OLIVER HARTWICH: The twenty-dollar week
- Administrator
- Jun 19
- 2 min read
For months, commentators had one demand of Labour: stop holding your fire and show us some policy.
Last week, Labour obliged. It would cap public transport fares at $20 a week in the big cities, and $10 everywhere else. Two numbers came attached: a cost of $65 million a year, and an average saving of $25 a week.
So, I reached for a calculator, and that is where the trouble started.
The announcement caused a bit of confusion in our office because there is more than one way in which you could read the policy.
The first reading is small. If the saving really is $25 a week, then $65 million stretches to about 54,000 people, or one New Zealander in a hundred. A modest scheme for a lucky few.
The second reading is enormous. Labour says 1.3 million people ride public transport each year, and if they all saved as promised, the bill would not be $65 million but well over a billion. On that reading, the $65 million is not a budget at all. It is a down payment.
The third reading sits somewhere between the two, and it turns on figures Labour never gave us. How many drivers will switch to the bus, and how many riders already spend enough to gain anything? Nobody outside Labour can say.
Three readers, three answers. We could not agree on what the policy was, let alone whether it was any good.
The reason is simple. Labour gave a headline and kept the workings. No model, no spreadsheet, no table of who saves what and where. In fact, not even a problem definition.
Without those, you cannot argue with the policy. You can only guess at it.
Consider one mystery. Each morning, two trains pull into Wellington station. The one from Masterton carries commuters who would save thousands a year. The one from Palmerston North carries commuters who get nothing, because their line is “inter-regional”.
Same city, same station, different outcome. Is that the plan or an accident? Nobody can tell, because the paper that would explain it was never written.
Had Labour written that paper, it would have caught all this. Writing a policy down is how a party finds out whether it works.
Commentators asked Labour for policy. But Labour only gave us a press release with a dollar sign on it.
Parties that want our votes owe us their workings, not just their answers.
Dr Oliver Hartwich is the executive director of The New Zealand Initiative
Labour as always taking money from people who work and save, to give to people who don’t work and don’t save, in order to get their votes.
Pork barrel politics at its finest.
“In fact, not even a problem definition.”
Which should really be the raison d’ être for any new policy.
However, it’s at least good that the Opportunity Party seems to be going a few steps further and calling for ‘free’ public transport. That way, Labour may be forced to explain why they think their voter bribe is affordable - which I don’t expect to be believed.
Someone wise said. "Democracy is destined to fail when citizens realize they can vote themelves more and more largess from the public purse".
Our elections have become competitions between National and Labout to bribe us with false promises of getting more from someone else with less efforts ourselves. National says "Let the rich get richer and some of that wealth will trickle down to the rest of you" Labour says "Forget about earning. Just spend lots now and let someone else keep paying forever."
Both are correct. A lttle of the wealth produced by productive working people is allowed to trickle down. Most dies not. Someone else will be paying for ever for all the "free stuff" we keep voting for. So was that wise person…
they have good intentions; that is all we can judge them; not on facts; just good intentions; they mean well; just like they did when they shut the entire country down; the entire economy; we drove around Auckland airport the other day; the scale; the traffic; the size; the activity; that with your all-knowing insight and brilliance, you could shut all that down; to stop a non-existent "scary, scary, scary"thing that no-one could see; or isolate; or grow; that was invented; now that requires true brilliance; or true insanity; .......
Labour knows they can get away with this rubbish because those intelligent enough to ask for the evidence will never vote Labour anyway.