Joyce waffles on | The Jackal

20 Nov 2011

Joyce waffles on


New Zealand has a huge decision to make on the 26th November... to own our future or sell it off. It's not about Keys personality, it's about cold hard facts... and that is where National is totally failing. Here's an example:

A couple of days ago Steven Joyce wrote an article called 32 pages of Labour waffle in which he states:

“The rest of the recipe is the same dangerous stuff that they have been unsuccessfully peddling over the past several weeks. 
“That includes 10 big new costs on businesses that would cost thousands of jobs, and a solution to debt that involves borrowing $15.6 billion more over the next four years. Labour still has its head in the sand on the crisis in Europe, which was caused by excessive borrowing, and poorly thought-out policies.”

Emphasis added.

Obviously the ten things Joyce has mentioned aren't actually listed because he's simply made that figure up. The other lie is his claim that Labour will borrow $15.6 billion more when the Labour website clearly outlines their fiscal strategy, which states:

Labour will borrow more in the short-term to fund our schools and hospitals because we will never sell our assets. The extra borrowing in the first term of Labour government will be $15.6 billion which is $2.6 billion higher than a National government which would borrow $13 billion. 
Our borrowing peaks at $4 billion more than National, but from 2017/18 we will be paying back the debt faster than a National government would because of the on-going asset returns and the increasing revenue of our fairer tax package.

Steven Joyce has taken the wrong figure and forgotten to include Nationals projected borrowing of $13 billion in his calculations. How dumb is that?

Here is the Statistics NZ data sheet (XLS) showing New Zealand's private sector and government debt. Happen to notice anything?

Net government debt has increased dramatically under National to over $40.8 billion in June this year, an increase of $22 billion since they gained office in 2008. It's not all because of the Christchurch earthquakes or global recession either.

John Key et al are a bunch of fraudsters that intentionally got New Zealand hugely in debt to try to justify their privatization of our assets.

Whoever you vote for... don't vote National.