barking rabbit Says: Due to aforementioned pride, I would prefer this solution to be beneficial to all new zealanders, therefore still like the idea of GST removed from food.

I didnt mean to be personal (except to point out that people in work have the same lifestyle and poverty dilemmas as those on benefits, often more so) and I commend you for the pride you refer to.

However, removing gst on food would not solve the problem. The wealthy would have more money in their pockets to spend (ie less gst paid on food). The tax-take would therefore drop. Therefore there would be less money to give to beneficiaries, so over time the real value of a given benefit payment would decline. Not only that, but if the wealthy and middleclass have more money available to spend on food they will buy more of it, so there will be less available for poor people to buy. If demand goes up, availability goes down, and prices rise.

Again…the real problem is that when people stop growing their own food they lose control of the price. They become dependent upon the vagaries of the world markets and economy.

eg: as petrol/oil becomes more expensive food prices will soar worldwide because it becomes more expensive to buy fertiliser, more expensive to run tractors, more expensive to transport to market.

Those same forces that push food prices up, make it harder for every NZ business to produce their products and ship them to market, whatever that product may be. The outcome of that is that the overall NZ tax-take declines and beneficiaries suffer again.

Fiddling with gst is a short-sighted and ultimately more damaging waste of time. The real answer to high food prices are various shades of the following:

1) Identify the fact that so many commodity prices are fundamentally founded upon our need for oil, and tied to the price for that oil. Find ways to break away from that reality!!

2) Force our farmers to produce ONLY for the local market so that there is no way we have to compete with international pricing. This sounds horribly like communism. It would be too damaging to contemplate doing this. However, maybe we could boost the availability of low-cost locally grown produce by getting prisoners to work their butts off producing food for the poor.

3) Teach people how to grow their own food.

4) Make public allotments available for communal food-growing. (Where else could an apartment dweller plant out a row of silverbeet and a herbgarden??)

5) Explain to beneficiaries that their income MUST be limited by (and significantly less than) the disposable incomes of middleclass working people. (sounds arrogant and heartless but it is true)

6) Limit the NZ population to a level where our food production potential significantly outstrips the demand/need for food. If we think food is expensive now, what will things be like when our population hits 6 million, or 10 million??

The real answers (and these are but a few…) have nothing to do with minor tampering with gst. The real answers come down to efforts by individuals to reshape their lives. If you are not reshaping your own life so as to reduce your dependence on world markets, and corporate products, then you will either go hungry, cold and wet, or else have to join the queue of people demanding to be given more, which ultimately has to be taken from someone elses efforts.

I don’t want to make this about personal situations, but once again generalisations and assumptions are being made due to a persons ‘beneficiary’ status. I spent fifteen years in the workforce (2yrs part, 13 full time) paying tax before I had my children. In comparison, I have been on a benefit for two and a half years (and will be ‘off it’ when my youngest turns five in 9 months), during which time, taking into account my ex husbands child support, and the family support payment working families get, my govt subsidised portion of the benefit has been less that $100 per week - considerably less than I paid in tax! I am law abiding - with a dad for a police sgt, I kinda have to be to keep the peace (oh, and I’ve never claimed the ‘extra’s’ I am entitled to - dumb pride…..)
I’m not asking for more hand-outs. Just a solution to the problem all low income families are facing in making ends meet, and feeding our children well. Due to aforementioned pride, I would prefer this solution to be beneficial to all new zealanders, therefore still like the idea of GST removed from food.

the most efficient & straightforward solution is still to simply make a weekly benefit payment to anyone under a certain income, & increase that payment as the price of food increases.
that’s if we can convince people like greengeek that it’s worthwhile spending

barking rabbit Says:
It concerns me that a couple of respondents make generalisations about beneficiaries without taking into account the diverse range of peoples and situations covered by this label. My option to avoiding being on a benefit would have been either staying in an environment that was detrimental to my babies, or handing their care over to strangers while I worked.

The main reason some people seem to support dropping gst on food is because they feel this will make life easier for beneficiaries and other poor. Personally I speak as someone who had to spend 6 months on a benefit (so I understand deprivation), and also 30 years in the paid workforce (so I understand the pain of paying taxes).

I have reached a point in my life where, for the last two years, I have been unable to afford to pay my living costs, unless I use my credit cards to get by.

The result is that my debt has continually increased, and I have to work my butt off to slow down the rate at which I am going financially downhill.

As a result I have never had as much time as I would have liked to spend with my kids, and therefore I have very little sympathy with your complaint that avoiding handing the care of your children to strangers necessitated choosing being on the benefit.

Taking the gst off food will require an increase in administration costs. It will not change in any way the total amount of tax needed to be spent on beneficiaries.

Why not?

Because the growers/suppliers of food will simply increase their prices, and/or ship their goods overseas as export markets continue to grow, thereby increasing the local prices too. People such as yourself will still need (and get) top-ups of your benefit wherever there is a shortfall.

Meanwhile, you probably don’t understand what our social welfare system has done to people like myself…(middle class, law-abiding, go-to-work-everyday kind of people). We have seen our effective take home pay drop hugely in real terms, while the social welfare system props up other peoples ‘human rights’.

It is time to get real and understand that the third world standards visible in Africa and India etc etc are the only true example of what ‘human rights’ really are. Human rights don’t in fact exist unless you can find someone else to make pay for them. Dropping gst on food simply gives someone like yourself an extra benefit at the expense of someone like me.

Time for NZ to wake up…if you think beneficiaries are hungry now, wait till the total effective tax-take drops over the next 10 years as taxpayers lose their ability to pay, or go overseas and you will see how much closer NZ gets to those third world conditions.

Yes, we would all love to get cheaper food, but clamouring for gst to be taken off food is really just another way for the poor to say “give me more of what you have”.

If you don’t grow your food yourself, then you will just have to pay whatever it costs to buy it from people who do. Digest that fact and you will have much more success in feeding yourself in the future, than if you simply demand that I should pay more tax so that you can pay less gst.

Ah, a voice of reason. I find it strange that some of the calls for abolishing GST on food come from the same people who normally complain about compliance costs to business.

The easy way is to be directly transparent - identify healthy staple foods and foodstuffs that are expensive and directly subsidise them, while leaving the consumer to pay the full cost of junk food if that’s what they want.