Taxpayer Update: Labour’s $180m bus bill 🚌 | Save the Family Farm 🚜 | New poll 📊
Hi,
Hello from Fieldays, where we've launched our Save the Family Farm campaign (more on this below).
We've also got this month's Taxpayers’ Union-Curia Poll, a defence of the cost of the Official Information Act, and our Ratepayer Guide to Amalgamation, which breaks down the do’s-and-don’ts of local government reform.
But first...
Labour’s first policy of the election year: another “free ride” with a $180million price tag 🚌💸
Labour have finally managed to release a policy, and it's a classic "promising things without doing proper costings".
On Wednesday, Chris Hipkins announced a public transport fare cap as part of Labour’s transport policy platform. On the surface, it sounds lovely. Cheaper buses and trains. Less pressure on commuters. A nice, neat headline for the evening news.
But, there is no such thing as a free bus ride.
And the symbolism was hard to miss.
While rural New Zealand gathered at Fieldays, Labour’s plot sat empty, and Chris Hipkins made the announcement from Auckland.
Which is quite something, because the people outside the big cities could be among those asked to help pay for it.
If fares are capped, the cost does not magically disappear. It gets shifted from passengers to taxpayers and ratepayers.
And the numbers are already raising eyebrows.
Our analysis now shows that Labour's costings are orders of magnitude out. See: Labour’s fare cap numbers don’t add up.
Labour claims its nationwide fare cap would cost taxpayers just $65 million a year.
But using publicly available 2024/25 data, we estimate Labour's policy in Auckland, Wellington, and Canterbury alone would cost between $141 million and $183 million a year.
That matters because around 90 percent of public transport trips are taken in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch.
And unlike Labour, we're showing our workings...
Then there's the fairness angle: A decade ago, public transport subsidies covered around 61 percent of the cost of providing services. Now, that figure is around 87 percent.
Labour’s fare cap would push that even higher.
A tradie in Timaru, a farmer in Feilding, or a courier in Gore paying Road User Charges does not get cheaper buses in Auckland. But under Labour’s plan, they would still pay for them.
Save the Family Farm: don’t bet rural New Zealand on a change of government 🚜
At Fieldays, we launched our Save the Family Farm campaign.
Many farmers think a Labour/Green Government means a ute tax. If only!
Labour are campaigning on a capital gains tax and opposing council rates caps, while relying on coalition partners who support wealth taxes, trust taxes, and even death taxes.
The Greens’ wealth tax alone would hit the average dairy farm with a bill of $68,043 a year, and the average sheep and beef farm with an extra $131,610 annual tax bill.
And the Greens' proposed death tax would be even worse: $1.23 million for the average dairy farm and $2.07 million for the average sheep and beef farm.
Family farming is not just about the people who own the land.
It is the contractors, vets, local businesses, rural schools, suppliers, mechanics, stock agents, shearers, and communities that depend on families staying on the land and investing locally.
But under a Labour-led coalition, those farms would be squarely in the firing line.
If you agree that protecting the rural way of life is important, back the campaign and sign our petition via SaveTheFamilyFarm.nz.
👉 Sign the petition asking Labour to rule out taxes on farms from any potential coalition agreement
NEW POLL: Government parties still able to form Government 📊
This month’s Taxpayers’ Union-Curia Poll is out, and despite some movement between the parties, the Government remains ahead.
Compared to last month, Labour is up 0.3 points to 32.2 percent, while National is up 0.1 points to 30.1%. The Greens are up 1.8 points to 11.5 percent, while New Zealand First is down 0.3 points to 11.4 percent. ACT is up 1.3 points to 7.8 percent, while Te Pāti Māori is down 1.0 point to 3.1 percent.
Converting these numbers into seats in Parliament, Labour drops 1 seat to 40 seats, while National also drops 1 to 38.
New Zealand First drops 1 seat to 14, while the Greens gain 2 to 14.
ACT gain 2 to 10 seats, while Te Pāti Māori drop 1 to 4.
For more detailed results, head over to our website.
$180 million to answer questions Government should already be answering 🕵️♂️💸
Most of the stories we break are (sadly) not leaked to us in underground carparks by trench-coated bureaucrats.
And even when they are, we verify using freedom of information laws: primarily the Official Information Act.
Cue Wellington clutching its pearls about people asking too many questions...
But that gets the problem exactly backwards.
As Tyler (from the Taxpayers' Union) put it, the cheapest OIA request is the one that never needs to be made because the information is already available to the public.
This $180 million bill is not the cost of transparency. It is the cost of secrecy.
Much of the information people ask for under the OIA is not top secret national security material. It is reports, data, spending information, briefings, and documents taxpayers have already paid for.
Instead of publishing that material as a matter of course, agencies force journalists, researchers, taxpayer advocates, and members of the public through a slow bureaucratic obstacle course — only to release much of the information anyway.
And then, blow me down, they complain the obstacle course costs too much.
Agencies should be proactively publishing reports, data, and frequently requested information online.
The UK and USA already publish spending and procurement data so taxpayers can scrutinise government spending without having to beg officials for permission. Even Ukraine, in the middle of a war threatening their very existence, does this.
We say that's the model New Zealand should be moving toward: an “armchair audit” approach, where routine spending data is published through a central transparency portal.
The answer is not to make it harder for taxpayers to ask questions. The answer is for Government to stop hiding so much in the first place.
Why transparency saves taxpayers' money 💰🦸
Responding to the same Newsroom piece, prominent Wellington lawyer Graeme Edgeler reminded his followers on X (formerly Twitter):
"One thing to consider when think about the cost of the OIA is how much money it saves!
Science funding was spent on a scheme to play whale songs to trees, with no assessment of whether doing so actually helped the trees.
We know this because of the OIA."
(and the research team at Taxpayers' Union...) 😉
The Ratepayers’ Guide to Amalgamation: bigger is not always better 🏛️
This is exactly why our new Ratepayers’ Guide to Amalgamation matters. If councils are going to merge, shift services into new entities, or redraw lines of accountability, ratepayers need a clear test before they are asked to sign off.
One of Wellington’s favourite articles of faith is that bigger councils must mean better councils.
A bigger bureaucracy, bigger boundaries, bigger budgets, and somehow - magically - lower costs.
Aucklanders' experience with the Super City means many have a view on that...
Councils have been given just three months to prepare those plans. That is not a lot of time for decisions that could reshape local democracy, shift debt and liabilities, and determine who controls core services for decades.
So our message is simple: ratepayers should not be forced into bigger councils on an unspecific expectation that savings might show up later.
Any council pushing amalgamation should have to show, upfront, how it will cut duplication, reduce costs, improve core services, and protect local accountability.
That means publishing transition costs before decisions are made, setting mandatory savings targets, having the numbers independently checked, and making sure local communities get the final say.
Because we have heard the “efficiency” sales pitch before.
Aucklanders were promised the Super City would deliver savings and better coordination. Fifteen years later, the Government still has not completed the promised post-implementation review.
So before Wellington pushes more councils down the same path, ratepayers deserve evidence, not just vibes.
Bigger is not always better. If amalgamation cannot pass the ratepayer test, it should not proceed.
👉 See what every amalgamation proposal should have to prove before ratepayers are asked to sign off.
Come and say hello 👋
If you’re at Fieldays, we’re at stall RM54 in the Rural Living Marquee. Pop in to say hi and join the campaign to Save Family Farms!
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P.S. Family farms are a way of life for so many people. That’s why we can’t let Labour and their mates in the Greens and Te Pāti Māori destroy what generations of Kiwis have worked so hard to build. Sign the petition now to tell Labour to rule out taxes on farms from any potential coalition agreement.
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