Labour’s capital gains tax isn’t the end of the debate — it’s the beginning of a reckoning. The left’s real problem isn’t its policy. It’s the cult of reasonableness that’s made conviction sound impolite.
Labour’s capital gains tax isn’t enough. Not even close. But it matters.
After decades of pretending that taxing wealth was somehow un-Kiwi, the political class has finally admitted what everyone under forty-five already knew: the system is rigged. The rich get richer because the rules were written that way.
Leaks and timing aside, this small step matters because it breaks a long silence. It suggests that maybe, just maybe, there’s still political oxygen left for fairness.
But the debate around it exposes a deeper rot. It runs on two axes. The first is pragmatism versus progressivism: the endless tug of war between what’s “politically saleable” and what’s morally right. The second is framing: the way we’ve come to talk about tax, the economy, and ourselves.
For forty years, New Zealand’s political class has treated tax as a technical problem rather than a moral one. “Affordability.” “Fiscal responsibility.” “Prudence.” These words roll off the tongue of every finance minister like a rosary. But behind them sits a theology, not a theory. The worship of the balanced budget. The fetish of the surplus.
We’ve built a politics where the worst sin isn’t greed or dishonesty. It’s being unreasonable.
Our leaders and pundits bow to this cult every day, treating compromise as courage and cowardice as maturity.
We all know the type. The middle-aged man in a blue suit, red tie if Labour, blue tie if National, standing behind a podium and sighing, “We have to be reasonable. We simply can’t afford to pay for X.” The “X” changes every decade: housing, healthcare, climate, infrastructure. But the sermon never does.
And yes, our current Minister of Finance is a woman. Funnily enough, our two worst ones have been. Which only proves the point: this isn’t about gender or personality. It’s about an ideology so deep in our political bloodstream that even good people end up preaching the same sermon. The uniform changes; the script doesn’t.
They call it responsibility. We call it what it is: looting.
Economist Paul Krugman had a name for these people: the Very Serious People. They talk in calm, confident tones about the need for restraint, the importance of discipline, the dangers of populism. They’re always wrong, but never in doubt.
In New Zealand, the VSP class thrives. They write opinion columns, front think tanks, and fill Treasury briefings. They tell us not to get emotional about inequality or housing, as though poverty were just a rounding error. They’ve mistaken detachment for wisdom and smugness for intellect.
Serious people acknowledge when they’re wrong and move on. Our VSPs double down, defending a failed experiment as “rational” or “reasonable,” as if saying it calmly enough makes it true.
But conviction alone isn’t enough either.
For the left, building something better will require the one thing we often struggle with: a willingness to compromise, just a little, in the service of a greater truth. Not the hollow, triangulated kind of compromise that trades ideals for power, but the kind that builds coalitions; that lets us win the argument slowly, by expanding who feels included in it.
The biggest threat to a fairer tax system isn’t National’s attack lines. They’ll say what they always say. The real danger is infighting on the left. T e traditional circular firing squad that forms whenever principle meets pragmatism. We mistake disagreement for betrayal, and in doing so, hand victory to those who want nothing to change.
I say this as someone who’s spent years bristling at the idea of compromise. My instincts are always to fight, to call things what they are.
But the older I get, the clearer it becomes: narrative eats policy for breakfast. The side that controls the story controls the outcome. If we want to win, not just the debate, but the future, we need to build a story people can believe in, not just a policy they can tolerate.
If we want to reshape the economy of this country, to move from managed decline to shared prosperity, we’ll need both clarity and patience. The courage to hold the line on values, but flexibility in how we get there.
The project isn’t purity. It’s reconstruction.
Those of us who came of age after the 1990s aren’t fooled. We’re smart and well-educated enough (thanks, Helen Clark, for the loans) to understand just how fucked we are. But we’re too economically precarious to do anything about it (thanks, John Key, for the everything).
We are angry, yes. But our anger isn’t chaotic or naïve. It’s forensic. We’ve looked at the balance sheet of a nation and found the numbers don’t add up. Not because of waste, but because of theft.
Maybe ours is the first truly silent generation. Not because we don’t care, but because we’ve run out of breath. We’ve seen 9/11, the GFC, and COVID-19 before turning forty. We’ve done everything right; studied, worked, saved. And still can’t buy homes our parents purchased on one salary.
And this isn’t about blaming older generations. Many of them fought for a fairer country too, and they’re just as frustrated at what’s been lost. It’s about admitting how much harder that fight has become, and how much more deliberate we’ll need to be to win it again.
We don’t hate the system because it’s complex. We hate it because it’s stupid. Because the people running it still pretend that endless growth and asset inflation are clever economic management rather than slow-motion cannibalism.
Labour’s capital gains tax, modest as it is, should be the start of a new story. One that speaks moral truth in plain language.
Policy doesn’t win arguments. Narrative does. The story the right tells is simple: discipline, order, reward for effort. The story the left tells, when it dares to, is equally simple: fairness, solidarity, shared prosperity.
But somewhere along the way, the left stopped telling that story and started managing spreadsheets. We tried to sound calm, responsible, grown-up. And in doing so, we handed the language of conviction to those who least deserve it.
So maybe it’s time we stopped apologising for wanting better. Time to stop letting the VSPs define what’s possible. Time to stop calling looting “prudence.”
The left doesn’t need to be angrier for the sake of it. It needs to be angrier for a reason. Angry realism means saying the quiet part out loud, but calmly enough that it sticks.
New Zealand isn’t broke. It’s being robbed.
We don’t need to agree on every detail. We just need to agree that the story we’re living under, that endless restraint equals responsibility, is a lie.
Because if we don’t tell a better story about who we are, the vandals will keep writing it for us.
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