On the Campaign, September 14: What you missed on the election campaign today

While the polls still show National as the likely winner come election day, the party continues to be grilled over the details of its foreign buyers’ tax policy.

The latest criticism of the policy has come from three experts - economist Sam Warburton, former Reserve Bank head of financial markets Michael Reddell and Corelogic head of research Nick Goodall - who modelled three different scenarios that only turned up estimates of between $212.7 million and $286.8m a year.

That would leave a fiscal hole of $2.1 billion over the four-year forecast period.

National leader Christopher Luxon has continued to defend the numbers as “rock solid”, but continues to refuse to release the workings.

Speaking to On the Campaign host Georgina Campbell, NZ Herald deputy political editor Thomas Coughlan said the party is being very secretive about the workings, which were done by consultancy firm Castalia.

“Last election, Judith Collins and Paul Goldsmith released a massive event for the release of their tax policy, gave people a couple of hours to look at it and digest the numbers, [and] they released the full report from NZIER which went into detail on whether National Party’s numbers were correct.

“This year, National did nothing of the sort. It handed the numbers out half an hour before it published them.

“Christopher Luxon does say he’s confident in the numbers, but actually he’s a lot less confident than Judith Collins was three years ago.”

But can the ongoing criticism actually impact National’s poll performance when they are riding so high? Or is the promise of a tax cut enough that people won’t question how it’s paid for?

Meanwhile today, a new poll shows which potential coalition voters think will be the most chaotic for New Zealand, National focuses on farmers, and there were some tense moments at a climate change debate last night.

Listen to the full episode of On the Campaign for the full rundown of today’s big election stories.

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