Kate Hawkesby: This Govt has done it's chips and panic mode isn't going to save them

It’s becoming more apparent every day that this Government is on its way out and I just wonder whether that’s why they’re spiralling now into the realm of the nutty.

The KiwiSaver tax announcement certainly looked like it. And now the embarrassment of axing that within about 5 minutes of announcing it due to such widespread backlash. What a cluster.

This is a government in real trouble, it's figured out opposition benches are calling them so they’re just going for broke on everything - until it gets enough backlash for them to pull a hard U-turn.

It makes me wonder if any thought goes into any policy at all, ever. 

I just don't know how they’re so tone deaf. Their ability to try to barrel through policy that negatively impacts us, instead of doing anything that’s actually useful, is worrying.

The KiwiSaver debacle was just the latest in the line-up of madness and it’s a long line. I was pleased Luxon said they’d repeal it and it should never see the light of day.

It seems National’s reading the room a hell of a lot more accurately than Labour are.

And it’s not like Labour’s not polling up the wazoo. The dollars on their polling are eye-watering, so for a party that spends that much time finding out what people think, you’d think they’d do better than throwing out policy ideas so bad they get wrenched back within 24 hours.

And this one was a no brainer. How they didn't see the negative optics on it is beyond me.

I mean what’s the one thing we’ve been told beyond a shadow of a doubt to do in this country? Save for retirement. Put money away, invest in KiwiSaver, save, save, save.

Don’t be an unnecessary burden on society, squirrel it away for a rainy day and be proactive. And so we did.

We responsibly worked and put aside money for retirement, only to have the ‘no new taxes’ crowd come along and go, oh actually, we’ll have a piece of that.

So the hard working saver was going to get less in their back pocket, while the Government creamed off some more.

Worse than the ridiculous idea in the first place, is the fact they clearly don’t think through the big picture. The optics of this were terrible from the get go. All it made people want to do was cancel their Kiwisaver.

They would have had fewer people signing up for it, or people opting out, and boom it would have been an even bigger headache down the track with not enough people saving for retirement after all. 

The Nats called it as they saw it; a government addicted to spending, and we know this with the free-for-all spray around treatment of the cost of living payment.

But trying to devalue our retirement savings was never a good plan, it was tacky and heartless. The Financial Services Council called the move ‘sub optimal’, and asked the Government to ‘rethink and re-consult’.

But why didn't it consult properly in the first place? 

The arrogance with which this Government is behaving smacks of a third-term Helen Clark government telling us how much water we can have in our showers.

When these muppets slid into power in 2020 with their huge ‘mandate’, could we ever have foreseen how out of control they would get in such a short time?

They’re lucky to be a two-term government – thanks to Covid – but at this stage I don't think even another pandemic could save them.

This is a circus that fewer and fewer of us want tickets to.

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