The Herald queried the figure, noting the combined departmental budgets of both agencies is significantly less than $3.8b \u2013 the personnel bill for the entire core public service is a shade over $11b a year.<\/p>\n
On Thursday evening, the party\u2019s general manager, former Labour MP Iain Lees-Galloway, replied saying the modelling underlying the public parts of the tax policy \u201cidentified savings in more departments than just MSD and IRD\u201d and laid out where those savings would occur.<\/p>\n
He also said a significant amount of savings would come from being able to eliminate student loan living costs through the party\u2019s citizen\u2019s income policy, a form of universal basic income of $19,400 a year that every citizen and resident would receive, paid for by a $24b land tax.<\/p>\n
\u201cI acknowledge that the public-facing material could be much clearer. We\u2019ll fix that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He supplied the Herald with a table showing how it arrived at its calculations.<\/p>\n
A table supplied by Opportunity showing its tax plans.<\/p>\n
While not all of the cuts would involve job losses, it is doubtful that such severe cuts could be made without touching a significant number of employees. <\/p>\n
MSD employs more than 9000 people, IRD has 4900 employees, the Ministry of Justice has 4700, MBIE employs 5800 and Oranga Tamariki\u2019s workforce is 4800. <\/p>\n
The party says it can achieve significant savings through the pairing of the land tax and the Citizen\u2019s Income, which is simpler to administer than the current tax and benefit system and would mean less work for IRD and MSD. <\/p>\n
Opportunity has said it will be \u201crepurposing 2000 Ministry of Social Development employees where they can have more impact\u201d, but the party\u2019s tax plan and documents supplied to the Herald only include cuts to MSD and do not break out any increase in other departments\u2019 funding. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Herald queried the figure, noting the combined departmental budgets of both agencies is significantly less than $3.8b…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":548316,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1443,270451,1032,74,57023,10666,34893,3597,679,16555,71,42,10938,84841,5812,43,6452,5202,4762,2171,7254,312,8262,7496,1361,61,40,38,41,39,1803,1533],"class_list":["post-551090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-about","tag-achievability","tag-advertising","tag-after","tag-clearer","tag-cuts","tag-documents","tag-fix","tag-forced","tag-form","tag-from","tag-headlines","tag-herald","tag-inquiries","tag-make","tag-news","tag-opportunity","tag-part","tag-party","tag-plans","tag-policy","tag-says","tag-spending","tag-tax","tag-that","tag-to","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-update","tag-will"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551090","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=551090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551090\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/548316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}