National short on details on its family tax review

Don Brash

National is promising to overhaul Labour's Working for Families package as part of a review of taxation on families.

But in a speech in Auckland yesterday leader Don Brash offered no details of what National might change.

The party has already said it would reveal only minor changes to Working for Families in its tax-cut plan to be announced in mid-August. Any big changes would have to wait until it was in power and could conduct a proper review.

The package, launched by Labour last year with great fanfare and projected to cost $1.1 billion a year by 2007, is designed to boost incomes of families earning from $25,000 to $45,000.

Dr Brash said National would provide a "less bureaucratic and complex system" than Working for Families. It would try not to tax people or use a demeaning bureaucratic device to return money to them.

He said many middle-income families eligible for Working for Families payments wouldn't claim them because they "don't want to line up at a Winz office to make their claim - and nor should they have to".

National would review the whole area of family taxation, in particular the pressures on single-income families that did not qualify for Working for Families.

The package's architect, Social Development and Employment Minister Steve Maharey, said it was becoming a pattern for Dr Brash and his spokespeople to say they would reveal what they would do only once in government.

National was offering a confusing picture of what it would do with the package, he said. And Mr Maharey said nobody lined up at a Winz office to apply for payments.

Meanwhile, Helen Clark took a swipe at the timing of National's tax plan release, saying its "tease and tell" would irritate journalists and the public. "We have had so many different statements about when that policy would be coming ... now they're teasing it out for another month.

"You start to get the clear impression that this policy isn't that easy to write because it simply isn't credible to promise to spend more, borrow more, tax less and get it all to add up."

Finance Minister Michael Cullen said National was sinking into trouble of its own making over tax cuts. Its finance spokesman, John Key, had claimed the tax cuts would cost about $1 billion but National's already-revealed tax plans would cost $1.165 billion.

"And they haven't even got to the much more expensive business of raising thresholds and cutting tax scales," Dr Cullen said.

* A Radio Live reporter was barred from covering Dr Brash's speech, which was given to a Radio Network business seminar at the Auckland Town Hall.

Radio Network executive Bill Francis said there had been a "misunderstanding" and if the network had known National had invited Radio Live the reporter would have been allowed to stay.