OPINION: There's an old saying in politics: don't ask a question you don't know or want the answer to.
Labour asked so many experts so many questions on tax that they didn't want to be answered, I'm running out of pages to fit them in.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins, who hails from the party of "listen to the experts", spent Sunday shunning their advice on GST that removing it from fresh and frozen fruit and veggies is, in fact, not particularly smart or effective both practically and politically.
It favours the rich over the poor and tax cuts would be smarter, so said the 2019 Tax Working Group report. The report commissioned by the Labour cabinet in 2017 - a cabinet, you guessed it, Chippy [Hipkins] was a part of.
Former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern shunned their advice on capital gains tax and now Chippy has his back against the wall, so is also shunning the answers from the experts that they paid handsomely for these answers.
Well, why are they not listening to these guys? It's because they're rich and wouldn't understand.
"Some of the tax purists will say we should not do this," Hipkins said on Sunday.
"They will always be able to find a reason not to do something, but they're not the ones struggling to pay for their grocery bills when they reach the checkout at the supermarket. They're not the ones who are having to remove things from their trolleys."
If these so-called 'experts' and tax purists, as Chris Hipkins puts it, are so wealthy, so comfortable, their answers and advice so irrelevant, then why for the love of a fresh banana would you spend $2 million commissioning a report and $1000 a day per expert to ask them anything in the way of questions at all?
Ryan Bridge is host of AM.
