I’m just about to head to the airport but just saw Christopher Luxon’s interview on Newshub Nation and was sufficiently riled by his treatment of the foreign buyers’ tax issue that I thought one last post was in order.

I don’t get riled that easily. When Luxon on Morning Report the other morning dismissed some views of mine as “what a load of rubbish”, some people were outraged on my behalf, but we laughed over breakfast.

But the bluster……is really just too much

We got another round of “trust us, we are right”, repeated over and over again, but with simply nothing to back it up. We got the “we’ve published a 30 page document of costing etc” and have released the independent review we commissioned. All things he knows simply not to be so.

The 30 page document – described repeatedly by Newshub’s interviewer (a little uncharitably really) as a “marketing brochure” (heavy emphasis on the glossy photos) – is here. It is promoting the entire tax and spending plan, and is just fine for those descriptive and promotional purposes. There are 1.5 pages on the foreign buyer tax plan. The first bit is scene-setting advertorial, then there is a perfectly reasonable description of the features of the policy, then there is a glossy photo and a stylised example of a sort of person who might be motivated to buy under it. And that is all fine. What of costings? This is the text that Luxon repeatedly tries to play up with his talk of 30 page documents of costings and modelling.

For the sort of document it is, this is fine. A brief description of the broad way they went about trying to estimate numbers (in an area where there are no official estimates to use). That’s useful, but only until questions start being asked, whereupon you might think they’d be open to explaining rather more (they have added that they assume, broadly reasonably, an average sale price of $2.9m).

Then Luxon tells us they’ve had it all independently verified and have released that too. But the problem is that they haven’t. All they made available is what is described as an Executive Summary by Castalia. Perhaps there is a more substantial document behind that, but they have not released it.

In the document they have released Castalia say this

It is mildly interesting to know that Castalia agree with National’s numbers, but on its own it tells us nothing of substance, because we get no idea of their approach, no more detail on National’s, nothing beyond Luxon’s “trust us”.

Castalia describes their general approach this way.

That is a reasonable approach in principle, and since there are no government estimates we should be led to believe they did independent modelling of foreign buyer tax revenue estimates.

Later in the same document there is a table, showing “National modelling” numbers on the left and “Castalia modelling” numbers on the right for each item in National’s plan.

For some items it makes sense that there is no difference between the two (when using government estimates). In others, they describe where and why there are differences.

What is puzzling if Castalia really did model estimates themselves for the revenue from the foreign buyers’ tax is that they came to exactly the same numbers in total and each year. Reasonable approaches to complex issues like this, with real uncertainty about behavioural responses etc, will almost inevitably come to slightly different estimates, even if they end up in much the same ballpark (eg in this case perhaps differences in how one might think of first year effects as a result of pent-up demand).

My point is not that Castalia did not honestly believe National’s numbers (I’m quite sure they did believe them to be reasonable) but to raise again the as-yet unanswered question as to just how much in-depth analysis and review went on for this specific line item. Luxon offers us nothing on that. He has released nothing more. We are just supposed to trust him.

It is quite astonishing, and particularly from a party that now avers its belief in a state Policy Costings Unit. In any such regime, any costings of policies parties actually adopted would routinely be released.

I have no idea why Luxon and Willis will not release their working, or a detailed carefully written up description of them. or why they won’t release Castalia to describe in detail what they did on this item.

But it isn’t reassuring. Not, as I’ve said repeatedly, that it matters much at macreconomically, but because it seems to say quite a lot about their likely approach to governing. Trust matters in politics and government, but trust is earned, and is reinforced by verification. It isn’t won, in functional polities, with a smile and some bluster and a refusal to provide any supporting detail, all while in interview after interview actively misrepresenting what they have done.

Anyway, our paper and my post on the wider issue is here. We’ve put our material and arguments out there.