September 5, 2024 • 34 mins
It’s been nearly a year since the Government changed hands, and Opposition Leader Chris Hipkins is back with Kerre Woodham to answer the hard-hitting questions.
Hipkins is pointing his finger at the coalition for slowing infrastructure down because of a lack of bipartisanship.
Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop has been urging parties to work across the House to secure a solid building pipeline.
But Labour leader Hipkins says it's the new Government which has been more partisan on infrastructure investment.
He told Kerre Woodham the coalition put a whole lot of things on hold already underway after the election.
Hipkins says many of those projects need to happen anyway, so when Labour regains power they won't stop things already started just because it wasn't their priority.
WATCH ABOVE
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the carry wood of morning's podcast from
news Talk said.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
B time once again for our quarterly catch up with
Labor leader Chris Hipkins and Opposition leader here for the
r If you have any sensible questions, sensible questions for.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
The leaders, not them ourselves, car well.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Do you want to see some If you have any
questions for the leader of the opposition, takes them through
or give us a call, which would be our preference.
On eight hundred eighty ten eighty. We'll get straight into things.
Good morning, Chris, and happy birthday.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Thank you. That was yesterday. Yeah, I know, and now
we're back into it again.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Well, I'm of an age I have birthday years now,
not just birthday days.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
That sounds like a great concept. I love it.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Yeah, No, it's a very good thing to do by partisanship.
I think a lot of us would love to see
you guys getting together as as major parties and coming
up with a plan of attack and allowing for Okay,
I'm not really big on cycle ways, but I understand
you are Labor, so we'll give you a cycleway as
(01:09):
part of our top ten. You can give us a
road and let's have that.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
I think people underestimate how much bipartisanship there is already.
So if I think about the law changes that go
through Parliament, for example, I'd say eighty plus percent of
that would be relatively bipartisan. There's not a lot of
dissent about it, and so on. I think what we've seen,
which is a little different, and particularly in the last
you know, since the election, is that there has been
more partisanship when it comes to things like infrastructure investment.
(01:37):
So you know, a new government came in, they put
a whole lot of things on hold that were already underway.
And I'm not saying that our previous government in twenty
seventeen didn't do that. I don't think we did it
to the extent that they have done it. But it
does happen when there's a change of government. And I
do think that there's a valid argument that says that
just slows everything down. A lot of that stuff still
needs to happen anyway, and you should just get on
(01:59):
with it. So what I've said isn't I think that's
a fair request. So when we come into government, yes,
our priorities for spend might be different, but if something started,
we're not going to stop it just because it wasn't
our priority. We want to keep it going because what
we've seen if you look at the numbers, there's eight
thousand few people working just in building and construction alone
since the election, and that's because all this everything slowed
(02:21):
down as the government's reassessed its priorities. I just think
that was unnecessary. I think if they had continued, you know,
they should have just continued the school projects, the hospital
projects and so on and said, yes, but we're going
to change what's further on in the pipeline, so as
new projects get started there'll be different priorities from the
last government. I think that would have actually meant that
we didn't get the big slow down in that sector
(02:42):
that we've seen that.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Was slowing down before the election. Though there was a
slow down in pipeline work before the electric.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Some yes, but the government is exacerbated has added to it.
So take state house builds for example, twenty twenty three,
we built a record number. Next year they'll build none.
That has an impact on that industry at a time
when the private market house builds is slowing down. The
government pulling the pin on all of its house building
(03:10):
is also slowed the market.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
A lot of the builds that were under take an
underlabor had been started by National anyway, because they were
responding to the fact that there weren't enough state houses
being built. That started you continued. Also National was questioning
do they need to be that bespoke? And I think
that is that not a relevant question?
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Largely they're not. So if you look at the I mean,
I've just visited a housing development. Where was I earlier
in the week. I'm just trying to remember where I was.
But I'd visited a housing development where they It was
in somewhere in the Waikato, I think where they had
based it, and I was in funkad A. There you
go very different from the Wyo, but you lose track
and so, but they had built five houses. They were
(03:50):
all the same and it works really well because you
get a standard design, you can replicate it. That's how
a lot of the original state houses were built. Works
really well.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
A lot of the newer ones aren't or weren't.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
I don't think that's true. I mean, I think you've
got difficult sites and some of the houses, some of
the sites they're working to now, do need a bit
of customization for the sites. So again, if I look
at school building, I think this idea of bespoke design
is sometimes a bit overstated.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
If it was a criticism of the previous government's school buildings,
well yeah, but no, but it's not saying prefabs will
do it.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah, but I don't think it's a valid one because
I as Ministry of Education in twenty eighteen, I got
the Ministry of Education to do a standard design catalog
and I used to have it sitting on my desk.
It was this big a three thing and schools were
basically given the catalog and said you can pick these
and you can change the color. You know, you can
do a few things, but by and large you can
just pick from the catalog. Where the spoke designs came
(04:48):
in was largely to do with geography rather than school needs.
So tatewaanu Amata High School we did a big redevelopment there.
It was built on a swamp, so suddenly the designs
had to change because the foundations had to go lower
in order to build on swamp. Wellington Girls a school
that you might be familiar with that is a very
small site on a hill right over the top of
(05:10):
a fault line needs slightly different design to.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Wouldn't you others, wouldn't you want to know that it
was a swamp before you picked it as a site
to build.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Well, unfortunately that was picked years ago, and there isn't
a whole lot of other available land to build a
school in a different place, unfortunately, So we're stuck with
what was chosen fifty sixty years.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
And it does take enormous kohones to spend billions of
dollars on an infrastructure project, enormous, but it takes even
bigger ones to stop it, to say we're throwing good
money after bad.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Well, yeah, but I don't think that that's what the
government have necessarily done. So if you take the roads
of national significance that they that they have committed to
that there's an economic analysis that estimates the economic benefit
that you get out of the road for every dollar
that you put in. It's called a BCR ratio. Many
of those roads have a BCR ratio of one. You're
(06:01):
getting a dollar of economic return out of every dollar
that you spend. Even in the worst case scenario. The
Inter Island Ferry project had a BCR of more than
four between four and five, So it was still delivering
a higher return for every dollar spent than a lot
of the roads of national significance were and that was
on the worst case scenario. Now, I think the worst
case scenario was unacceptable. I think the land side infrastructure
(06:24):
costs had blown out, and yeah, but we as a
government said we weren't going to fund them. Based on
what Kiwi Rail were asking for, we still thought you
could order the firies and you could do the land
side infrastructure cheaper. We certainly weren't giving them the blank
check to do the most expensive option.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
When it comes to spending, there's only so much money
we can spend anyway, and that's only going to get
worse as we've got an aging population. Though hopefully the
Cullen Fund will take care of the super costs, but
we've got big healthcare costs around an aging population, and
it's an I think it's a really unfair burden to
(07:00):
put on young ones.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
I think we've got to be honest as a country
about two things in this area. One is the cost
of the infrastructure that we're going to need to build,
and the other is the cost of the services that
we're going to need to provide. So if you take
the over sixty five population, if we go back to
twenty thirteen, you know the key English government, the over
sixty five population was about fourteen percent of the population.
About two hundred thousand people have joined the over sixty
(07:23):
five since then, it's now about sixteen percent of the population.
Go another two years ahead and that's going to go
up to one point two million people. I ead, about
twenty one percent of the population. That's going to increase
government spending, not just because of superannuation, but because of
the extra healthcare that over sixty five is consumed that
younger people don't, And we're going to have to be
honest about that. It's going to increase government spending or
(07:46):
we're going to have to cut either health care that's
available or superannuation. We don't need to. But if we
have this arbitrary constraint that says we're going to keep
government spending at thirty percent to GDP, which successive governments
have committed to over a long period of time, then
we're not going to be able to afford all the
things that New Zealanders expect us to pay for.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
So you want to see that that lifted. Treasury has
advised that thirty percent is sensible. You know, anything over
that is for crises. Surely an aging population is something
that could have been forsaorn as we saw with the
cul and fund.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Well, I think you have to, I mean, you have
to be clear about what you're increasing government spending for
and what it's so borrowing. If we take borrowing for example,
then we are going to need to increase borrowing to
pay for the longer term assets that we will pay
off over the life of those assets. The current government
are proposing to do that anyway.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
But they look like private public partnership.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
You still have to pay. Someone's still going to.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Pay, but not all of it. You know they're looking at.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Well, no, you're actually through a PPP, you pay more
because the private sector's cost of capital is higher than
the government's cost of capital. You just spread the cost
over a longer period. But you actually but the taxpayer
actually ultimately ends up paying more through a PPP than
they do if the government just funds it up front.
And so I mean a hard to sell, Well, it's
not a hard to sell because ultimately, you know, you're
mortgaging the future. You're basically pushing it to a future
(09:06):
generation to pay a bigger cost in order to defer
some of the costs that you might otherwise pay today.
So I think again we need to have an honest
conversation with Kiwis about that and say, if you want
to have the infrastructure investment now, either you can use
private equity, which you'll pay more for in the longer term,
or you can do government borrowing, which you'll pay less
(09:28):
for in the longer term. Either way, you've got to
do one of those two things. You can't just magic
the cash are ab out of nowhere.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
So you'd be willing to go back to Treasury and say, look,
we're going to have to raise that threshold that you
think is sensible because we just don't have enough money.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
I think the debt threshold is definitely something we should
talk about because ultimately we're just not going to be
able to put the infrastructure in place. You know, we've
got billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure that we
need to pay for. We're not going to be able
to do that unless we increase borrowing or get capital
injection from somewhere else. So if you look at the
even the government's roading projects. They've released them. This week's
(10:05):
billions of dollars every year that's unfunded. They have no
idea how they're going to pay for it. Now they
talk about things like value capture, which is another name
for capital gains tax. Basically, they're saying, we're going to
capture the value, the increased value of the land around
where these roads are built, and we're going to tax that.
We're going to use that to pay for the roads.
That's something you do after you've built the road. You
can't do that ahead of building the road, which means
(10:27):
you still have to pay to build the road. So
you're going to be borrowing for that. You might have
a new revenue source to pay back the borrowing, i e.
A capital gains tax or value capture tax, whatever however
you want to structure it, you're still going to have
to pay for it somehow.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
What billion dollar infrastructure projects are you proudest of that
your government built over the past six years.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
I think if you look at the I mean, none
of these, none of the big infrastructure projects that cost
billions of dollars are finished in a five year window.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Now, of course they're not, but I mean what.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
The hospital, So Dunedin Hospital really proud that that's well underway.
If you look at the other score, many of the
school rebuilding projects that we started, and many of them
are underway, not finished, but they're big school rebuilding projects.
Some of the roading projects, the rail projects, these are
things which I think will make a difference. We spent
a lot of money on rail, to be frank, billions
(11:15):
of dollars on rail, largely just to keep the railway
system as it was, because it was so badly run
down that we're going to have to close large parts
of it if we didn't spend a lot of money
maintaining them.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
News talks said, be Clint, good morning to you.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
Good morning, carry How are you very well?
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Thanks excellent.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
I have just two things I wanted to just ask Chris,
and happy birthday yesterday, but two things you've said. And
I think it's great that you guys work together and
obviously behind the scenes that we don't see you work
together a lot. You said you're not going to drop
things just because it isn't your idea, and I praised that.
But a couple of weeks ago you're on record saying
oil and gas will stop immediately when you guys get
(11:55):
back in power, which seems disingenuous. I'd like to know
what you think about that. And secondly, when you were
in power, you brought up a lot of first time
by a housing stock at a market rates, which really
messed up the market. And we obviously had a bit
of a problem with housing at the moment. How will
you fix that if you get back.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
In Yeah, I think on the issue of oil and guess,
we haven't said that we would stop oil and gas
immediately on coming into government. We've said that we'd do
something similar to what we did last time. Last time
we honored all of the existing permits, all of the
existing blocks that were out there, and we would do
the same again. And you know the reality we do
have to face up to some realities. Though. We haven't
(12:33):
had a new permit issued since two thousand and four.
So even though the key government were out there saying
we want more oil and gas exploration, they weren't able
to achieve that. We haven't had any find of oil
and guess since about two thousand and one. I think,
so we have to be realistic that, you know, the
commercial realities of oil and gas exploration are stacking up
(12:55):
against significant new oil and gas exploration in New Zealand,
regardless of what the government does. So that's why we
want to see an acceleration of renewable electricity. It's ultimately
paper and actually it can be developed faster than oil
and gas. Even if we found guests today, it's probably
you know, at least sort of seven or eight years
if they're moving really fast, before we would actually be
(13:17):
able to use that to generate electricity.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
I think that's fair enough as long as as long
as you're just being open and looking at it. And
I don't think the result of bunch of boiling gas
left that's great.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Yeah, And looking on the issue around rentals, I actually
do think that's a fair thing, you know. I think
as a government we need to shift from buying existing
homes to building new ones. And I don't think we
should be competing with first home buyers to buy more houses.
So I think if you look at the state houses
that we've got now, a lot of them sit on
(13:49):
a lot of land that's poorly utilized. I think redeveloping
that land by putting a higher density of state houses
on there, and it doesn't all have to be state
housing either. So if you take away one state house build,
you know, four new houses of one or two of
those could end up being private home because it makes
for a better community frankly, to have a mix of them.
(14:10):
As long as you're increasing the overall number of state houses,
I think that's how you grow the affordable rental market.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
So that was a kind of a strategic error to
be out in the market with first time buyers.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
I think it was a needs must situation. You know,
you had people who were homeless, you needed to find
somewhere to house them. But one of the reasons I
was really keen on us ramping up state house builds
was so that we're not competing with first time buyers.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
News Talk, said b Grant, we'll get you on before
the news headlines are very good morning to you, Carrie.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
How are you good? Good good, Thanks for taking my call.
You and I had a chat last week or the
week before, I believe it was around the second in
COVID and Quarry, and I think the consensus then was
that an apology would go a long way for people
(15:01):
at myself who were on the wrong end of mandates. Obviously,
we're hearing a lot about division and unity and coming together.
I'd just like to ask Chris, it's my first opportunity
to speak to someone who was in the previous Labor government.
Does he not think, for someone like myself, who voted
(15:22):
Labor before I voted for Jacinta the first time, that
it would go a long way to get people like
myself on side as sad just apologize for the things
that he got wrong.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
Yeah, we've got the first Royal Commission report is due
out I think around November, and it's due to the
government around November, and I've said that I'll await the
findings of that first Royal Commission report before we make
any judgments on that. I had a pretty open session
with the Royal Commission, which I understand from what they
(15:55):
fed back to me will be reflected in the report,
including reflecting on areas where I thought we could you know,
we could have done better. So but I'm going to
await the final you know, or the final port of
the current Royal Commission before I make any call on that.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
You have said though, that you think, with the benefit
of hindsight, you wouldn't have kept Auckland lockdown.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
You Yeah, I think there's a few things that that
that that I reflected in my conversation with the Royal
Commission bearing in mine. I had my first conversation with
them over a year ago now, because you know, these
things take a long time. But I reflected on that
Auckland lockdown, and I also reflected on the exit from
COVID nineteens, you know, from our our sort of COVID
suppression elimination strategy that actually, you know, when you when
(16:37):
you when you're responding to the pandemic, you've you're focused
on responding to the here and now. No one gives
you a book that says this is how it ends,
this is how you get out the other side of it.
And actually, if anything, I think that was probably one
of the weaker parts. I think we actually did really
well in the beginning around them, you know, suppressing it
and then eliminating it and avoiding too many lockdowns and
so on. It got messy at the end, and I
(16:59):
think that that is from my perspective, that's actually one
of the big lessons from it. You have to have
a clearer exit strategy, and you have to think further
ahead to that exit strategy, even as you're dialing up
the response, you need to think about how you're going
to dial it down again.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
At the other end, I think grant two was that
you I was talking to with somebody who said that
they took great comfort from justinto Adern at the time
saying nobody would be forced to have vaccinations, making your
employment dependent on being vaccin vaccinated as it's dancing on
the head of a pin to say that nobody was forced.
And I think that's where a lot of people feel
(17:33):
a lot of hurt and a lot of betrayal.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Yeah, and I do hear that, and I understand that.
And I have to tell you that the issues around
vaccination was some of the hardest that we dealt with
through the COVID nineteen period. We were trying to keep
New Zealander is safe. We were trying to stop the
spread of the virus. We were trying to keep the
economy moving. We had bearing in mind that we had
(17:57):
a lot of people who were refusing to go to
work if there were unvaccinated people in their workplace. There
was a lot that we were trying to balance up there.
And you know, anybody who thinks that all of that
decision making didn't sit heavily on the people who were
making those decisions that really did. It was hard going.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Does that answer your question?
Speaker 4 (18:16):
Ground well, not really Carry, I'll be honest. I mean,
it's all well and good to say that at the
time it was it was hard decisions, and I understand that.
But we already have the benefit of hindsight now, Chris,
And I mean I think even you must realize by now,
(18:36):
people like myself three years on, no COVID, no vaccinations.
All I'm asking for, mate, is I get that it
was hard at the time. All I'm asking for is
as simply to say, look, I'm sorry, we got it wrong.
(18:57):
And it just I mean, as I said to Carry
when I rung last time, it appears from the outside
looking in that no matter what happens, and no matter
what side the politicians are on, you're all just incapable
of apologizing when you get things wrong. There's always some
qualification like whether it's oh, you know, we all had heart,
(19:18):
we all had choices to make, rather than just saying, look,
now was the benefit of hindsight we were wrong. It's
always I'm going to wait for this and you know,
you know the answer. It just seems to be too
hard to say. Look, yes, we got it wrong.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
During the COVID nineteen response period where we did know
clearly get things wrong. I actually stood up in front
of the country in many cases on a live television
broadcast and admitted that we'd got things wrong on the
issues of vaccination, though if you follow the science, and again,
I think the Royal Commission have been tasked with canvassing
the science, canvassing whether we did get the balance right there.
(19:59):
Getting a high vaccination rate in New Zealand is one
of the reasons why those who were not vaccinated, actually
we're safer and we're better off. So in some cases
there are people who couldn't be vaccinated for various health
reasons and so on, and so that's why I'm saying, well,
await the Royal Commission. I'm not convinced that the high
vaccination rates that we got in New Zealand were the
(20:22):
wrong thing to do. In fact, I think that the
science almost certainly is going to show that it was
the right thing to do.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Can we have Opposition leader, Labor leader Chris Hipkins here,
What haven't we touched on? Oh, I know, capital wealth,
capital gains tax wealth tax, inheritance tax. Surely you must
adopt that to get some kind of differential between.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
I think we'll have quite a different tax policy next time,
and it will involve broadening New Zealand's tax base. I
think it is absolutely time for us to have that
conversation as a country. It's time for us to do
something about it.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
See they do something about it because we have had
the conversation. That's what I'm saying, commission the tax work.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
That's right, and so we're working through that now. Will
we will be going into the next campaign with a
plan to do something think about it.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
A capital gains tax.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Well, it'll be something in that space. You know. We're
working through the design of what that will be. The
Michael Cullen report provides a really good blueprint that the
subsequent work by the i D also provides further evidence.
So we're working through that. But I want to be
able to answer all the detailed questions when we do it.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Put does as Michael recommended, our capital gains tax would differentiate.
You've got a really hardcore group of people, with capable
people within your own party who want to see it happen.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
I think there'll be a form of capital taxations and
that will certainly be part of the mix, part of our.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
I'm just seeing your billboards borrow more, tax more vote labored.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Well that certainly that's certainly what the National Party will
try and do to us.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
That's what you've told me, to borrow more. And then
you want to put a.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
You're necessary not necessarily because it depends also how you
apply any money that you earn from a capital gains tax.
So you can apply that to infrastructure spend, you can
also apply it to a personal income tax brackets. I
have said that I think that we shouldn't leave large
gaps between income tax brackets adjustments, as has happened under
successive governments previously. But if you're going to adjust them
(22:16):
more regularly, you have to broaden the tax base in
order to be able to do that. So at the moment,
salary and wage journers pay a disproportionate share of the
tax that the government collects relative to others. And if
you compare us to Australia, to the US, to the UK,
to all those other countries that we compete with for talent,
actually they don't and tax people salary way journeys to
(22:40):
the same extent proportionately as New Zealand does.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
How would you encourage there to be more salary and
way journers because we have got an aging population. You know,
we saw that when we close the borders and depended
on New Zealanders to fill the gaps. There weren't enough
of them.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Well, I mean, there are certainly plenty of working age kiwis, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
But there weren't enough workers.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Yeah, But we've also got to be careful around the
population growth that we don't grow the population to the
point where we can keep up with population growth. So
there is a balance to be had here about making
sure that we're getting the workers that we need whilst
not growing the population so fast that we run out
of houses and that the infrastructure gets choked up and
so on. We've got to build that under the ground
infrastructure to cope with population growth. So I'm certainly not
(23:25):
saying we shouldn't grow the population, but we've just got
to make sure we've got a plan around how we
actually properly fund.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
That, and where would the taxes come from if we
broaden the tax space. If we're not looking at wage
and salary owners, how do we get to people who
aren't paying their fair share.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Well, I mean that's where you look at issues around
capital gains taxation, wealth taxation, land taxation. You know those
are all there's variants of those in operation around the world.
Is not necessarily no, I mean, so you've got it.
So if you take someone who owns twenty rental properties.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Well, there's not many of those.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
There are actually quite a few people and they and
they control an awful lot of the country's wealth, and
they won't be paying a fraction of the tax that
somebody who is a salary and wage journer is paying
relative to their overall income. And I think that is
a problem with the current tax system.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
If you're depending on having enough money to spend coming
from people who own twenty rental properties, we're going to
be in big trouble.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Look, I've always been clear that we should avoid things
like taxing someone's family home. So even if we were
going to do something like a capital gains tax, we
should exempt the family home from that. So therefore it
would be targeted at the people who are by definition
having more money. Well, capital gains tax if you look
at Australia where they get billions of dollars through capital
(24:41):
gains tax every year they introduce a capital gains tax
in nineteen eighty five. The longer that you have a
capital gains tax in place, the more revenue that it raises.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Wouldn't it be better to make New Zealand more productive
rather than just taking from people who are productive.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Well, capital gains tax or if some form of capital
gains taxation can actually be part of the picture about
making New Zealand more productive at the moment, if you've
got spare money to spend, actually the finance adds up.
You know, it's good. It makes good commercial sense to
be investing in residential property. If we change that dynamic
so it makes more sense for people to be investing
in productive businesses instead, we could actually make the whole
(25:18):
country more productive.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
I think a lot of small business owners would see
that you've put barriers to productivity in terms of so
much interfering in the workplace, in terms of rather than
letting them get on and build good employer employee relations,
you don't trust employers to do that.
Speaker 4 (25:34):
Well.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
If you're talking about increasing the minimum wage, actually increasing
wages as a feature of increased productivity, yep.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
But you put the cart before the horse. You increase
the wages before they could prove their productivity. I mean,
most of small and medium business owners, they have to
have good staff, they have to look after them them.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
I mean, if you look at you know, economies around
the world where productivity has been driven upwards, increasing wages
has been one of the things that's helped to drive
productivity upwards. So it does shift the dial a bit
around government, around firm investing in new capital, equipment, new
plant and so on.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
Asking about charities and marty trusts and the like and
taxation that a couple of texts on that would you
expect charities and religious organizations and marty trust to pay tax?
I think broadening the tax.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
It really depends on the purpose of the charity, whether
it's a genuinely charitable purpose or whether it's a business
masquerading is a charity. And where there are some businesses
that masquerade as charities. And I do think that's an
area of the tax law that I understand the current
government are looking at. Will let's see what they come
back with. But if they come back with something sensible
and that space will support it.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Now, leadership, everybody, I mean of course they do. As
soon as you get somebody who leads a party to defeat,
everybody says, all, well, time to change the leader. But
it took so jolly long for Labor to get a
leader last time round. You before Jacinda took over. That
was what cobbled Labor a lot. Last time round, Ay
had a popular prime minister under Key. But even then,
(27:07):
as his popularity started to fade, you didn't have anyone ready,
so you led them to defeat. There must have been
some saber ratling.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Look, I mean I took the some holidays to think
about whether I had had it in me to, you know,
to do not only another term in opposition, but then
actually subsequent terms in government because win the election sucks.
Opposition does suck. But actually you can't just think about that.
You have to if you're going to go into the
election campaign. You have to go into the campaign aiming
to win and ready to govern again if you do win.
(27:37):
And so that means you're not thinking about the next
three years. You think about them probably the next ten.
And so I did take the summer holidays to think
about that and to think, have I got ten more
years of at least ten more years of this than
me and I do you know, I hadn't really young.
I had basically, if you take the election campaign out
of it, I was only the prime minister for about
six months.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
You were a camp minister throughout, Yes, I was.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
But being prime minister is quite a different job and
you get a different you know, it's a whole different
set of pressures and a different set of influence that
you have as prime minister. Tonight about six months at it.
So you know, I'd like to do it again because
you know, I learned a lot during that six month period.
I'm determined that we're going to use this time that
we've gotten opposition to make sure that we do go
into government better prepared next time around.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
Ye see, that's the thing that really got up my snores.
I think the last time we talked, when you said
when we came to government last time, we weren't ready.
What on earth were you all doing for nine years
on the taxpayer dollar? Weren't ready to govern?
Speaker 1 (28:33):
I mean we actually only had nine weeks, Carrie, so
we changed the leader nine weeks before the elections.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Shouldn't people who have policies be working so hard on them?
And the background absolutely, with a very clear idea about
how they wanted to see those you know, those portfolios
take shape the moment they were in a position to
do so.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
And actually, I'll go back and I'll say, you know,
the education policy that we put forward at the last election, sorry,
the twenty seventeen election was one of the most comprehensive
that we did and we were focused on implementing it
until COVID came along and turned everything upside down.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
Bruce, you have a question, Hello, Bruce.
Speaker 5 (29:09):
Yes, yeah, Hi Kerry. Look, my question is around you're
talking about productivity, but productivity has always been linked to
a lot around access to finance. And in New Zealand
we've only got access to about four large banks and
I work with a lot of smeeth so it's my
role I facilitate boards for small people. And the thing
(29:33):
that strikes me in New Zealand versus places like the
Old Germany, which actually has thousands of small banks. China,
when you think chi Chopping when he came in in
seventy eight, set about creating five thousand banks, and it
was the revolution of those countries in terms of smaller
businesses being able to access finance, which for most small
(29:55):
businesses in New Zealand is impossible. That's is it your
belief that that's where our productivity is actually missing and
tied up because of the ability to access finance to
push through machinery, which is part of the reason why
we're so poor in terms of our productivity stats in
the OECD, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
So interesting question.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I'll probably give you
three quick answers on that. One is, I do think
we need more competition in the banking sector. The second is,
I do think we need more development finance and more
of a focus on development finance. If you look at
other smaller innovative economies, development finances more really development, oh exactly.
And we had since the DFC, we haven't had any
(30:39):
kind of emphasis on development finance because it created such
a hangover for the country and so we've been reluctant
to do things in that space. But we need to
figure out how we can make development finance more available
to small businesses.
Speaker 5 (30:50):
Wouldn't this be a fantastic opportunity for Kiwi Bank to
sort of become the bank to small business and to
actually own that space.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
I would love to see Keywibank growing and being a
real disruptor in the banking sector and an innovator there.
So yes, I do think there's more space that. But
the other thing about the productivity is we do need
to be realistic about when we're talking about productivity. As
a primary sector lead country, we shouldn't compare ourselves to
other countries that might be say tech sector or services
(31:18):
sector lead and compare productivity between those countries. Because the
primary sector is very productive compared to other primary sector
around the world, but primary sector is say, less productive
per dollar spent than the tech sector, for example. So
we need to make sure that we're comparing apples with
apples when we talk about productivity, because our primary sector
(31:39):
actually is very productive, probably doesn't get the credit that
it's due for the level of productivity. But it's a
it's by definition a less productive sector, Kerry, You're looking
at me.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Lesser primary sector doesn't get the credit that it's due.
Who spults that.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
I think the whole country probably underestimates the value that
the primary sector contribute and how productive they are compared
to other primary sectors around the world.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
We've got two minutes, so you will be lead leading
Labor into the next election against Christopher Luxen. Absolutely, you
think Kristoph Luxem will be there, I'd.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
Say that's a fifty to fifty equation at the moment,
you know, I'd say keep your eye on Nikola willis.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Well, which just very capable. Absolutely. What are you most
optimistic about in terms of New Zealand having come through
the doldrums.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
I'm optimistic about the future of New Zealand's economy because
I think there's a lot to look forward to. If
you look at one of the things in which I
think we are underestimating in terms of how it's going
to support our economy in the future. As KEI we saver.
We have this big pool of retirement savings that are
now starting to be invested in New Zealand and if
you look at Australia is about twenty years ahead of
us in terms of their retirement savings. But that's one
(32:49):
of the reasons that they have done better than us
and say and the key we save is one of
the things. Well, I'm putting it on the table. We'll
give you an answer before the election as to whether
or not that's something we campaign on. But I'm certainly
I'm open to considering that. So yes, I'm not announcing
that today, Cary, but I do think can we save
it as a fantastic legacy, another one of Michael Cullens's
(33:09):
great legacies for the country. But I think that is
actually going to help to grow the New Zealand economy.
I think that investment that we're going to see through
retirement savings being invested back into the economy. I think
that's one of the reasons for us to be optimistic.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Can we do a raising of the retirement age or
so that those who are who work with their bodies,
who get knackered, Can we do a finest raising of
the retirement.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
The point that you've just raised is the reason that
I'm opposed to raising the retirement age, because for people
who have been physically physically demanding work, it wouldn't be
fair on them. One of the reasons that we've got
such acceptance of New Zealand superannuation is that it is universal.
Everybody does get it. But we've got to make sure
that we're preparing now to pay for the retirement boom.
That's pretty much on us.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
And there's your slogan, borrow more tax more.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
That is not true, Pero, you haven't been listening to
what I've been saying.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
History never repeats. Is your song choice? Very nice to
have you, and again, Chris Hopkins, labor leader, opposition leader.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Great to be here for more from Kerry Wooden Mornings.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
Listen live to news talks it'd be from nine am weekdays,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio
You're listening to the carry wood of morning's podcast from
news Talk said.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
B time once again for our quarterly catch up with
Labor leader Chris Hipkins and Opposition leader here for the
r If you have any sensible questions, sensible questions for.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
The leaders, not them ourselves, car well.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Do you want to see some If you have any
questions for the leader of the opposition, takes them through
or give us a call, which would be our preference.
On eight hundred eighty ten eighty. We'll get straight into things.
Good morning, Chris, and happy birthday.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Thank you. That was yesterday. Yeah, I know, and now
we're back into it again.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Well, I'm of an age I have birthday years now,
not just birthday days.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
That sounds like a great concept. I love it.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Yeah, No, it's a very good thing to do by partisanship.
I think a lot of us would love to see
you guys getting together as as major parties and coming
up with a plan of attack and allowing for Okay,
I'm not really big on cycle ways, but I understand
you are Labor, so we'll give you a cycleway as
(01:09):
part of our top ten. You can give us a
road and let's have that.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
I think people underestimate how much bipartisanship there is already.
So if I think about the law changes that go
through Parliament, for example, I'd say eighty plus percent of
that would be relatively bipartisan. There's not a lot of
dissent about it, and so on. I think what we've seen,
which is a little different, and particularly in the last
you know, since the election, is that there has been
more partisanship when it comes to things like infrastructure investment.
(01:37):
So you know, a new government came in, they put
a whole lot of things on hold that were already underway.
And I'm not saying that our previous government in twenty
seventeen didn't do that. I don't think we did it
to the extent that they have done it. But it
does happen when there's a change of government. And I
do think that there's a valid argument that says that
just slows everything down. A lot of that stuff still
needs to happen anyway, and you should just get on
(01:59):
with it. So what I've said isn't I think that's
a fair request. So when we come into government, yes,
our priorities for spend might be different, but if something started,
we're not going to stop it just because it wasn't
our priority. We want to keep it going because what
we've seen if you look at the numbers, there's eight
thousand few people working just in building and construction alone
since the election, and that's because all this everything slowed
(02:21):
down as the government's reassessed its priorities. I just think
that was unnecessary. I think if they had continued, you know,
they should have just continued the school projects, the hospital
projects and so on and said, yes, but we're going
to change what's further on in the pipeline, so as
new projects get started there'll be different priorities from the
last government. I think that would have actually meant that
we didn't get the big slow down in that sector
(02:42):
that we've seen that.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Was slowing down before the election. Though there was a
slow down in pipeline work before the electric.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Some yes, but the government is exacerbated has added to it.
So take state house builds for example, twenty twenty three,
we built a record number. Next year they'll build none.
That has an impact on that industry at a time
when the private market house builds is slowing down. The
government pulling the pin on all of its house building
(03:10):
is also slowed the market.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
A lot of the builds that were under take an
underlabor had been started by National anyway, because they were
responding to the fact that there weren't enough state houses
being built. That started you continued. Also National was questioning
do they need to be that bespoke? And I think
that is that not a relevant question?
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Largely they're not. So if you look at the I mean,
I've just visited a housing development. Where was I earlier
in the week. I'm just trying to remember where I was.
But I'd visited a housing development where they It was
in somewhere in the Waikato, I think where they had
based it, and I was in funkad A. There you
go very different from the Wyo, but you lose track
and so, but they had built five houses. They were
(03:50):
all the same and it works really well because you
get a standard design, you can replicate it. That's how
a lot of the original state houses were built. Works
really well.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
A lot of the newer ones aren't or weren't.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
I don't think that's true. I mean, I think you've
got difficult sites and some of the houses, some of
the sites they're working to now, do need a bit
of customization for the sites. So again, if I look
at school building, I think this idea of bespoke design
is sometimes a bit overstated.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
If it was a criticism of the previous government's school buildings,
well yeah, but no, but it's not saying prefabs will
do it.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah, but I don't think it's a valid one because
I as Ministry of Education in twenty eighteen, I got
the Ministry of Education to do a standard design catalog
and I used to have it sitting on my desk.
It was this big a three thing and schools were
basically given the catalog and said you can pick these
and you can change the color. You know, you can
do a few things, but by and large you can
just pick from the catalog. Where the spoke designs came
(04:48):
in was largely to do with geography rather than school needs.
So tatewaanu Amata High School we did a big redevelopment there.
It was built on a swamp, so suddenly the designs
had to change because the foundations had to go lower
in order to build on swamp. Wellington Girls a school
that you might be familiar with that is a very
small site on a hill right over the top of
(05:10):
a fault line needs slightly different design to.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Wouldn't you others, wouldn't you want to know that it
was a swamp before you picked it as a site
to build.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Well, unfortunately that was picked years ago, and there isn't
a whole lot of other available land to build a
school in a different place, unfortunately, So we're stuck with
what was chosen fifty sixty years.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
And it does take enormous kohones to spend billions of
dollars on an infrastructure project, enormous, but it takes even
bigger ones to stop it, to say we're throwing good
money after bad.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Well, yeah, but I don't think that that's what the
government have necessarily done. So if you take the roads
of national significance that they that they have committed to
that there's an economic analysis that estimates the economic benefit
that you get out of the road for every dollar
that you put in. It's called a BCR ratio. Many
of those roads have a BCR ratio of one. You're
(06:01):
getting a dollar of economic return out of every dollar
that you spend. Even in the worst case scenario. The
Inter Island Ferry project had a BCR of more than
four between four and five, So it was still delivering
a higher return for every dollar spent than a lot
of the roads of national significance were and that was
on the worst case scenario. Now, I think the worst
case scenario was unacceptable. I think the land side infrastructure
(06:24):
costs had blown out, and yeah, but we as a
government said we weren't going to fund them. Based on
what Kiwi Rail were asking for, we still thought you
could order the firies and you could do the land
side infrastructure cheaper. We certainly weren't giving them the blank
check to do the most expensive option.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
When it comes to spending, there's only so much money
we can spend anyway, and that's only going to get
worse as we've got an aging population. Though hopefully the
Cullen Fund will take care of the super costs, but
we've got big healthcare costs around an aging population, and
it's an I think it's a really unfair burden to
(07:00):
put on young ones.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
I think we've got to be honest as a country
about two things in this area. One is the cost
of the infrastructure that we're going to need to build,
and the other is the cost of the services that
we're going to need to provide. So if you take
the over sixty five population, if we go back to
twenty thirteen, you know the key English government, the over
sixty five population was about fourteen percent of the population.
About two hundred thousand people have joined the over sixty
(07:23):
five since then, it's now about sixteen percent of the population.
Go another two years ahead and that's going to go
up to one point two million people. I ead, about
twenty one percent of the population. That's going to increase
government spending, not just because of superannuation, but because of
the extra healthcare that over sixty five is consumed that
younger people don't, And we're going to have to be
honest about that. It's going to increase government spending or
(07:46):
we're going to have to cut either health care that's
available or superannuation. We don't need to. But if we
have this arbitrary constraint that says we're going to keep
government spending at thirty percent to GDP, which successive governments
have committed to over a long period of time, then
we're not going to be able to afford all the
things that New Zealanders expect us to pay for.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
So you want to see that that lifted. Treasury has
advised that thirty percent is sensible. You know, anything over
that is for crises. Surely an aging population is something
that could have been forsaorn as we saw with the
cul and fund.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Well, I think you have to, I mean, you have
to be clear about what you're increasing government spending for
and what it's so borrowing. If we take borrowing for example,
then we are going to need to increase borrowing to
pay for the longer term assets that we will pay
off over the life of those assets. The current government
are proposing to do that anyway.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
But they look like private public partnership.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
You still have to pay. Someone's still going to.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Pay, but not all of it. You know they're looking at.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Well, no, you're actually through a PPP, you pay more
because the private sector's cost of capital is higher than
the government's cost of capital. You just spread the cost
over a longer period. But you actually but the taxpayer
actually ultimately ends up paying more through a PPP than
they do if the government just funds it up front.
And so I mean a hard to sell, Well, it's
not a hard to sell because ultimately, you know, you're
mortgaging the future. You're basically pushing it to a future
(09:06):
generation to pay a bigger cost in order to defer
some of the costs that you might otherwise pay today.
So I think again we need to have an honest
conversation with Kiwis about that and say, if you want
to have the infrastructure investment now, either you can use
private equity, which you'll pay more for in the longer term,
or you can do government borrowing, which you'll pay less
(09:28):
for in the longer term. Either way, you've got to
do one of those two things. You can't just magic
the cash are ab out of nowhere.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
So you'd be willing to go back to Treasury and say, look,
we're going to have to raise that threshold that you
think is sensible because we just don't have enough money.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
I think the debt threshold is definitely something we should
talk about because ultimately we're just not going to be
able to put the infrastructure in place. You know, we've
got billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure that we
need to pay for. We're not going to be able
to do that unless we increase borrowing or get capital
injection from somewhere else. So if you look at the
even the government's roading projects. They've released them. This week's
(10:05):
billions of dollars every year that's unfunded. They have no
idea how they're going to pay for it. Now they
talk about things like value capture, which is another name
for capital gains tax. Basically, they're saying, we're going to
capture the value, the increased value of the land around
where these roads are built, and we're going to tax that.
We're going to use that to pay for the roads.
That's something you do after you've built the road. You
can't do that ahead of building the road, which means
(10:27):
you still have to pay to build the road. So
you're going to be borrowing for that. You might have
a new revenue source to pay back the borrowing, i e.
A capital gains tax or value capture tax, whatever however
you want to structure it, you're still going to have
to pay for it somehow.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
What billion dollar infrastructure projects are you proudest of that
your government built over the past six years.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
I think if you look at the I mean, none
of these, none of the big infrastructure projects that cost
billions of dollars are finished in a five year window.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Now, of course they're not, but I mean what.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
The hospital, So Dunedin Hospital really proud that that's well underway.
If you look at the other score, many of the
school rebuilding projects that we started, and many of them
are underway, not finished, but they're big school rebuilding projects.
Some of the roading projects, the rail projects, these are
things which I think will make a difference. We spent
a lot of money on rail, to be frank, billions
(11:15):
of dollars on rail, largely just to keep the railway
system as it was, because it was so badly run
down that we're going to have to close large parts
of it if we didn't spend a lot of money
maintaining them.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
News talks said, be Clint, good morning to you.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
Good morning, carry How are you very well?
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Thanks excellent.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
I have just two things I wanted to just ask Chris,
and happy birthday yesterday, but two things you've said. And
I think it's great that you guys work together and
obviously behind the scenes that we don't see you work
together a lot. You said you're not going to drop
things just because it isn't your idea, and I praised that.
But a couple of weeks ago you're on record saying
oil and gas will stop immediately when you guys get
(11:55):
back in power, which seems disingenuous. I'd like to know
what you think about that. And secondly, when you were
in power, you brought up a lot of first time
by a housing stock at a market rates, which really
messed up the market. And we obviously had a bit
of a problem with housing at the moment. How will
you fix that if you get back.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
In Yeah, I think on the issue of oil and guess,
we haven't said that we would stop oil and gas
immediately on coming into government. We've said that we'd do
something similar to what we did last time. Last time
we honored all of the existing permits, all of the
existing blocks that were out there, and we would do
the same again. And you know the reality we do
have to face up to some realities. Though. We haven't
(12:33):
had a new permit issued since two thousand and four.
So even though the key government were out there saying
we want more oil and gas exploration, they weren't able
to achieve that. We haven't had any find of oil
and guess since about two thousand and one. I think,
so we have to be realistic that, you know, the
commercial realities of oil and gas exploration are stacking up
(12:55):
against significant new oil and gas exploration in New Zealand,
regardless of what the government does. So that's why we
want to see an acceleration of renewable electricity. It's ultimately
paper and actually it can be developed faster than oil
and gas. Even if we found guests today, it's probably
you know, at least sort of seven or eight years
if they're moving really fast, before we would actually be
(13:17):
able to use that to generate electricity.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
I think that's fair enough as long as as long
as you're just being open and looking at it. And
I don't think the result of bunch of boiling gas
left that's great.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Yeah, And looking on the issue around rentals, I actually
do think that's a fair thing, you know. I think
as a government we need to shift from buying existing
homes to building new ones. And I don't think we
should be competing with first home buyers to buy more houses.
So I think if you look at the state houses
that we've got now, a lot of them sit on
(13:49):
a lot of land that's poorly utilized. I think redeveloping
that land by putting a higher density of state houses
on there, and it doesn't all have to be state
housing either. So if you take away one state house build,
you know, four new houses of one or two of
those could end up being private home because it makes
for a better community frankly, to have a mix of them.
(14:10):
As long as you're increasing the overall number of state houses,
I think that's how you grow the affordable rental market.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
So that was a kind of a strategic error to
be out in the market with first time buyers.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
I think it was a needs must situation. You know,
you had people who were homeless, you needed to find
somewhere to house them. But one of the reasons I
was really keen on us ramping up state house builds
was so that we're not competing with first time buyers.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
News Talk, said b Grant, we'll get you on before
the news headlines are very good morning to you, Carrie.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
How are you good? Good good, Thanks for taking my call.
You and I had a chat last week or the
week before, I believe it was around the second in
COVID and Quarry, and I think the consensus then was
that an apology would go a long way for people
(15:01):
at myself who were on the wrong end of mandates. Obviously,
we're hearing a lot about division and unity and coming together.
I'd just like to ask Chris, it's my first opportunity
to speak to someone who was in the previous Labor government.
Does he not think, for someone like myself, who voted
(15:22):
Labor before I voted for Jacinta the first time, that
it would go a long way to get people like
myself on side as sad just apologize for the things
that he got wrong.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
Yeah, we've got the first Royal Commission report is due
out I think around November, and it's due to the
government around November, and I've said that I'll await the
findings of that first Royal Commission report before we make
any judgments on that. I had a pretty open session
with the Royal Commission, which I understand from what they
(15:55):
fed back to me will be reflected in the report,
including reflecting on areas where I thought we could you know,
we could have done better. So but I'm going to
await the final you know, or the final port of
the current Royal Commission before I make any call on that.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
You have said though, that you think, with the benefit
of hindsight, you wouldn't have kept Auckland lockdown.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
You Yeah, I think there's a few things that that
that that I reflected in my conversation with the Royal
Commission bearing in mine. I had my first conversation with
them over a year ago now, because you know, these
things take a long time. But I reflected on that
Auckland lockdown, and I also reflected on the exit from
COVID nineteens, you know, from our our sort of COVID
suppression elimination strategy that actually, you know, when you when
(16:37):
you when you're responding to the pandemic, you've you're focused
on responding to the here and now. No one gives
you a book that says this is how it ends,
this is how you get out the other side of it.
And actually, if anything, I think that was probably one
of the weaker parts. I think we actually did really
well in the beginning around them, you know, suppressing it
and then eliminating it and avoiding too many lockdowns and
so on. It got messy at the end, and I
(16:59):
think that that is from my perspective, that's actually one
of the big lessons from it. You have to have
a clearer exit strategy, and you have to think further
ahead to that exit strategy, even as you're dialing up
the response, you need to think about how you're going
to dial it down again.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
At the other end, I think grant two was that
you I was talking to with somebody who said that
they took great comfort from justinto Adern at the time
saying nobody would be forced to have vaccinations, making your
employment dependent on being vaccin vaccinated as it's dancing on
the head of a pin to say that nobody was forced.
And I think that's where a lot of people feel
(17:33):
a lot of hurt and a lot of betrayal.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Yeah, and I do hear that, and I understand that.
And I have to tell you that the issues around
vaccination was some of the hardest that we dealt with
through the COVID nineteen period. We were trying to keep
New Zealander is safe. We were trying to stop the
spread of the virus. We were trying to keep the
economy moving. We had bearing in mind that we had
(17:57):
a lot of people who were refusing to go to
work if there were unvaccinated people in their workplace. There
was a lot that we were trying to balance up there.
And you know, anybody who thinks that all of that
decision making didn't sit heavily on the people who were
making those decisions that really did. It was hard going.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Does that answer your question?
Speaker 4 (18:16):
Ground well, not really Carry, I'll be honest. I mean,
it's all well and good to say that at the
time it was it was hard decisions, and I understand that.
But we already have the benefit of hindsight now, Chris,
And I mean I think even you must realize by now,
(18:36):
people like myself three years on, no COVID, no vaccinations.
All I'm asking for, mate, is I get that it
was hard at the time. All I'm asking for is
as simply to say, look, I'm sorry, we got it wrong.
(18:57):
And it just I mean, as I said to Carry
when I rung last time, it appears from the outside
looking in that no matter what happens, and no matter
what side the politicians are on, you're all just incapable
of apologizing when you get things wrong. There's always some
qualification like whether it's oh, you know, we all had heart,
(19:18):
we all had choices to make, rather than just saying, look,
now was the benefit of hindsight we were wrong. It's
always I'm going to wait for this and you know,
you know the answer. It just seems to be too
hard to say. Look, yes, we got it wrong.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
During the COVID nineteen response period where we did know
clearly get things wrong. I actually stood up in front
of the country in many cases on a live television
broadcast and admitted that we'd got things wrong on the
issues of vaccination, though if you follow the science, and again,
I think the Royal Commission have been tasked with canvassing
the science, canvassing whether we did get the balance right there.
(19:59):
Getting a high vaccination rate in New Zealand is one
of the reasons why those who were not vaccinated, actually
we're safer and we're better off. So in some cases
there are people who couldn't be vaccinated for various health
reasons and so on, and so that's why I'm saying, well,
await the Royal Commission. I'm not convinced that the high
vaccination rates that we got in New Zealand were the
(20:22):
wrong thing to do. In fact, I think that the
science almost certainly is going to show that it was
the right thing to do.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Can we have Opposition leader, Labor leader Chris Hipkins here,
What haven't we touched on? Oh, I know, capital wealth,
capital gains tax wealth tax, inheritance tax. Surely you must
adopt that to get some kind of differential between.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
I think we'll have quite a different tax policy next time,
and it will involve broadening New Zealand's tax base. I
think it is absolutely time for us to have that
conversation as a country. It's time for us to do
something about it.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
See they do something about it because we have had
the conversation. That's what I'm saying, commission the tax work.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
That's right, and so we're working through that now. Will
we will be going into the next campaign with a
plan to do something think about it.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
A capital gains tax.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Well, it'll be something in that space. You know. We're
working through the design of what that will be. The
Michael Cullen report provides a really good blueprint that the
subsequent work by the i D also provides further evidence.
So we're working through that. But I want to be
able to answer all the detailed questions when we do it.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Put does as Michael recommended, our capital gains tax would differentiate.
You've got a really hardcore group of people, with capable
people within your own party who want to see it happen.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
I think there'll be a form of capital taxations and
that will certainly be part of the mix, part of our.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
I'm just seeing your billboards borrow more, tax more vote labored.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Well that certainly that's certainly what the National Party will
try and do to us.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
That's what you've told me, to borrow more. And then
you want to put a.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
You're necessary not necessarily because it depends also how you
apply any money that you earn from a capital gains tax.
So you can apply that to infrastructure spend, you can
also apply it to a personal income tax brackets. I
have said that I think that we shouldn't leave large
gaps between income tax brackets adjustments, as has happened under
successive governments previously. But if you're going to adjust them
(22:16):
more regularly, you have to broaden the tax base in
order to be able to do that. So at the moment,
salary and wage journers pay a disproportionate share of the
tax that the government collects relative to others. And if
you compare us to Australia, to the US, to the UK,
to all those other countries that we compete with for talent,
actually they don't and tax people salary way journeys to
(22:40):
the same extent proportionately as New Zealand does.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
How would you encourage there to be more salary and
way journers because we have got an aging population. You know,
we saw that when we close the borders and depended
on New Zealanders to fill the gaps. There weren't enough
of them.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Well, I mean, there are certainly plenty of working age kiwis, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
But there weren't enough workers.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Yeah, But we've also got to be careful around the
population growth that we don't grow the population to the
point where we can keep up with population growth. So
there is a balance to be had here about making
sure that we're getting the workers that we need whilst
not growing the population so fast that we run out
of houses and that the infrastructure gets choked up and
so on. We've got to build that under the ground
infrastructure to cope with population growth. So I'm certainly not
(23:25):
saying we shouldn't grow the population, but we've just got
to make sure we've got a plan around how we
actually properly fund.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
That, and where would the taxes come from if we
broaden the tax space. If we're not looking at wage
and salary owners, how do we get to people who
aren't paying their fair share.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Well, I mean that's where you look at issues around
capital gains taxation, wealth taxation, land taxation. You know those
are all there's variants of those in operation around the world.
Is not necessarily no, I mean, so you've got it.
So if you take someone who owns twenty rental properties.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Well, there's not many of those.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
There are actually quite a few people and they and
they control an awful lot of the country's wealth, and
they won't be paying a fraction of the tax that
somebody who is a salary and wage journer is paying
relative to their overall income. And I think that is
a problem with the current tax system.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
If you're depending on having enough money to spend coming
from people who own twenty rental properties, we're going to
be in big trouble.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Look, I've always been clear that we should avoid things
like taxing someone's family home. So even if we were
going to do something like a capital gains tax, we
should exempt the family home from that. So therefore it
would be targeted at the people who are by definition
having more money. Well, capital gains tax if you look
at Australia where they get billions of dollars through capital
(24:41):
gains tax every year they introduce a capital gains tax
in nineteen eighty five. The longer that you have a
capital gains tax in place, the more revenue that it raises.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Wouldn't it be better to make New Zealand more productive
rather than just taking from people who are productive.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Well, capital gains tax or if some form of capital
gains taxation can actually be part of the picture about
making New Zealand more productive at the moment, if you've
got spare money to spend, actually the finance adds up.
You know, it's good. It makes good commercial sense to
be investing in residential property. If we change that dynamic
so it makes more sense for people to be investing
in productive businesses instead, we could actually make the whole
(25:18):
country more productive.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
I think a lot of small business owners would see
that you've put barriers to productivity in terms of so
much interfering in the workplace, in terms of rather than
letting them get on and build good employer employee relations,
you don't trust employers to do that.
Speaker 4 (25:34):
Well.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
If you're talking about increasing the minimum wage, actually increasing
wages as a feature of increased productivity, yep.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
But you put the cart before the horse. You increase
the wages before they could prove their productivity. I mean,
most of small and medium business owners, they have to
have good staff, they have to look after them them.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
I mean, if you look at you know, economies around
the world where productivity has been driven upwards, increasing wages
has been one of the things that's helped to drive
productivity upwards. So it does shift the dial a bit
around government, around firm investing in new capital, equipment, new
plant and so on.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
Asking about charities and marty trusts and the like and
taxation that a couple of texts on that would you
expect charities and religious organizations and marty trust to pay tax?
I think broadening the tax.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
It really depends on the purpose of the charity, whether
it's a genuinely charitable purpose or whether it's a business
masquerading is a charity. And where there are some businesses
that masquerade as charities. And I do think that's an
area of the tax law that I understand the current
government are looking at. Will let's see what they come
back with. But if they come back with something sensible
and that space will support it.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Now, leadership, everybody, I mean of course they do. As
soon as you get somebody who leads a party to defeat,
everybody says, all, well, time to change the leader. But
it took so jolly long for Labor to get a
leader last time round. You before Jacinda took over. That
was what cobbled Labor a lot. Last time round, Ay
had a popular prime minister under Key. But even then,
(27:07):
as his popularity started to fade, you didn't have anyone ready,
so you led them to defeat. There must have been
some saber ratling.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Look, I mean I took the some holidays to think
about whether I had had it in me to, you know,
to do not only another term in opposition, but then
actually subsequent terms in government because win the election sucks.
Opposition does suck. But actually you can't just think about that.
You have to if you're going to go into the
election campaign. You have to go into the campaign aiming
to win and ready to govern again if you do win.
(27:37):
And so that means you're not thinking about the next
three years. You think about them probably the next ten.
And so I did take the summer holidays to think
about that and to think, have I got ten more
years of at least ten more years of this than
me and I do you know, I hadn't really young.
I had basically, if you take the election campaign out
of it, I was only the prime minister for about
six months.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
You were a camp minister throughout, Yes, I was.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
But being prime minister is quite a different job and
you get a different you know, it's a whole different
set of pressures and a different set of influence that
you have as prime minister. Tonight about six months at it.
So you know, I'd like to do it again because
you know, I learned a lot during that six month period.
I'm determined that we're going to use this time that
we've gotten opposition to make sure that we do go
into government better prepared next time around.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
Ye see, that's the thing that really got up my snores.
I think the last time we talked, when you said
when we came to government last time, we weren't ready.
What on earth were you all doing for nine years
on the taxpayer dollar? Weren't ready to govern?
Speaker 1 (28:33):
I mean we actually only had nine weeks, Carrie, so
we changed the leader nine weeks before the elections.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Shouldn't people who have policies be working so hard on them?
And the background absolutely, with a very clear idea about
how they wanted to see those you know, those portfolios
take shape the moment they were in a position to
do so.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
And actually, I'll go back and I'll say, you know,
the education policy that we put forward at the last election, sorry,
the twenty seventeen election was one of the most comprehensive
that we did and we were focused on implementing it
until COVID came along and turned everything upside down.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
Bruce, you have a question, Hello, Bruce.
Speaker 5 (29:09):
Yes, yeah, Hi Kerry. Look, my question is around you're
talking about productivity, but productivity has always been linked to
a lot around access to finance. And in New Zealand
we've only got access to about four large banks and
I work with a lot of smeeth so it's my
role I facilitate boards for small people. And the thing
(29:33):
that strikes me in New Zealand versus places like the
Old Germany, which actually has thousands of small banks. China,
when you think chi Chopping when he came in in
seventy eight, set about creating five thousand banks, and it
was the revolution of those countries in terms of smaller
businesses being able to access finance, which for most small
(29:55):
businesses in New Zealand is impossible. That's is it your
belief that that's where our productivity is actually missing and
tied up because of the ability to access finance to
push through machinery, which is part of the reason why
we're so poor in terms of our productivity stats in
the OECD, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
So interesting question.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I'll probably give you
three quick answers on that. One is, I do think
we need more competition in the banking sector. The second is,
I do think we need more development finance and more
of a focus on development finance. If you look at
other smaller innovative economies, development finances more really development, oh exactly.
And we had since the DFC, we haven't had any
(30:39):
kind of emphasis on development finance because it created such
a hangover for the country and so we've been reluctant
to do things in that space. But we need to
figure out how we can make development finance more available
to small businesses.
Speaker 5 (30:50):
Wouldn't this be a fantastic opportunity for Kiwi Bank to
sort of become the bank to small business and to
actually own that space.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
I would love to see Keywibank growing and being a
real disruptor in the banking sector and an innovator there.
So yes, I do think there's more space that. But
the other thing about the productivity is we do need
to be realistic about when we're talking about productivity. As
a primary sector lead country, we shouldn't compare ourselves to
other countries that might be say tech sector or services
(31:18):
sector lead and compare productivity between those countries. Because the
primary sector is very productive compared to other primary sector
around the world, but primary sector is say, less productive
per dollar spent than the tech sector, for example. So
we need to make sure that we're comparing apples with
apples when we talk about productivity, because our primary sector
(31:39):
actually is very productive, probably doesn't get the credit that
it's due for the level of productivity. But it's a
it's by definition a less productive sector, Kerry, You're looking
at me.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Lesser primary sector doesn't get the credit that it's due.
Who spults that.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
I think the whole country probably underestimates the value that
the primary sector contribute and how productive they are compared
to other primary sectors around the world.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
We've got two minutes, so you will be lead leading
Labor into the next election against Christopher Luxen. Absolutely, you
think Kristoph Luxem will be there, I'd.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
Say that's a fifty to fifty equation at the moment,
you know, I'd say keep your eye on Nikola willis.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Well, which just very capable. Absolutely. What are you most
optimistic about in terms of New Zealand having come through
the doldrums.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
I'm optimistic about the future of New Zealand's economy because
I think there's a lot to look forward to. If
you look at one of the things in which I
think we are underestimating in terms of how it's going
to support our economy in the future. As KEI we saver.
We have this big pool of retirement savings that are
now starting to be invested in New Zealand and if
you look at Australia is about twenty years ahead of
us in terms of their retirement savings. But that's one
(32:49):
of the reasons that they have done better than us
and say and the key we save is one of
the things. Well, I'm putting it on the table. We'll
give you an answer before the election as to whether
or not that's something we campaign on. But I'm certainly
I'm open to considering that. So yes, I'm not announcing
that today, Cary, but I do think can we save
it as a fantastic legacy, another one of Michael Cullens's
(33:09):
great legacies for the country. But I think that is
actually going to help to grow the New Zealand economy.
I think that investment that we're going to see through
retirement savings being invested back into the economy. I think
that's one of the reasons for us to be optimistic.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Can we do a raising of the retirement age or
so that those who are who work with their bodies,
who get knackered, Can we do a finest raising of
the retirement.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
The point that you've just raised is the reason that
I'm opposed to raising the retirement age, because for people
who have been physically physically demanding work, it wouldn't be
fair on them. One of the reasons that we've got
such acceptance of New Zealand superannuation is that it is universal.
Everybody does get it. But we've got to make sure
that we're preparing now to pay for the retirement boom.
That's pretty much on us.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
And there's your slogan, borrow more tax more.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
That is not true, Pero, you haven't been listening to
what I've been saying.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
History never repeats. Is your song choice? Very nice to
have you, and again, Chris Hopkins, labor leader, opposition leader.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Great to be here for more from Kerry Wooden Mornings.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
Listen live to news talks it'd be from nine am weekdays,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.