“I’m going to bring down the cost of living”. No, you’re not. None of you are. At best you might slow down increases. Any quick drop in the cost of living will come from lower oil prices, but nothing politicians are going to do will reduce anything. Pretty much all parties are guilty of this.
“I’m going to create xxx number of jobs”. No, you’re not. You can’t create any jobs. You can make conditions more favourable for business to create jobs. You can tax existing and future jobs, reducing those job numbers to transfer to new state-sector jobs (which is a transfer). So you wont create anything. Even big infrastructure projects don’t “create” jobs unless they result in higher productivity from what is being built. Again pretty much all parties are guilty.
“I’m going to fix healthcare”. No, you’re not. Publicly provided taxpayer funded healthcare is always going to involve rationing. It’s never going to be enough for the medical professional unions. There is always going to be more demand for new pharmaceutical and new procedures than supply of them. It’s a matter of what gets prioritised, unless you want to radically change the system, and none of them do. Fairly ubiquitous as well.
“We’re investing in….” No, you’re not. You’re spending other people’s money. You don’t expect a return on the investment. It wont generate more money than you spend. It’s just a euphemism for subsidising what you think is good for us. Businesses invest. Entrepreneurs invest. Savers invest. Politicians spend, and when their “investments” cost far more and deliver no net benefit, they aren’t accountable and you get the bill. They all think they are investing.
“We’ll save you money by spending it”. No, you wont. It’s smoke and mirrors. You say you’ll give people money after taxing other people, but you’ll never know what those you taxed would have spent or invested their money on. You’ll never know the jobs, the sales, the donations, the wealth generated from it, because it’s not your money. ACT is perhaps the only one explicitly different on this, although NZ First and National slip into it from time to time, and even Labour sometimes has flashes of inspiration.
“We’ll ensure equality of opportunity”. No, you can’t. You can’t possibly ensure everyone has the same upbringing, with similar parents, with similar families, neighbours, friends and teachers. You can’t protect everyone from sickness, disability, disease, accidents or natural disasters. It’s simply existentially impossible. This is less common, but all parties typically say it at some point.
"We're bringing down (or will bring down) the debt". No you're not. To be fair the Greens and TPM don't care about public debt because consciously or not they believe in the voodoo funny money of MMT. MMT brought you the grotesque house price inflation under Ardern and the general inflation as well, but more importantly has been behind the hypergrowth in government debt in multiple Western countries - which of course has done so much. National, in particular Willis and Luxon, are guilty of this claim and it is wrong. Until there are budget surpluses, debt isn't coming down. They use the measure of public debt as a % of GDP to get around that, which isn't a bad measure, but even then it's not right, yet.
"We'll end dependency on fossil fuels" No you wont. Aviation is a long way from moving from fossil fuels and for now, "sustainable aviation fuels" are expensive and in short supply. The effect of forcing their use will inflate airfares considerably, which also affects air freight costs. Do you see anyone saying this? No. Moreover, there is little movement for heavy shipping to be off of fossil fuels, and it's going to be a good decade or so before much heavy trucking is as well. Given the relative poverty of New Zealand compared to other developed countries, it will be some time before most cars are electric, and notwithstanding the enthusiasm of some, much of the rail network will remain diesel because it carries so little freight. Getting off of transport, moving to 100% renewable electricity is expensive and not worth doing, as the Ardern Government's Climate Change Committee found in 2019.
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