Paul Goldsmith
Paul Goldsmith
He spoke to an Infinz event this week, at which he said the Government needed to act responsibility to reduce spending and debt and to have a credible growth plan out of the Covid-19 disruption.
That would mean temporarily holding back “nice to have” spending, he said.
“An obvious place to start is suspending new payments to the New Zealand Super Fund for the next four years. That alone would reduce core crown debt by $9 billion over four years.”
Contributions were suspended between 2009 and 2017.
When Finance Minister Grant Robertson announced the decision to restart contributions – put on hold by former Prime Minister John Key’s Government – Robertson said that was projected to increase the size of the fund to over $63 billion by 2022/23.
The fund is now worth more than $45 billion.
Goldsmith said core elements of National's plan were low taxes, regulatory restraint, consistency, an openness to investment and a path to make progress on the border.
He said National would dial back the “excessively bureaucratic” AML rules and put a hold on new regulations for the next 18 months to give businesses time to adjust after Covid.
“Sadly, the greatest growth industry in New Zealand for far too long has been compliance.
“Some of the extra compliance has been justified, but in too many areas we – the legislators and the Government and council officials – have gone too far and have lost sight of reality that it’s the consumer that pays for most of it, either directly or through the lack of competition as expensive regulation favours large incumbents in any industry.
“My primary goal as Minister of Finance will be to translate the same discipline the previous National Government demonstrated with fiscal policy to the regulatory side.”
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