Fair Enough? - Tax HiveMind Midpoint Update

Friday, 20 April 2018, 2:39 pm
Article: HiveMind

Join our HiveMind exploration on this important issue: Fair enough? How should New Zealanders be taxed

Should we lower taxes to boost the economy? Are we taxed too much? Should ‘sin taxes’ on things like sugar and pollution be used to change our behaviours? These are some of the issues dividing the people taking part in our interactive Tax HiveMind, which launched on 16 April.

Scoop and PEP invite you to join the discussion and share your issues, ideas and perspectives on the NZ tax system. Click here to find out more about the Tax HiveMind and take part.

There’s been a lot of interest. Since starting 4 days ago, over 170 people have voted over 7000 times on a range of tax positions and 25 people have added over 50 statements for other participants to consider.

Our Tax HiveMind is intended to complement and feed into the review being run by the Government-appointed Tax Working Group (TWG), which is looking at the fairness, balance and structure of the tax system with a 10-year time horizon.

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While the TWG has invited the public to send in written submissions, we believe that an issue as important as the fairness of the tax regime should be open for discussion, debate and dialogue. Unfortunately, a written submission process just doesn’t encourage the kind of public exchange we think is necessary in a well-functioning democracy. Our HiveMind will end at 9am on 30 April so that the results can be submitted to the TWG as a submission.

At a time when opinion can seem polarised, Scoop’s HiveMind process is able to identify areas of common ground. For the tax issue, almost everyone seems to agree that good-quality public services are necessary for any well-functioning nation, that people who fall on hard times should have access to basic services funded by national taxes, and that the tax system needs to make sure that multinationals pay their fair share of tax here in NZ where their services are used.

Click here to take part in the Tax HiveMind.

HiveMind

What is HiveMind?

Welcome to HiveMind - Scoop's new public engagement platform. HiveMind is an experiment including our readers in co-creating a more participatory and interactive public media conversation.

We believe online public engagement tools can help groups of people interested in an issue to find new points of commonality and novel solutions to complex societal problems. Such problems require broad-based and inclusive debate and decision making.

It's all too easy for us to remain stuck in polarised worldviews or our social media bubbles. HiveMind seeks to get beyond these echo chambers and to allow people to:

- Engage in a meaningful process
- Learn from other perspectives
- Identify common ground in disparate viewpoints
- Create potentially innovative and practical solutions to real world issues

HiveMind uses Pol.is - an online tool for collecting open-ended feedback from large groups of people. Through a HiveMind exploration you can voice your opinion about a story or issue, and can also agree and disagree with what others are saying, one statement at a time. New statements go through a moderation process and then are added so that participants can vote on them.

Pol.is runs statistical analysis on these voting patterns in real-time. It produces opinion groups and surfaces the comments that brought each group together. It also identifies comments that found broad consensus among participants.

Contact HiveMind

Email - Joe Cederwall - joe@scoop.co.nz

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