Ten reasons to vote to change the Government
1) Vision
Labour have shown themselves to be a Government with no vision other than to stop Don Brash. There are no plans for the future, no way ahead.
Brash has created almost all of the agenda, and Labour have been in catchup mode. On treaty issues, on taxation, on welfare reform, on student loans National has led and Labour have followed.
2) A once in a generation chance to lower tax
If a centre right Government is not elected in 2005, the opportunity to significantly lower taxes may never occur again. The reason is that a re-elected Labour Government would vow to never ever let the surplus get so big again. They would make sure that within minutes of a surplus appearing they had invented new ways to spend it. They’ll buy everyone a pet cow if necessary, just so long as they don’t have a surplus and can then claim no room for tax cuts.
And the reason tax cuts are good is not personal gain. Hell my annual saving I could probably make in a day or two if I got off my arse. It’s about having a faster growing economy.
3) Education
Labour have seriously screwed up the education system. Not in a minor way, but major league stuff here. Just read the reports on NCEA.
Trevor Mallard is not the person to fix the mess he created. And neither is David Benson-Pope. Bill English is. He will be an outstanding Minister of Education who has a passion for excellence for the school sector
4) Integrity
Helen Clark’s endorsement of the behaviour of Taito Phillip Field in paying an illegal over-stayer $1.20 an hour to work for him in Samoa, while getting a work permit for him off his colleague is appalling. At the very very minimum she should have got a QC to investigate, Or even reprimanded him. But no she has praised him.
5) Under 20% tax for 85% of taxpayers
The signal it will send to people entering the workforce, saving for their mortgage, paying off their loan is immense. Trust me that marginal rates do affect incentives, and it would be great to be in a country where no New Zealander will pay more than 19 cents in the dollar tax on their income up to $50,000.
6) Ideology
Labour really has bent over backwards to stick it to the private sector in any area where it may compete with state unions. They even discriminated against three year olds, until they backed down. In every sector from hospitals, to schools, to tertiary education to prisons they put ideology ahead of common sense. Patients have died because Labour refused to allow private hospitals with capacity to gain contracts for publicly funded operations.
A vibrant private sector improves the public sector. A lack of competition through monopoly provision has never ever produced quality outcomes.
7) Tertiary Education
The amount of money wasted on scam tertiary courses is somewhere between the hundreds of millions and billions if you count all non completed sub-degree courses. We used to get outraged over $20,000 coffee machines for Treasury. Ministers should have been sacked for the tertiary education fiascoes. Especially as the warnings had been there for years. Scandal after scandal was exposed and nothing was done until it all got too much.
How can a Minister see an institution go from $5 million a year to $246 million in just five years and not put a stop to it, and ensure quality. Maharey presided over the biggest waste of money any Government has ever seen in NZ’s history.
And I am a fan of investing more into tertiary education. One could have got close to universal allowances maybe, if Maharey was allowing money to be wasted away because it was politically incorrect to interfere and stop it.
8) John Key as Minister of Finance
Need more be said!
9) Their student loan bribe
If you want to invest $300 million a year more into tertiary education, then there are some great ways you could do that. Lower fees or better allowances. But interest free loans is the stupidest way to do it. As we now know, it will actually increase long-term student debt by $5 billion or so. It provides all the wrong incentives, and its only redeeming feature is that is sounds appealing on the surface.
Promising $300 million a year in lower fees may not have got the same headline, but it would be a much better way of helping students that this idiotic policy.
10) Don Brash as Prime Minister
I’m not just saying this, but I think Brash will make an outstanding Prime Minister. I’ve worked with and for him and he is genuinely nice guy with a good sense of humour. He is very seriously intelligent and generally knowledgeable in every policy area. Yes there have been bloopers on the campaign trail, but it has been obvious how much he has grown over the five week period.
He is a skilled CEO, and a good team leader. He has also shown at Orewa and beyond an ability to communicate directly to New Zealanders. This may be our only chance to experience Don Brash as Prime Minister, and it one which I think would be very good for New Zealand.