Gower on Labour’s blunder bus

Patrick Gower writes in the HoS:

Labour’s campaign bus is officially called Big Red.

But this week a more appropriate moniker was surely the David Cunliffe Blunder Bus.

The signs were never really that good for the bus from the campaign’s first week, when it had a prang in Tauranga, escaping with scratched paint.

This week it was Labour’s campaign itself that veered seriously off-course when leader Cunliffe botched and bungled his way through a defence of Labour’s capital gains tax policy.

This put a serious dent in Labour’s campaign. It could turn out to be a tragedy for Labour. …

Instead, it is now a “what might have been” moment for Cunliffe, because Cunliffe somehow made it even worse when he stuffed up explaining the inheritance aspect of the capital gains tax – again, that’s something he should have known.

And we are still in the dark over whole the exemption riddled CGT would work. Cunliffe said you won’t be taxed on your parents home, so long as you sell it within a month of them dying. How he has backtracked and said they’ll fill in that detail after the election. It could be a week, a month or a year.