Maori Party co-leader Pita Sharples. An unusually practical politician
Maori Party co-leader Pita Sharples. An unusually practical politician
The Maori Party contains more wise heads than its size should indicate. It has just mounted the most professional election launch of any minority party. Its pragmatic leadership has sensibly backed off from insisting on repeal of the Seabed and Foreshore Act, having noticed that yet another example of Labour’s rushed and ill-considered legislation actually offers opportunities for Maori.

It may also be backing off from a demand to abolish GST on food. Some Pakeha cynics suggested that this would represent a 12.5 percent tax cut for many people who didn’t pay income tax anyway. The Maori Party may have concluded that abolishing GST on food would raise the cost of living because it involves employing an army of bureaucrats to work forever on the definition of food, and it would not lower prices to any significant extent because somebody (and that means the taxpayer) must pay for the underlying GST involved in producing the food in the first place.

The Maori Party raises the issue of income tax thresholds, suggesting a tax-free allowance on the first $25,000 of earned income. While its proposed threshold is probably too high, the idea has great merit – and it’s the long-established norm in other more developed countries. Income tax thresholds are useful and efficient: they can immediately help to lift low earners out of the poverty trap and encourage welfare beneficiaries to find profitable employment.

Index-linking tax thresholds annually to inflation would also guard against slippage, where wages do not keep pace with inflation or cannot combat the great and greedy maw of good-for-nothing boom and bust governments. Lip service has been paid to this principle when it comes to superannuation, but superannuitants have every right (and plenty of evidence) to complain that their increases have lagged far behind inflation. As for old folks perks as imagined by NZ First, West Coast pensioners holding a Winston First Party Supercard can now ride free on off-peak buses. The trouble is, the West Coast has no bus service.

This is what happens when your country and your taxes are controlled by self-centred, out-of-touch politicians.

If Labour is swept aside, perhaps we will see a positive change in the way the country is governed – one that better reflects what the authors of the flawed MMP system had in mind. We might see a coalition of views concentrated on improving the state of the entire nation, rather than the selfish preservation of traditional power bases. It is just possible that – rather than the “apartheid” view that Maori seats should be abolished – we achieve a combination of political effort that sees exclusive voting by Maori gradually fade away, as part of the natural process of becoming a mature and inclusive community that wants to restore a leading place in the civilised world.

There is something unpleasant about a nation that reserves seats in Parliament for an ethnic minority and seems to be content when Maori talk about “our people” as if they were a threatened race set apart from the rest of society. And it’s especially sick when the white majority of ordinary people is excluded from voting for wise heads who run a race-based party that had to be created because of Pakeha stupidity.

  • Maori carving picture by Ron Dean, Dreamstime.com