New Zealand First leader Winston Peters says he’s asked Christopher Luxon and Nicola Willis for a spreadsheet to show how National’s numbers stack up.
He told Newshub Nation on Saturday morning that he could not find an economist who could make their figures work for the amount of money they say will be generated by foreign buyers in the property market.
Under National’s plan, foreign purchases would incur a 15% foreign buyers tax, meaning a foreign person buying a $2 million home would pay $300,000 in tax.
It estimated the new revenue stream, which was key to the party being able to afford its proposed tax cuts, would bring in $740m a year.
But Peters said economists told him that was not likely.
“Every economist… and I agree and I said so at the time, it’s about $500m short or $2.1b over four years. I did run the economy once as a former treasurer. I’ve got some idea how to run things. My point was no economist can find out how it works either and I noticed yesterday National has dropped it from its calculations.”
National released the details of its fiscal plan on Friday, including a $2b saving on benefits due to only adjusting them in line with inflation, and a tax cut policy that would cost $14.6b over the period it forecast for.
Peters said it was the “most unreal election”. “We’ve got people making promises day after day about what they’re going to do and they haven’t got the money for it.
“It’s got to be a false promise… these promises, throwing money around like an eight-armed octopus are irresponsible in the extreme.”
He said he had asked Luxon and Willis for details and said he would reserve judgement until he saw how it stacked up.
“I’m open minded, I’ll look at it… but please show us now.”