Labour’s meaningless tax on bottled water exports

Labour and NZ First coalition deal includes an agreement to impose a royalty on exports of bottled water.

Jacinda Ardern said in the campaign it would be between 10 and 20 cents a tonne.

So how much money will this tax raise?

An MBIE report found we had $7.1 million of exports in 2015. The average price per litre was 64 cents so that represents 11 million litres.

Now 11 million litres is 11,000 tonnes. So at the rate Ardern announces it would bring in revenue to taxpayers of between $1,100 and $2,200 per annum!!

Yep they really are that stupid.

Incidentally we extract 10 trillion litres a year of water. So the amount of extracted water that is exported is 0.0001% of that. Or of every million litres of water extracted 1.1 litres is exported.

This is such a serious problem that we need a new tax for it!