The Green Party has had to rewrite the numbers in its flagship tax policy. The fix cuts projected net revenue by about $200 million a year, a mistake co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick called a “typo.”
The reissued plan shows total net revenue of $5.15 billion in 2027/28, rising to $5.73 billion by 2030/31. The version released a day earlier said $5.35 billion and $5.94 billion. Over four years the gap comes to roughly $800 million. The Greens revised the plan after RNZ and 1News asked questions that morning.
Where the error came from
The fiscal table set aside $100 million a year for administering and enforcing the new taxes. That sum had been added to total revenue instead of being subtracted as a cost.
Brad Olsen, principal economist at Infometrics, reviewed the costings for the party and told 1News the Inland Revenue Department (IRD) cost had been put in the wrong place. “I’m sorry to have missed this,” he said. “However, all revenue from the Green’s tax changes do stack up. The error is regrettable but not material to the taxation elements of the Green’s Tax Policy.”
His review found the costings reasonable, but only on the Greens’ own assumptions for each policy. It did not cost the proposals independently, and Infometrics warned that the large number of overlapping changes were “difficult to fully assess.”
Swarbrick’s response
Asked about it on RNZ’s Midday Report, Swarbrick confirmed the mistake. “Yes, we’ve issued a correction on this. So, there was a typo, which you’ve rightfully pointed out with net revenue,” she said. It was put to her that the error added up to nearly half a billion dollars across the forecast period. She said the figures still held.
“This is what happens when you have a large team moving at pace, and you’ve got designers who are producing collateral, which is going out,” she said. “We’ve made an error, and we’ve issued a correction to correct exactly that, but our figures still stack up, and we’re being transparent about that correction.” The revision leaves the individual policy measures unchanged.
It was the second hitch in the launch. The plan appeared early on the party’s website, hours before the scheduled announcement, and the Greens brought forward Sunday’s media event as a result.
What the plan proposes
The plan is the party’s first major policy of the election year. It has three parts:
A 2.5% annual tax on net assets above $10 million, with the family home exempt. A “capital acquisitions tax” of 33% on inheritances and gifts worth over $1 million, with family homes and farms exempt. For earners, a $10,000 tax-free threshold and a new 45% top rate on income over $160,000, replacing the current 39% rate on income over $180,000.
The Greens say the income changes would give a tax cut to 96% of New Zealanders. Co-leader Marama Davidson said 99.7% of people would not pay the wealth tax. Swarbrick said the party narrowed the wealth tax because voters wanted certainty about who is affected. “With that $10 million threshold, I think it’s pretty clear,” she said.
On how the IRD would collect the new taxes, she said modelling under the previous Labour government put the cost of applying a wealth tax at about $3 million a year. “We’ve resourced the IRD around $100 million in this proposal,” she said at the launch. That is the same line later corrected.
National’s campaign chairperson Simeon Brown said the Greens had handed Labour “a smorgasbord of new taxes” and called the proposals “economic lunacy.”
