INDEPENDENT NEWS

The Left hits “peak spending”

Published: Sun 14 Sep 2014 04:19 PM
The Left hits “peak spending”
The Labour Party have decided to go for broke and heap more spending commitments on the Left's spending pile in a vain bid to turn around their flagging polling numbers five days out from the election, National Party Associate Finance spokesman Steven Joyce says.
“Their latest ‘idea’ today to create a new ‘investment fund’ from the dividends of state-owned enterprises is just another way of pre-committing money that has already been committed by Labour a few times over,” Mr Joyce says.
"Dividends received by the Government from state-owned enterprises are already being used to pay for public services like education and health and to pay down debt. They can't just keep being spent again and again. On top of that, the so-called ‘strategic investment’ language is quite obviously code for spending money on experimental cleantech investments that have lost money the world over.
“When you strip it back, what Labour have come up with today is simply another $400 million in pre-committed spending – no more and no less. That takes their four year commitment to $19 billion, before you add on the Greens plan to spend at least another $12 billion, and Dotcom's plan to spend tens of billions more.
“On top of that you have to add all the uncosted pledges of the Labour Party – to pay higher student support, to pay more to ACC claimants, to re-establish the 'dole for artists' scheme, and so on.
“This approach would push up interest rates for households and businesses and stall the economy – as we saw under the previous government six years ago when floating home mortgages were almost 11 per cent at the economy flat-lined.
“The Left's appetite for looking like Father Christmas to the voting public has no limit.
“The only thing we can be absolutely sure of in regards to Labour, The Greens and Dotcom is that if they win next Saturday's election we would very quickly become a much poorer New Zealand.”
ends

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