Good morning everybody, my name is Hayley Horan and I'm the CEO of Visitor Central, home of Wellington Chamber of Commerce. And I do not have a cold, I have just used my vocal cords for screaming at the hurricanes for approximately 90 minutes on Saturday night. So, you know, we won in the wind.
We won in the wind. And I think that's the story of our beautiful capital. So we're going to keep winning no matter what.
So excuse my croaky voice. But thank you so much for welcoming us, being so welcoming this morning and turning up. We have about 80 people online.
So across our central New Zealand businesses, of which we have about 155,000, 80 of them are online this morning and the others can be recorded. So thank you. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
But before we get started, I better jump into some housekeeping, keeping us safe. So in the event of a fire, please use the nearest exit and gather either out on Lambton Quay or at the car park entrances on Warring Taylor or Johnson Street. If there's an earthquake, stay inside and move away from the windows.
The women's toilets are by the kitchen and the men's are through the doorway right there to the left. And I would like to say that it's very, very exciting to have you here today with us. Chlöe Swarbrick is the co-leader of the Green Party Aotearoa New Zealand and Matt Allen, who is the sponsor, Allen and Clark.
I want to thank you as well and you'll do a formal introduction shortly. Today's event is part of our election series of events where we're looking to host the leader of every political party in Parliament. I think as a business association, we have a really clear mandate and that is to bring the information to the table and that is for you to then make your choices.
So thank you for giving us this time this morning. We have a pile of questions already online, so we are going to have a Q&A at the end today, but we'll be honest that we may not be able to get through all of those questions. So as I say, it's an absolute pleasure to continue the series with co-leader of the Green Party, Chlöe Swarbrick.
Chlöe is also the Green Party spokesperson for mental health, drug law reform, revenue, climate change and finance. And I can say for everyone in this room, they're all critical, critical conversations to be having. So I'd now like to hand over to Matthew, Matt, Allen from Allen and Clark, who will introduce Chlöe more formally.
And thank you so much for your sponsorship. It's a pleasure, thank you. Thanks for having me.
Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. Kō Matthew, Allen, aho. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this Beehive to Business Breakfast.
So these events, of course, exist to bring communities together, communities, business and government, and the people who are shaping policy. So this, but this one feels particularly well-timed given there's been quite a lot of media commentary lately. And as you'll be aware, the polls are showing the Greens anywhere between 8 to 13% most recently.
So regardless of where the election lands, the Greens will potentially have a very significant part of a centre-left government should go that direction. The Green Party spent the last 18 months building a coherent economic alternative to the current government, arguing that fiscal austerity has not delivered growth, and that a different approach to public investment would produce better outcomes for New Zealanders, including for business. Just this past Sunday, of course, the party released their 2026 election tax policy, a 2.5% annual tax on net assets above $10 million, an inheritance tax, and higher corporate tax for large companies.
And then more broadly for Wellington businesses, where the public and private sectors are tightly intertwined, the Green Party's vision for the shape and scale of government matters directly. The questions of public investment, regulatory settings, and the future of public services are not abstract. They shape how we as businesses operate, how we plan, and how we think about what comes after November.
So to our speaker, our Chlöe Swarbrick is co-leader of the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand. She's been an MP for Auckland Central since 2020, and entered Parliament as a List MP in 2017. She became co-leader in March 2024, and is a party spokesperson for finance, revenue, and climate change, and drug policy reform, which I didn't actually know until then, and they were very important to me.
So maybe if you, I don't know if you are going to touch on that, but most welcome to. She also sits on the Finance and Expenditure Select Committee. Under her leadership, the Greens made a deliberate effort to engage with audiences outside the traditional base on the economics, not just the environment.
This morning is part of that. Chlöe's here to talk about the forces shaping New Zealand's future, and the role businesses can play in a changing economic, environmental, and social landscape. Given where the Greens have been sitting in recent polls, it is worth listening carefully and engaging.
Even if for some of those among us, your cheque book gets a little nervous when she mentions inheritance and wealth taxes. So Chlöe, thank you for joining us. We look forward to your address.
Please join me in welcoming Chlöe, co-leader of the Green Party. I'll just get my phone so I make sure I don't waste all of your time. Thank you so much for having me.
As has just been said, I am Chlöe Swarbrick. I am actually, however, I'm not sure where all my portfolio lists came from. I'm no longer the Mental Health and drug law reform spokesperson.
However, it is very near and dear to my heart. I've never encountered an area of public policy, particularly in drug law reform, that is just so utterly anti-evidence, anti-people, and produces worse and worse results, yet we continue to pursue it. I did, however, co-found the cross-party group on mental health and addiction with Matt Doocey and Louisa Wall, and we've got some very good news coming soon which will demonstrate actually some of that collaboration.
But I guess just to start with first things first, because in front of many audiences, and thank you as well for the acknowledgement of the fact that since I have become co-leader, I have been really doing my best to get out there and to, I guess, explore this theory that I have, which is proven true almost every time I talk to New Zealanders, regardless of where they come from, that people in this country care about each other and the planet that we live on. I think that at a point in time when politics feels so overwhelming and exhausting and polarised, coming back to those really basic principles is critical. So just to start with an introduction to the Green Party, because I think we've been pretty bloody consistent for the last 30 years or so.
I think you probably would look across the political aisle and see a lot of different politicians who will poll or focus group their way into understanding what they think about something. But with the Greens, you know pretty much on every single issue where it is that we will stand. And that is because our principles are so foundational to everything that we do.
So for the uninitiated, Green Parties all across the world have the same four core charter principles. What differentiates us here in Aotearoa is of course a commitment to understanding and honouring of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and I think particularly in the context of our current political environment, acknowledging that fundamental truth feels pretty important, albeit unfortunately sometimes seemingly unnecessarily controversial. Happy to get into that if anybody wants to have that debate.
From that flows our other four basic principles or commitments, which are ecological wisdom, recognition of the fact that resources are finite. Even those resources that do regenerate need time and space and planning in order to regenerate. I think a debate on precisely this point has actually come to a head around the notion of the Fisheries Amendment Bill, which I'm stoked to see that we have won at the very least a short term win on and longer term if we manage to resign this government to the history books.
From that first principle of ecological wisdom, I think the second premise is entirely logical. And this is something which I think you'll hopefully see reflected in much of my public and private commentary, is that logic is really important to me as is evidence. That is social responsibility.
If we accept that resources are somewhat finite, even those that do regenerate, then in order to have this thing called society, let alone social cohesion, we need to share my friends. At the very least, we need to ensure that everybody has their basic needs met, so that we have a society that is safe, let alone healthy, let alone where people are able to achieve their potential or their wellbeing. Thirdly, nonviolence.
Of course, the Green Party are hippies. We don't like going to war. But I think if you really dig into that a little bit more, it's about how do we actually create systems of governance or otherwise, that don't generate conflict in the first place? How do we genuinely and meaningfully enable conversation and democracy so that people are able to come to understand each other? Fourthly, appropriate decision-making.
We're nerds for local government and devolving decision-making powers down to the level where it actually affects people. So if anybody wants to talk about Citizens Assemblies or otherwise, I am all ears. But that is, I think, just the starting premise that I just wanted to introduce everybody to because interestingly enough, I so frequently find all across the country that people, despite having known the Green Party, our name is green, our colour is green, they're not particularly aware of that deep whakapapa and those foundational guiding principles.
And that's where I guess I come to that point of the economy. Because not a lot of people also know that Jeanette Fitzsimons, one of our founding co-leaders, very much had that economist string to her bow. And it was Jeanette who first said that we currently have an economy that exploits both people and the planet.
Therefore, our approach to economics has always been about trying to rebuild these systems in a way that actually allow us to orient ourselves towards the flourishing of people and the planet. And I don't think that those things need to be traded off against each other. I was in a pretty insane situation just last week in Scrutiny Week down the road at Parliament, when I was asking one of our Ministers of Conservation, sorry, one of our Ministers for the Environment.
I don't know if we so much have a Minister of Conservation, albeit in title alone at the moment. But one of our Ministers for the Environment about just this government's intention to open up the potential sell off of 60% of our conservation estate, let alone the mining on conservation land and otherwise. And the argument that was put to me by one of these Crown Ministers was, well, we just need to find ways to exploit our natural environment in order to make money to then be able to protect our natural environment.
I don't know about you guys, but that does strike me as kind of insane. And I think that that is the threads that we are trying to get to when we are talking about the economic policy of the Green Party. It is a coherence that understands that foundational relationship between the wellbeing of people and planet.
So look, I guess the thing that I wanted to say today, some notes that I wrote down earlier this morning before I got here, is I think all of us in this room and the 80 odd people who are circulating online somewhere, kia ora, all of us are here in Aotearoa, New Zealand because we have chosen to be. All of you have skills, you have talents, you have clearly resources. And that means that you have options.
But you have chosen to be in this country because being in this country means something to you. And I think that that tells us a really important thing, that the race to the bottom that we seem to have been engaged in for the last 40 or so years with the merciless cuts to the public service, and to the things that all of us enjoy and rely on, well, those things are not going to deliver us salvation, let alone the flourishing, let alone the prosperity that we all need. But to the counterfactual, the things that we love about this country are in fact, the very likes of our natural environment, which is currently under threat.
Our families, the belonging and the community that we have here, our sense of identity, and a rather decent climate to live in and to grow up in and to raise our kids in. But right now, as I think we all know, if you open the paper every day, those things are under threat. And we have to choose whether we want to protect those things, and whether we want to invest in them, or whether we want to continue down this incredibly illogical economic pathway of destruction and devastation, and trade those things off, where I think we end up left with, without all too much of those things that all of us so foundationally and fundamentally care about.
We have to choose whether we are going to invest in this country, or if the story is the best that we can hope for is simply to sell it off for parts. Now, this may seem like a bit of a random pivot. But I am the MP for Auckland Central.
And some of you may have seen in the news over the last week that we have had the news of closure of some of our iconic music venues. One of them is Neck of the Woods, which is actually somewhere that I worked 12 years ago. And in response to that news, there was an absolute outcry.
I heard some people in my community lamenting the fact that despite our community having gone through immense amounts of change and challenge over the last 10 years, with the disruption that is inevitable with the building of our country's largest, most expensive infrastructure in the form of the city rail link, that now, at the final hurdle, with just a few months left to go, we might instead be inheriting a city where the best that someone can hope for is to catch a train from Starbucks on Queen Street to Starbucks on K-Road. That doesn't feel like an incredibly exciting city, nor what was promised to us, right? What we instead need is flourishing small businesses, that identity and that culture that I was just talking about, the very reasons that keep us all in this country, the things that we love about this place. But those things are right now a threat.
And this is where, in just the past week, we have actually seen some incredible glimpses of hope, because the community has come out of the woodwork. Artists and musicians, people who are not particularly renowned for having a lot of resources at their disposal, have decided to chuck $5 in here, $20 in there, and we have now raised around $80,000 to $90,000 to save Neck of the Woods. I think this is just a tiny glimmer of how, when New Zealanders see something that they matter being under threat, people will rally and people will unify if they understand what it looks like for us to all organise ourselves to try and save and protect something and to move forward.
So this is a microcosm, I think, of the opportunity that we have to have a meaningful conversation as a country about what kind of economy we actually want to have and to put those economic settings in place. As I so frequently unpack for many different types of audiences, I actually ended up taking on some postgrad economics papers a while ago, because actually, Gareth Hughes, one of my former Green MPs, when I was in my first term of Parliament and I was talking quite a lot about the cannabis referendum, we were sitting in an MP planning meeting at dinner, and he said, you know, Chlöe, you seem pretty all good at getting media cut through. Surely you don't want to be talking about weed for the rest of your time in Parliament.
And I was like, true, yeah. I think I want to talk about economics, because I understand that that's where real power lies. That's actually how we shape the outcomes and the opportunities and the potential that is available to us as a country.
And now, having done some of that highfalutin academic research into the state of economics, and also, obviously, on a day-to-day basis, encountering the way that politicians and the media landscape talks about economics, I really just whittle it down to regular people as, what is this economy? It is just all of us. It is the things that we create. It is the planet that we live on.
And it is the rules that we put in place in order to govern those relationships. And right now, the rules that govern those relationships are dragging us further and further down. Our country feels like we are stuck in a rut, because honestly, we are.
Unless something meaningful changes, nothing is going to change, which I think is where all of us, hopefully in this room, understand that a country that is hollowed out of its young people, of its talent, of its creativity, of its small businesses, of its working people, well, that country is really bad for business. So, if we, in fact, want to have a country which is good for commerce, which is good for business, then we need to create the conditions necessary for that. And thank you, Matt, for acknowledging the fact that over the last 18 months, you can see, and it is all available online, a really coherent, huge body of work that the Greens have undertaken to demonstrate, for example, our industrial strategy, where we have shown that we can, in fact, be a country that retains good, meaningful manufacturing jobs and revitalises our regions, if we choose to invest in making that a reality.
But this is also where I think it's important to actually address some of the commentary that I have seen percolating in the likes of social media comments and in some blog posts over the last few days, which is some people's notion that all the Green Party are talking about when we're talking about implementing a fairer tax system, in some people's minds, is just the idea of one-off transfers from those who are wealthy to those who are doing less well off. And here I think it's important to unpack, actually, a perfect example of where this has happened to the detriment of our country in the context of right-wing economic policy. This is, in the 90s through to today, the sell-off of state housing, which was replaced by something called the accommodation supplement.
We ended up with a mass sell-off of state housing, something which kept house prices relatively stable or lower, definitely far more so than they are today. And it was replaced by this notion that the market would provide, but obviously that certain people wouldn't be able to afford to get into all of the housing in the private market, so we just topped that up. The accommodation supplement now costs us to the tune of approximately $2 billion and is a direct wealth transfer from the state, from our collective democratic resources, into the pockets of landlords by way of some of the lowest-income New Zealanders.
That is not meaningfully benefiting anybody, and in fact it is actually bidding up the cost of rents in this country, which I think belies the core point that I am trying to make here, that there are some things that I genuinely believe, and hopefully all of us can at least understand, should perhaps not be commodified to the extent that they are at the moment. Because if we are to genuinely protect New Zealanders' rights to affordable, accessible housing, health care, education, so on and so forth, then they also have more money in their back pocket to engage in those discretionary activities, the likes of going to their small business or engaging in arts and culture. So the point here is that, of course, baseline with the extreme inequality that we have at the moment, those transfers are important for addressing people's immediate needs, but that is not how we will build the necessary foundations for a country that is capable of prosperity.
To do that, we have to actually invest in building this country, which means fixing our dilapidated infrastructure, which means lowering the cost of living for New Zealanders, and which ultimately means a happier, healthier, and safer country. So happy to get into any of the details there. Also to touch, of course, on the many challenges of climate change and AI, but I just thought it would be worthwhile to particularly point out that kind of economic thinking for the Green Party.
Thank you. Thank you, Chris. Oh, that's a lot to take in, and I love the systems thinking, thinking about the entirety.
So we now are open to the floor. I don't know, Christy, do you want to kick from online first, as we had such a great following? Thank you, Cody. You mentioned AI, so I'll just start here.
This is from Michael, and he said, how do you use AI, and what are your thoughts on how to use AI? Okay, Michael. Sorry, I'm writing this down just so that I address the fulsome question. If you've seen me on the news, you probably know I'm not particularly great at a soundbite.
I'm like, here's the history of that issue. My BA is in philosophy, if that gives you any insight. So how do I use AI? I'm going to be completely straight up with you.
I am terrified of AI, and that's personally. I therefore probably fall far more into the camp of personally being a bit of a Luddite in terms of my own use with it. I find it scary that we have a situation right now, and a lot of my friends are creatives who have seen content that has been generated by, effectively, our communities all across the world, the history of human knowledge input into this tool, which is now, I guess, bypassing that human touch.
So I'm reticent, and I haven't yet figured out how to engage with that, and I also need to acknowledge the reality that I haven't yet made time to do so. So that's very much my personal interaction with AI, just to be completely honest and transparent with you. But I am completely, of course, aware of the fact that it is here.
It is happening. One of my best friends recently retrained to be a teacher, and this is, I guess, just another cautionary tale and something that I think is worthwhile us all thinking about as we consider how best to regulate and what our philosophical approach to society should be. But you'll all know that it is being used in our schools and actually now being required to be used in many of our tertiary education courses as well.
But in this school, my friend was telling me that kids these days, I'm sure they said that about all of our generations, but kids these days are not used to friction, and they are used to now being able to outsource anything that feels inconvenient into this technology that can just produce the outcome. And the thing that worries me about that is not so much the tool, but it is the fact that we are, to a certain extent, training or at least culturally normalising the fact that things shouldn't be hard. And that, for me, is a concerning prospect.
So that aside, these are just personal reflections to the political and regulatory side of things. When we heard the government announced that they were going to cut 8,700 public sector jobs, and don't worry about it, we're just going to replace it all with AI, we had a conversation as a caucus and myself with many of my MPs, because one of the things that I've been thinking and talking a lot about over the last two years in particular, has been that I think that we need to break this really stupid political binary where bureaucracy, good, bureaucracy, bad. For me, the question should be, what is the point of bureaucracy? What are we actually trying to achieve with the public service? And how do we actually go about doing that? So instead of my MPs going out and just attacking the 8,700 figure, I was like, well, surely we should be going back to first principles.
Again, what are we trying to achieve with the public sector? And how do we actually do that? To that effect, of course, artificial intelligence can be a tool. But it's not just simply going to backfill and bang, we've got the same outcomes that we were expecting or have been for the previous however many years. So I think that this is where we really actually need to come back to those first principles.
And this is not some wishy-washy kind of Green Party notion of, you know, grandiose thinking. It's just, what are we actually trying to achieve? And do we have the tools capable of achieving that? Because otherwise, I think that we end up with really hollow promises from our politicians. I've also been talking quite a bit to researchers at Victoria University of Wellington and at the University of Auckland, because I am interested in understanding and expanding my thinking on artificial intelligence.
I am reminded of several years ago now, just before I got to Parliament, when Parliament Transport Select Committee, I think, had to have a parliamentary inquiry into Uber, because politicians didn't really understand what it was, despite it having been operating in the country for several years. And I worry that we are really at risk of that exact same thing happening right now. So I'll be honest with you, I'm playing catch-up, and I think most of our parliament is.
Obviously, there's some really egregious and concerning elements of it, the likes of deepfakes, especially its application to pornography and otherwise. But yeah, I guess this is where, just philosophically, I am open to it. But I think that we need to have meaningful, open conversations about what it is that we're trying to achieve, and not pretending that it is going to be a panacea, silver bullet to solve all of our problems, especially when the means of that production is not equitably owned, which really actually does prompt the bigger question as well about our economic settings, and whether they are capable of sustaining that technological revolution.
Thank you. Kia ora. Kia ora, Chlöe.
I have a comment and a question. I did a deep dive yesterday into the love tax that came out. I'm a political scientist, I'm not an economist.
Out of the eight kind of clauses that you guys promoted, I think sinks are incredible. I've been following your tax policy for 10 years, and I think this is the most reasonable, practical, doable thing as a centrist myself. Put that on the billboard.
So congratulations, because I can definitely see the work you've done on that policy. A technical question, and this is just advice for me, I guess. In my research, I realized that we don't actually know how many landlords we have, or a way of comprehensively knowing who these landlords are.
We have some proxy measures from Inland Revenue, and Envy, and HUD, some surveys, we may have got some shit, but actually we don't really know. How are you dealing with this as a party, and can you help educate us in terms of understanding the landlord market? Because it's such a flagship component of your speeches, narrative, political. So I just want to know and advice for me to better understand.
Hell yeah. Yeah, thank you very much for that question. I had no idea where that was going to go.
So yeah, I mean, what you've kind of touched on is, I think, one of the major critiques that we've been levying, albeit it has become more and more refined about how an economy that is effectively speculative isn't actually productive. It is in fact robbing us of our ability to be productive, and also clearly to retain our talented young people, not only because of the fact that all the money is being poured into houses, which is bidding them out of the market, but also that's not being poured into research and development and innovation and creativity and so on and so forth. So as you allude to, so far the best kind of metrics that we're able to glue together are from NB, bond lodgment data, IRD, sometimes in the company's office, Land Information New Zealand.
The last time that we tried to do this, there was approximately 110,000 landlords, but that again is like very speculative. So this is where one of the core components of the reform in the housing space that we've been advocating for is for a register for landlords and for property managers. And actually, there was a bill that was introduced under the former Associate Minister of Housing, Portal Williams, in which you can go back in Google and you'll find me arguing publicly for the register for property managers that she was looking to implement, which, by the way, was actually something which was first argued was necessary back in 2008, when the Real Estate Agents Act was first being amended, and the Labour Party was first putting forward proposals to regulate property managers as part of the real estate framework.
And then it ended up being taken out of that, and then the National Party was arguing to put it back in, including the likes Gerry Brownlee. Then, and this is all on Hansard, then the Nats came into government, Nathan Guy was the Associate Minister, and he then took it back out. Then we ended up just with the real estate agents being regulated, and then fast forward to the 2020-23 term, Portal Williams introduced this bill.
Then it didn't end up progressing, it was at Select Committee, and I was arguing at Select Committee for the register for landlords to be introduced there, because that would just be the easiest way to measure these things, and also actually to hold bad landlords accountable. It exists in many other jurisdictions, including in many places in Europe.
And then the bill ended up being killed by Chris Bishop and completely yanked off the order paper. Now he's introducing another form of this legislation, but just to regulate property managers. So that kind of tells you the very messy story over the last 20 odd years of trying to do something in this space, but ultimately probably about why it's so important to have consistent politicians.
Next slide. I'll just use my voice, because that was very loud. What does success look like for the Green Party in this coming election? And what goals have you set your caucus and party for what you're trying to achieve in November? Really good question.
So, honestly, so I guess I'll take this to a personal level and then I'll take it to the party and kind of broader political level. I remember coming into parliament and having actually, I'll use the example of drug law reform. I would talk across the aisle, because obviously in the Green Party, in order to make anything happen, you have to work with other people.
So we are inherently quite diplomatic, despite how we might be caricatured or the soundbites taken out of context, whatever. And I would have these conversations, particularly with MPs and the legacy parties, Labour and National, who behind the scenes would agree outright that our current drug laws are just utterly stupid. They're producing more and more misery.
We're wasting good money after bad for worse and worse outcomes. And not only that, they're anti-compassionate, et cetera, et cetera. Get them to agree to that behind the scenes, because they understand all of those things.
But then they'll say, I couldn't possibly say that in public. I couldn't possibly advocate for that because I would risk my position politically. And they'd then kind of make the argument that they just needed to be in the requisite position of power in order to implement their beliefs.
To which point I would just kind of make the argument that, well, if you are going to waste your beliefs away or put them in the back cupboard to get up the kind of greasy pole, no one's going to believe you when you get to that position that those are the things that you believe in, but you've also conformed yourself so much by that point. Basically, if you wear the mask for long enough, it becomes your face, right? And I think that that's where particularly, and again, this is not a critique of anybody individually, but it is very much a structural and cultural critique of parliament. I mean, if you were to design an institution that was capable, let alone competent of dealing with the issues of our time, you would not design the Westminster parliamentary system.
But inside of those legacy parties on a day-to-day basis, and actually inside of parliament and across the political spectrum, on a day-to-day basis, I think you are kind of choosing individually between change or between career progression. And if you are choosing one of those two things, you're inherently deprioritizing the other. And that's kind of what I mean, right? These people would say that they believe in the change of drug law reform, but they're prioritizing their career progression, which means that change on that issue falls further and further below.
So I guess that offers you my kind of theoretical critique of our parliament and our political system, which is why I'm such a massive nerd for constitutional reform. But for the Green Party in this election, I guess in the broader sense, success would look like, I guess us finally as a country engaged in a meaningful, I'm not gonna say evidence-based because perhaps that's a little bit too aspirational, but aspirationally an evidence-based discussion about the kind of economy that we want to have and evolving the discussion away from tax good, tax bad, debt good, debt bad, and instead talking about the types of tax, who is being taxed, where that burden is falling, the kinds of investment, what constitutes good debt investing and growing our productive capacity, for example, as opposed to borrowing to pay for tax cuts. So I think that to me would look like a big success is shifting what theorists would call the Overton window, but in a very practical sense, New Zealand is having a more informed participation in our democracy, because I very strongly believe that politics doesn't just happen every three years with a general election, it happens every single day with decisions that make and shape our country opportunities, potential, et cetera.
So that is part of why I love election campaigns, because you have this moment in which everybody is focused and all of the potential futures for our country are on the table and we can pick a path if we all organise ourselves accordingly. So at the outcome of the election, post November 7th, obviously in my ideal world, I would love to be in a position for us to form government, a government that takes climate change seriously, not only mitigation, but also adaptation, because unfortunately, despite our best efforts, this government has really squandered the progress on that. And then also making some of those fundamental shifts in the way that we deal with and think about economics, particularly investing in ourselves.
Thank you. Thank you very much. Christine, can I come back to you? Yes, this one's from Stu and he says, if the green small part of the next government was for green small business, what do you expect to see? Stu, thank you, Stu.
So, I mean, I think the key thing, so this is part of what I was trying to touch on in my opening remarks about, I'm sorry, I'm looking at you as a conduit to Stu. Sorry. I think that this is where it's really important to understand that, I mean, actually, even as I got our current National Party Minister of Finance to agree to, interestingly, in our scrutiny week hearings on finance on Wednesday last week, extreme inequality is incredibly corrosive, not only for our economic potential, but also for our democracy and for social cohesion.
Extreme inequality robs the punters who are necessary to spend money in our small businesses. So this is where, for example, our tax policy, which is important to note, this is just the first of our election policies. This sets the scene for how we resource and fund the other things that we will be announcing.
The really important thing about that taxation policy is not just that it will provide the 96% of New Zealanders with income tax cuts, which, you know, you've seen, for example, this government come to power, promise income tax cuts, which most New Zealanders would say they don't feel anymore because of the fact that the cost of living has gone up so much. It is not just the fact that we're putting more money in the back pocket of working New Zealanders, but it is that we are unlocking the resources necessary to rebuild the foundations that enable our country to thrive, which means actively lowering the cost of living for power bills and for groceries and for other things. So I guess what I'm saying to Stu is watch this space, but you can see the seeds of this thinking and of the work that we have done in, for example, our industrial strategy and the other thinking over the past year.
Fantastic. Thanks very much. We have time for one more question.
Kia ora. Kia ora. Oh, hello.
Matamari. Chlöe. Welcome.
I just wanted to know, what do you do to relax? You have such a wealth of youthful years of experience and what you know and what you share with us all in the country, but I just wanted to know, how does Chlöe switch off? Thank you for that question. Well, I'm going to give you a very philosophical answer. No, this is actually something that I've been talking to, talking about rather, with a lot of my friends who, it will not surprise you, are oftentimes quite left wing.
We, so many on the left, particularly in my cohort and my generation on the left, have spent the last kind of 10 to 15 years in spaces and places furiously getting up to scratch with the debates and the citations and the arguments, and we can win any argument, but we're not winning. And this is what I meant when I said at our Green Party AGM about two years ago now in my inaugural AGM speech as the Green Party co-leader, that there is no point being right if we're left clinging to our mountains of evidence when the last tree is cut down. We actually, in fact, have to build relationships and get outside of our bubble.
And this is something which I've been reflecting on in many of the rallies and protests that I've been speaking in front of over the last two years and everything from economic inequality to the government's, opposing the government's move on orders to opposing the genocide in Gaza and otherwise, is at the end of the day, right now, I think a lot of people, to a certain extent understandably, are defining themselves in opposition to something. But that is a really exhausting place to be. And it's not particularly inspiring, it's not particularly aspirational, and it's definitely not a regenerative store of energy.
So I think that what we, in fact, have to do is define ourselves by virtue of what we want to be. And that is the invitation to work with other people, to share that collective vision, to come to consensus of what the basic non-negotiables are that all of us agree on to move our country forward. And that's where I come back to that really basic point I made in my introductory remarks about how, not only do I genuinely believe, but I see it proven to me every single day that New Zealanders care about each other and the planet that we live on.
And this is where, to answer your question, I come to the point that the left needs to have some goddamn fun. We need to stop being so serious all the time. So I have made it quite a political act over the last year to do the things that I love.
And I am incredibly grateful to live and operate and belong to a community in Auckland Central in particular that loves music. So I love to dance. Thank you so much.
I really, really appreciate it. And when these trouble close with music, here you come. I totally agree.
We all need to play more and laugh more and live more. So look, I just wanted to say thank you so much. It was so interesting and the questions were great, but it is time now to thank, I don't know why I've got two microphones.
I just like being really loud. I just want to thank very much Allen and Clarke for our incredible series, Beehive to Business. I genuinely believe it's our role to bring the information to the table.
And I feel like we've had a fantastic session this morning. I do need to click the clicker because I've been told to do this. To anyone that's a member, thank you so much.
And to anyone that isn't, why not? And so we're looking forward to continuing this series to bring leaders to you. And in fact, our next one is here, the beautiful Qiulae Wong, who's going to come and give her point of view. So thank you so much, Chlöe and the team.
Thank you so much to everybody online and that concludes our breakfast this morning. Thank you so much.
