labour succeeded in increasing the tax income each year without hurting anyone too much.
You refer to zero interest student loans. Many parents think this is only fair, because many of them had a free tertiary education, and the latest crop have to pay for about 30% of their costs. Plus, the govt gets cash at a lower rate than the rest of us, so it's not a great cost. If it was such a bad idea, why has National kept this in place? Exactly, it would cost them a lot of votes to remove it. Many tertiary students go on to become employers, so if you wanted to cripple NZ even more than National has managed to do over the last five years (still not reaching the performance figures Labour achieved back in 2008) then that would be one way to do it.