National finance spokeswoman Nicola Willis endured an uncomfortable time at the ASB Great Debate in Queenstown last night.
Queenstown, which has an average property price of $1.7million, is one of the real estate markets which stands to be most affected if National wins the election and gets to introduce its proposed tax on foreigners buying houses worth more than $2million.
Ms Willis’ day began poorly when several economists issued a report which strongly disagreed with her costings, and she struggled to defend her costings last night.
Ms Willis argued there were more than 95,000 houses valued at more than $2million in New Zealand, and that only a small number of those would need to be sold to overseas buyers for her projections to be achieved.
Her comments were greeted with rumbles of discontent from the full house, and open scorn from some of her opponents.
Greens co-leader James Shaw said Ms Willis’ policy was a continuation of "the war on renters" and would price first-home buyers in places such as Queenstown out of the market.
Labour finance spokesman Grant Robertson started assailing Ms Willis over her costings in his opening remarks and kept hammering her on the point throughout the 90-minute debate.
Ms Willis said National’s policies had been independently costed and audited and its workings were set out on pages 18 and 19 of its policy document — pages which Mr Robertson just happened to have on hand to brandish with the claim "there’s no calculations there".
Ms Willis said she was confident overseas buyers would return to the New Zealand real estate market and buy the sort of homes that would meet her revenue targets.
"They will want to buy expensive luxury homes and I want to tax them when they do, to bring relief to the squeezed middle."
Ms Willis, meanwhile, attacked Labour’s spending programme while in government. "OK isn’t good enough," she said.
"This is actually the best country in the world but it is being dragged back by six years of economic mismanagement by Labour."
Mr Robertson defended himself by saying that Labour had needed to respond to the circumstances in front of it.
"There are a lot of hindsight economists on stage here who seem to think that we didn’t go through Covid."
Act New Zealand leader David Seymour said in light of the numbers released in the pre-election fiscal update Act was reconsidering its taxation policy, and would release a reworked alternative budget on Tuesday.
"Even I didn’t think that Grant [Robertson] could run away with the books that quickly, but he did," Mr Seymour said.
Mr Seymour called for government spending to be reined in, pledged to make thousands of public servants redundant as soon as possible to reduce it to the level it was at six years ago and open up New Zealand to greater overseas investment.
"New Zealand needs more than a slight change of direction — it needs real change."
Infrastructure spending in particular needed to be supported by overseas and domestic private investment partners, he said; as an example, Auckland had been arguing about a second harbour crossing since 1959 and a whole generation had been and gone in the interim.
Ms Willis said places such as Queenstown needed to discuss infrastructure planning for the decade with the government and set up funding arrangements so that debt pressure was taken off council’s balance sheets.
Mr Robertson said the government was already working with private partners, such as the National Super Fund, for initiatives such as wind farm projects.
Mr Shaw argued for greater investment in green technologies, and the retention of the government work programme in that area — a sector Act and National have targeted for cuts.
By Mike Houlahan
