National’s finance spokesperson Nicola Willis is calling out Labour for what she says is an $18.2 billion gap in their spending.<\/p>\n
At a press conference the Finance Minister called on Labour leader Chris Hipkins and the party’s senior MPs to explain the gap between its spending plans and revenue intentions.<\/p>\n
It comes as Labour announced it will cap public transport fares at $20 a week in main centres and $10 everywhere else if elected.<\/p>\n
Willis criticised the move, saying it was “yet another dubiously-costed policy”.<\/p>\n
“There is no magic money tree that can be plucked to pay for Labour’s election promises. The government’s books are in deficit.”<\/p>\n
“What you’ll see is that even under conservative assumptions there is an $18.2 billion gap between Labour’s spending plans and its capital gains tax.<\/p>\n
“This is Labour’s $18 billion hidden bill for New Zealanders.”<\/p>\n
Willis said the economy was growing again, and unemployment and debt were forecast to fall.<\/p>\n
She said these “gains” had required a “disciplined approach” across budgets and Labour’s recent announcements showed they were not “fit for that task”.<\/p>\n
“Labour claimed this week that its proposal to cap public transport fares at $20 a week would save people an average of $1200 a year for a total cost of $65 million a year.”<\/p>\n
“Well, as has been pointed out by some of your colleagues, that simply cannot be true. I am happy to give Mr Utikere [Labour MP Tangi Utikere] a calculator to work this out. If he requires one, I’ll send it over.”<\/p>\n
Labour has been approached by RNZ for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"National’s finance spokesperson Nicola Willis is calling out Labour for what she says is an $18.2 billion gap…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":487714,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[138,219,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-487713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=487713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/487714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=487713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=487713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=487713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}