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New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union Treads Where Mainstream Media Fears to Go

Now Challenges Labour Party Opposition

HASTINGS, HAWKES BAY, NEW ZEALAND, May 5, 2015 /EINPresswire.com/ -- A prairie populist style of citizens in group in less than two years is now in a position to point out that its membership shows signs of overhauling that of the Labour Party, New Zealand’s version of the Democratic Party. The New Zealand Taxpayers Union has attained this level of public prominence by one simple ploy.

It ventures into territory that the mainstream media treats as taboo.

This includes the astonishing level and duration of fringe benefits to Members of Parliament present and past. Also various feel-good government administered public funds in a number of spheres that the media treats as sacred.

Its single purpose, the Union claims, is to identify wasteful areas of public spending.

In April it spawned the Auckland Ratepayers Alliance designed to focus exclusively on the nation’s biggest city where special interests have long enjoyed unchallenged thrall generously supported by public funds.

NewsSentinel’s Randal Jackson interviewed Jordan Williams (pictured), the youthful and Wellington-based constitutional lawyer who co-founded and runs the Union.

Excerpts: -
The average citizen is concerned with financial waste across a range of activities, some of which impinge increasingly on personal freedoms. The Union is not publicly funded . . .

Taxpayer money is precious and should go to higher needs. There are groups out there that do what we do. But take public money. Business New Zealand ( a corporate lobby) is guilty . . .

The Taxpayers' Union, wants to get a fiscally conservative message into the media. It is not publically funded, unlike others such as anti-tobacco groups . . .

Then there are the chambers of commerce: millions of Auckland council dollars are pumped into these business organisations . . .

Our role is to represent the man in the street. The establishment view is quite different from the public view . . .

Take, for example, the (judicial) Sensible Sentencing Trust. It's hated by the establishment but over 10 years it has turned the justice system around by organisation and coordination. . .

I don't care if the intellectual elite hate us. The average Joe has had enough off being bossed around……
Today's public health campaigners would, in previous generations, have ended up in religion. They have a need to boss people around . . .

Take the fat tax in Denmark. It cost thousands of jobs but had very little effect on consumption. Likewise, soda taxes in the US have had very little effect on their targets, who often then substitute alcohol . . .

Planned plain packaging for tobacco products is more about being seen to do something to “stick it up the capitalists” -something that doesn't work.. Criminal gangs are winners. . .

Despite the rhetoric, smokers pay vastly more in excise than smoking-related health care costs. If you raise smoking taxes, you should reduce taxes overall . . .

Originally published in the Oceania edition of News Sentinel

Max Farndale
Manufacturers Success Connection
64 6 870 4506
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