Why our tax debate in Aotearoa is stuck on the wrong questions and answers
Look at where things are at right now across the country. Emergency department wait times blowing out, doctors and nurses at the end of their rope.
Cost of living decimating household budgets, infrastructure deficits everywhere and political debates revolving around minor bracket adjustments or whether we need a CGT vs a wealth tax.
The entire parliamentary debate is trapped in endless tinkering around the edges, because our revenue model is still built on a 19th-century framework designed before real-time digital payments even existed.
What if the fundamental premise of how we fund the country is wrong?
Instead of thousands of pages of tax code, income brackets, GST compliance overhead and chasing capital offshore, what happens if a country like Aotearoa treated taxation purely as a system function?
New Zealand processes $8.6 Trillion across core interbank settlement rails annually. By shifting from heavy personal/corporate income compliance to clipping digital transaction velocity (an automated micro-levy at the central bank settlement layer), you eliminate deadweight compliance costs and enable funding a permanent economic floor for citizens and a structural surplus.
For anyone keen on macroeconomics, tax reform, or UBI models, if a real UBI is inevitable, as many people think with the rise of AI and NZ going backwards in real terms year on year, how do we fund it?
(Full disclosure: I’m a Hamiltonian tech worker/author and just published an independent non-fiction book breaking down the full dataset and blueprint today called 'The Great Revolution' but wanted to bring the core policy mechanics here to discuss with you guys).