Nicola Willis: Finance Minister on the low voter turnout in the local body elections

Participation in local elections is at a historic low and there's growing calls for reform.

Turnout's been higher in rural areas and much lower in the main cities, but data shows under 40 percent of eligible voters made their voices heard.

Finance Minister Nicola Willis says a simpler solution is needed, much like the general elections.

"It might be simpler if it was just - turn up and vote. Turn up to the booth, turn up to the place just as you do for the general Government elections."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
With us.

Speaker 2 (00:00):
Now we have Nikola Wulis, the Finance Minister. Nikola Hello,
hello Heather, Hey, before we get started, is there a
poll coming out with TV INZ tonight.

Speaker 1 (00:08):
I understand there is.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Is it good for you guys or not?

Speaker 1 (00:12):
Well, as we always say, poles bounce up and down
and all around. It is fair to say that this
one shows a different result from other polls that have
been published recently.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
So for this one you start with a three instead
of a two.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
I'm not going to comment on it because I take
our obligations to TVNZ seriously and till I've taken that
news to their viewers, I shouldn't.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Well stand by. We'll stand by now on Chorus, if
we sell the Chorus debt at how much of a
discount are we selling it?

Speaker 1 (00:40):
Well, that's exactly why we're going out to explore that
with the market. Essentially, Chorus already obligated to pay us
back lending that the Crown did to them, And what
we're investigating is if we gave that debt to someone
else to manage and we got paid back quicker, would
that be worth it for the Crown. So we need
to weigh what price would we get it for. What

(01:01):
could we use that money for today that would be
of value, What extra borrowing would that prevent us having
to do, and what would that be worth overall? So
we're going out to get a bit more information about
what the price would be that we could get for it,
and then we'll make some judgments about whether we proceed.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
What if you I mean you must have crunch some
numbers to kind of have a fair idea of what
you would tolerate. Would you tolerate I don't know it
discount as big as thirty percent?

Speaker 1 (01:25):
Well, it is a commercially sensitive transaction. So I don't
want to comment on that because I want to get
the best steal possible for the taxpayer, and any comments
I make at this point could foreclose the options. At
the current book value, the securities which we have have
a value of six hundred and forty two million, but
the actual value will depend on the market.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
Okay, now, on the family boost. Nearly half of the
money it was revealed over the weekend as going to
families who earn more than one hundred and twenty thousand
dollars a year. Now, this can't be. What we want
to do is be putting money into relatively wealthy families pockets.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
Do we well break that down and think about who
are those families. So the thing with family boaster is
you claim more depending on what level of fees you pay.
So you have to be paying three hundred dollars a
week or more to claim the full entitlement. So families
paying that amount of fees tend to be where mum

(02:17):
and dad are both working full time or both caregivers
are working full time, and so therefore they're eligible for
more support because they're paying more than fit in fees.
So it's always been designed to give a little bit
of help to those people who are working hard, paying
huge early childhood and education fees in order to be
able to work. So that's what the scheme's for. It's

(02:40):
for those battling parents who are out there trying to
do the right thing, working really hard, juggling like crazy,
and then they get hit by the big easy.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
This is welfare, right, and we just don't have that
much money as a country. We should be giving welfare
to the people who actually can't afford it and the
rest everybody else just needs to make do, don't we.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
Well, this is very targeted support, so to be eligible
for it, you still have to be under household income
over the course of a year, and you have to
be paying those ECE fees in the first place. It
was a cornerstone part of our tax relief package that
we campaigned on at the election because we said, look,
when we're offering tax relief, we want it for everyone

(03:20):
who's working, and we've delivered that. But we're also particularly
sympathetic to parents at that early stage when you're just
set upon by fees, because actually it should all be appreciating.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
You should have simply get in tax relief. Then shouldn't
you let people keep more of their tax rather than
taking the tax and then redistributing it as welfare. It's
a rich one.

Speaker 1 (03:37):
Well, it's the most expensive time in life when your
kids are in early childhood education because once they go
to school, that's free. But in that early stage, when
you've often also got a first mortgage or high rental costs,
where you're actually limited in your ability to return to
work full time, you really get hit by costs. So
we're upfront we're going to target extra relief at families

(03:59):
with young children. And actually, when I talked to mums
and dads up looking down the country and actually grandparents.
They say, well, of all the times in life, that's
the time to help.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
Did you vote in the local body elections?

Speaker 1 (04:11):
I did.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
If anybody was going to get away with not voting,
I thought it was going to be somebody as busy
as you. All Right, when you opened your book phone, Nicoller,
were your heartened by the quality of the people. Was
there a moment where you thought, oh lord, here we go.

Speaker 1 (04:28):
Well, look I'm in Wellington, right and so.

Speaker 2 (04:32):
So it was o here we go.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
Well, look, I've been up front. What I want for
Wellington is for Wellingtonians not to face the rate increases
that they had in recent years. And what was quite
obvious to me was there was no one really running
a campaign message that was really clearly about that, with
a really clear plan.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
Wasn't that Raye chungs But then he got tripped up
by the pendulous breasts?

Speaker 1 (04:58):
There was that. But also you missed my second bit,
which was and a really clear plan to deliver it.
Oh you did. Well. I just think that spelling these
things out really helps. And look where we are. We've
got a new mayor that can only be a good
thing that he's got a clear mandate from the people.
We've got a new council and I want to work
really constructively with that new council to do good things well, given.

Speaker 2 (05:20):
The turnout is so poor, do you know, I mean,
I'm starting to come around to the idea that we
need some structural reform here. We actually probably need to.
We've got sixty seven territorial authority's probably about a thousand
local body politicians across the country, not a number I'm
making up. Do you not think that we need to
cut it right back?

Speaker 1 (05:36):
Well, of what I'm increasingly of the view of is
that this whole postal voting thing is too complicated for
a lot of people. Do you know it might be
a lot simpular if it was just turn up and vote,
Turn up to the booth, turn up to the place,
just as you do for general government elections, because I
just have sympathy for the people. You know, you get

(05:58):
the letter or you don't get the letter then and
you have to fill in the papers, then you have
to remember to seend them, and that's a lot of
steps in the process, whereas just bowling up to your
local voting place is quite simple. I'm not in favor
of online voting. I think that's open to all sorts
of problems, but I do think that we should be
having another lock at the voting system as a whole
to make sure as many people vote as possible.

Speaker 2 (06:18):
Now, I am loving all the government agencies going after
the money that's owed to them or other people, and
the IDs obvious doing a great job here. But my
question to you is why has it taken so long
to recover debt that has been outstanding for five years?

Speaker 1 (06:31):
Yeah, look, it's a really good question. I actually spoke
with the ID about this today, and they made quite
a deliberate decision during COVID not to chase text debt
because they wanted to leave a bit of time for
everyone to get on their feet. But the problem is
we're still paying the price for that some years later.
And at the end of the day, the vast majority

(06:51):
of tax payers pay the text they owe by law,
and it's not fair on everyone else if some people
just shirk their obligation and so IRD are now chasing that.
We of course, as a government, have given them funding
to ensure that they can do audits, they can chase up,
they can do those things because for us it's about fairness.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
Yeah, brilliant. Hey Nicola, thanks very much, appreciate it. Nichola Willis,
Finance Minister. For more from Heather Duplessy Allen Drive. Listen
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