The Green Party spent the weekend in south Auckland setting out the argument it wants to carry into the 7 November general election, and it comes down to who pays tax and who does not.
Green MPs, candidates and members gathered on Sunday 26 July for the party’s annual general meeting, where a 43-page manifesto was unveiled alongside the campaign slogan “For All of Us”. RNZ reported the document was written by party members and covers climate action, democracy, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, incomes and digital technology. But the policy that dominated the room, and the coverage, was tax.
Co-leader Marama Davidson told the meeting the party’s pitch is straightforward. “We’re going to make sure that people have affordable lives, that we protect nature to be healthy, [and] that we return politics to being honest to make decisions for all of us,” she said. “We will tax the super-rich and address corporate greed so that we can invest that back into the services that people rely on.”
Co-leader Chlรถe Swarbrick reached back to the first Labour government for the comparison she wanted members to take home. “In the 1930s and 40s, our great-grandparents did something that had never been done before. They established public healthcare, public education, public housing, and they paid for it all by higher taxes on those who profited handsomely during a time of hardship for many,” she said, in remarks reported by RNZ on Monday morning.
The numbers behind that pitch were released a month earlier. On 21 June the Greens published their tax policy, built around a 2.5 percent annual tax on net assets above $10 million for an individual and $20 million for a couple, with the family home exempt. The party says that catches roughly the wealthiest 0.3 percent of New Zealanders and would raise about $3.8 billion in 2027/28.
Sitting alongside it is a capital acquisitions tax of 33 percent on assets or gifts worth more than $1 million, which the party estimates would apply to about 1,100 people a year and raise $953 million in its first full year. Family homes, family farms and transfers of Mฤori land are exempt. The package also lifts the corporate rate to 33 percent for the largest 0.7 percent of companies while leaving small and medium firms on 28 percent, adds a 0.06 percent levy on the liabilities of the big four banks, and puts a 5 percent withholding tax on profits large technology companies shift offshore.
The money would pay for a rebuilt income tax scale. The first $10,000 of income would be tax free, the rates in between would be reshuffled, and a new top rate of 45 percent would apply to income above $160,000, as RNZ set out when the policy landed. The party says 96 percent of people would pay less income tax, and its own costings put the net gain to the government books at $5.15 billion in 2027/28, rising to $5.73 billion by 2030/31.
This is a smaller ask than the Greens have made before. Their previous version applied the same 2.5 percent rate from $2 million of net assets rather than $10 million, which would have raised several times as much. Trimming the threshold narrows the number of people affected, and it also narrows the target the government can shoot at.
Not that the shooting has stopped. Finance Minister Nicola Willis has been blunt about what she thinks a wealth tax does. “If you impose a wealth tax, you’re kicking wealth out the door,” she said. Willis has pointed to Treasury advice that taxable wealth tends to move offshore or be restructured out of reach, saying the higher the wealth taxes, the more a country loses.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has ruled a wealth tax out and argues the answer is patience with the government’s existing programme. “The way forward is to follow the plan to lift and improve affordability for New Zealanders and have a proper long-term economic plan,” he said.
ACT leader David Seymour went further when the policy was released in June, saying of the Greens that “the Green Party, in my view, have shown a real evil in their message, that New Zealand’s problems are that other people have succeeded”. Labour has kept its distance from a wealth tax as well. Leader Chris Hipkins has committed his party to a simple targeted capital gains tax on residential property with the family home excluded, which is a much narrower proposition than anything in the Green manifesto.
That leaves the Greens carrying the argument largely on their own, which is roughly where they want to be. Members who spoke to RNZ at the meeting made the case in kitchen-table terms. “We’ve got GST, we’ve got income taxes and the people that are working week to week, all their expendable money is taxed,” one member said. Another put it as “we need tax reform so that we can do all the good things, so we can look after each other and our nature”.
The manifesto was not the only thing the party pushed over the weekend. It also called for a one-year pause on consents for new artificial intelligence data centres while national rules are written, an argument we covered separately, with Swarbrick saying the facilities “extract power, they extract water, and they extract profit”. Luxon called that position alarmist.
Whether a tax on the very wealthy is a vote winner or a vote loser is the question the Greens have decided to answer in public between now and November. They will need a governing partner willing to take it to the table, and neither of the parties on that side of the House has volunteered yet.
If you want to see how your own views line up with what the parties are offering this election, our voting tool compares the policy positions side by side.
What do you make of the Greens’ tax plan, and does the $10 million threshold change your view of it? Let us know in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job ๐
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