In 2025, as we look towards Nicola Willis’s second budget it seems everyone is talking about National’s unaffordable $14 billion tax cuts.
In 2024, Whakatane was doing more than talk about them.
The Postpone The Tax Cuts campaign by the Whakatane Act Local group were taking to the streets of our hometown calling for the tax cuts to be postponed until they were, if not justifiable, then at least affordable.
Passersby supported the call in huge numbers and a small one person picket quickly grew into a larger group who became a movement that keeps growing today as the effects of the disastrous choices and priorities of this administration are revealed to us a little more every day.
Postponing such a huge expense didn’t seem a lot to ask from an administration that sold itself to the public as fiscally responsible and committed to save money by stopping wasteful spending.
Well, it turned out ‘wasteful spending’ was the backroom superstars that keep things going so the frontline could score the trys and kick the conversions.
And ‘fiscal responsibility’ was axing existing pay equity claims in order to save billions of dollars by removing legitimate pay claims from the table, changing the rules so they can’t proceed and then saying let’s start all over again.
Getting Aotearoa ‘back on track’ required derailing the economy to give unaffordable tax cuts that only benefited the very well off, and $3 billion worth of landlord handouts and, just to make the it all so much more reckless, borrow the money to do it.
And now they can’t pay it back.
And in 2025, everyone, not just the experts, but everyone, knows that National should have delayed the tax cuts until the economy showed signs it was going to pick up.
We’ve seen the National led coalition yell “Women and children first” as they attack the most vulnerable in society to carry the burden of their record borrowing.
In 2024 Postpone The Tax Cuts called for protests against the unaffordable tax cuts, and today, everywhere you look, people are protesting about the damage to the economy the tax cuts are doing.
We need to protest harder.
Postpone The Tax Cuts Facebook Page
