Tova on Labour’s GST own goal

Tova O’Brien writes:

What could possibly be worse than having your flagship cost of living policy leaked and announced by the opposition? 

Finally announcing your leaked and already announced flagship cost of living policy but buggering up the cost.

You also have to wonder who in Labour is leaking to Nicola. Their policy was Labour policy, not Govt policy, so the leak can’t be a public servant. It also wasn’t leaked (as is more usual) to a media source, but direct to Nicola. So really has to be a Labour MP or very senior staffer.

C’mon Labour! The Finance Minister pitched his election year budget as ‘getting the basics right’.

Someone hand that man a calculator. Just a basic one mind, let’s not confuse things with all those extra buttons on a scientific calculator.

Maybe an abacus?

So to miss the mark with the cost of its GST off fruit and veg policy by about $250million dollars is the gnarliest own goal we’ve seen since the FIFA Women’s World Cup kicked off. 

Making matters so much worse for Labour, the person who alerted the masses to the miscalculation was the very same person who was leaked the policy and cut Labour’s lunch in the first place, National’s Finance Spokesperson Nicola Willis.

To be fair, Labour did notice the error themselves. They just decided not to tell any and hope no one would notice the difference between the embargoed documents and the speeches.

The spin machine was quick to fire up about falsehoods from the opposition with a government spokesperson telling journalists, “the fact sheet was an earlier version that was only sent to media under embargo ahead of the announcement”.

“The materials that were publicly released at the time of the announcement were all correct.”

Problem was there were no materials publicly released at the time of the announcement – or at any point after it for that matter.

So they never told anyone about the hole and never issued new material correcting it until after Willis pointed it out.