Soper says PM in state of shock

The Herald reports:

If you thought the Government (well more correctly the Labour Party) is hell-bent on committing political suicide you’d be wrong.
The Beehive is reeling and sitting in the top office of the ever diminishing building Jacinda Ardern’s in a state of shock at the reaction to the Taxation Working Group’s report.

I’m shocked that they’re shocked. They had the report for a month, which should have been plenty of time to digest it, work out the ramification, conclude the proposed model is a dog, and kill it at birth.

Now she’s wide awake to the political damage it’s doing to Labour, spending the first six minutes of her post-Cabinet press conference yesterday giving us a lesson on how to report it accurately.
Ardern was at pains to ensure the students understood her lecture. The debate should be about a fairer and more balanced taxation system and is most certainly not an attack on the Kiwi way of life as some have claimed.

How is it fair to tax people for inflation? How is it fair to double tax small business owners? How it is fair to tax people more who have a home office?

To ensure we knew what she was banging on about she reminded us that she grew up in Morrinsville, in a small town rural community. All of her jobs were mostly with small businesses and she knows the debate going on in rural New Zealand and their views will be heard, she insisted.

Now that is a brazen rewriting of truth. I can only imagine she means her stint in a fish and chip shop. The reality is that since finishing study, her only jobs have been in Government.

To claim she has worked in small business because of her school jobs is akin to me claiming I worked in the newspaper industry because I had a paper run when I was 12.

Will she claim to have aviation experience because once when she was seven she handed out lollies on a plane?

As the lesson was drawing to a close she told us the bleedingly obvious: that the tax would be paid only when a capital gain is realised, or when an asset gets sold, so there won’t be an ongoing impost.

This is not true. You can also get hit with CGT if you move overseas for a while.