Political parties and their policies as related to our bishops’ key points

With the general election on September 20 approaching fast, NZ Catholic has
summarised the policies of the main parties according to the headings outlined in the
New Zealand Catholic bishops’ statement released in August.

The order of listing was chosen at random. Visit the parties’ websites for fuller information

New Zealand First
www.nzfirst.org.nz
Leader: Winston Peters MPs: 7
Poverty: • Raise the minimum wage to $16. • Exempt food from GST. • Review “Working for Families”. • Ensure a genuine living wage. • Use the tax system to encourage
savings, especially for people saving for a deposit for a first home.
Health: • National strategy for cancer treatment, men’s health issues including — prostate cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, gout, asthma, obesity,
dementia, and other diseases. • Improve public health services. • Improve access to high quality oral healthcare services. • Set up an appropriate regulatory regime for complementary medicines. • Increase rural health services. • Ensure equitable access to basic healthcare throughout the country. • Develop centres of excellence for strategically placed specialist services. • Provide funding to help the diagnosis of osteoporosis by DXA scan for women over 50 years who have experienced a low trauma fracture. • Adequately resource elective surgery and provide additional waiting times funding.
End-of-life care: • Complete the nationwide network of Elder Abuse and Neglect Coordination Services. • Ensure that adequate funding and direction is put into Alzheimer’s, dementia, and osteoporosis research. • Ensure that a pilot study is undertaken to provide a formula for the timely provision of operations for cataracts and hip replacements. • Guarantee the maintenance of core hospital services and timely access to
acute emergency services. • Ensure that the subsidy paid to elderly in care is automatically adjusted for CPI inflation each year, and ensure DHBs fully pass it on. • Undecided on euthanasia. • Ensure a sustainable superannuation scheme.
Unborn children: Oppose decriminalisation of abortion. Refugees, asylum seekers: No official policy available.
Migrants: • Tighten immigration policy. • Make sure that Kiwi workers are at the front of the job queue. • Ensure that immigration policy is based on New Zealand’s interests and the main focus is on meeting critical skills gaps. • Ensure family reunion members are strictly controlled and capped and there is fairness across all nationalities.
People in prison: • Wider use of home detention with mandatory reporting for approved work or training. • A greater range of non-custodial sentences such as the
confiscation of property, larger and long term reparation payments and fines. • Short, sharp custodial sentences, with dedicated, stipulated, supervised and monitored work.
Children: • Free GP visits for children 6- to 12-years-old.• Introduce the Teen Health Check Bill to require DHBs to make provision for health checks on all year 9 students, and other measures. • Provide additional resourcing for child and youth mental health services. • All babies born automatically registered for $1000 kickstart Kiwisaver.
• Clothing allowances for orphans and unsupported children.
Families: • Upskill and train New Zealanders for greater independence from the State. • Oppose the liberalisation of laws relating to issues such as prostitution, cannabis and other drug use. • Institute a Castle Doctrine law, empowering New Zealanders to defend themselves and protect their homes and families with all necessary force.• Require greater parental responsibility for young offenders.


United Future
www.unitedfuture.org.nz
Leader: Peter Dunne MPs: 1
Poverty: • Support a broad-based low rate tax system. • Oppose the introduction of a capital gains tax. • Introduce income sharing for couples with dependent
children. • Introduce compulsory Kiwisaver.
Health: • Commit to the public health model so that it continues to assume the key role in the provision of vital health services. • Investigate the feasibility of a national health insurance scheme for non-trauma based disability. • Ensure that ambulance and air rescue services are set and maintained at a level that does not compromise public
and crew safety. • Zero tuition fees for those studying medicine, dentistry, pharmacy and nursing. • Introduce a free annual health check-up to all over 65s. • Ensure that older people are consulted about their health careand are empowered to make informed choices.
End-of-life care: • Investigate the feasibility of a national health insurance scheme, as an extension of the existing ACC scheme, for non-trauma based disability such as elective surgery for the elderly. • Ensure resources focusing on the acute health needs of the elderly are balanced by attention to ailments that affect their quality of life.
• Ensure there are enough community nurses and other welfare agencies to treat people at home where possible. • Oppose decriminalisation of euthanasia.
Unborn children: Supports decriminalisation of abortion.
Refugees, asylum seekers: • Increase the refugee quota to 1000 — from
750 a year. • Ensure that those who arrive in New Zealand under family or humanitarian quotas are supported into viable training and employment opportunities.
Migrants: • Prioritise the residency applications of those who have skills we need. • Allocate more resources to support new migrants as they settle in New Zealand. • Advocate for equal employment opportunities for ethnic minorities. • Review the operations
of NZQA to ensure that the process of formally recognising migrants’ skills is effective and efficient. • Oppose the current proposal to abolish the specific title and office of the Race Relations Commissioner.
People in prison: • Make drug and alcohol rehabilitation courses available for inmates who have been identified with drug or alcohol addictions. • Make literacy
programmes available for inmates. • Make suitable employment and accommodation integral components of parole.• Encourage the use of customised parole provisions to help with rehabilitation.
Children: • Concentrate on appropriate support for parents before and after birth. • Ensure high-quality extended care and support, including home visits, by lead maternity carers and Plunket. • Treat child obesity as a parenting issue and use parent education as the first line of attack. • Develop and fund programmes focusing on better nutrition. • Amend the Care of Children Act to make explicit the presumption of shared care when determining the care arrangements for children when parents separate. • Promote more research to address youth-related health problems.
Families: • Introduce income sharing for couples with dependent children. • Extend paid parental leave to 13 months. In addition to the 14 weeks’ leave for mothers
(which is able to be transferred to her partner upon application), a father or other partner would be able to take up to four weeks’ paid leave in his or her own right, either at the same time as the mother or on their own. An additional 38 weeks’ “family leave” would be available to either parent, adding up to 56 weeks in total. • Support flexible working hours. • Raise carer rates for grandparents to the same as that for foster parents. • Make the Children’s Commissioner part of the refocused Families Commission.


New Zealand Labour Party
www.labour.org.nz
Leader: David Cunliffe MPs: 34
Poverty: • $60 a week for most families in the first year of a child’s life, and up to age three for families on modest incomes. • Increase the minimum wage to $16.25 an
hour. • Ensure that all core public service workers are paid at least the living wage. • A Commission of Inquiry into wages and collective bargaining. • Create 2000 apprenticeships.
• Make KiwiSaver universal. • Increase the employer and employee minimum contribution rates
gradually by 0.25% a year for six years — from 3% each to 4.5% in 2021. • Use variable Kiwisaver contributions to control inflation rather than just relying on interest
rates. • Protect subcontractors. 1.) Contractors’ liens, where head contractors are required to retain a portion of money they owe so they can meet their obligations to their subcontractors; and 2.) Statutory construction trusts, where money would flow through a trust
to ensure subcontractors get paid first should a construction company collapse.• Commit $183 million to a comprehensive Youth Employment Package. • Pay the equivalent of the dole to employers willing to offer a permanent full time job. • Establish NZ Power, which will use its market power to bring down electricity prices.
Health: • Make GP visits, prescriptions and dental care free for pregnant women. • Make GP visits and prescriptions free for people aged 65 and older. • Extend and
improve the Care Plus programme to a further 250,000 New Zealanders with longterm health conditions. • Make prescriptions free for all people in the Care Plus programme. • Make GP visits and prescriptions free for children aged up to 13. • $60 million to boost primary healthcare. • Include testing for uric acid in vulnerable populations. • Create a Musculoskeletal Strategy to plan for our ageing population needs. • Establish an Aged Care Commissioner. • Implement the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and adopt the optional protocol to the convention. • Provide $60 million over four years for family and sexual violence services.
End-of-life care: • Ensure palliative care becomes a core component of healthcare provision, with appropriate funding.
Unborn children: No official policy available.
Refugees, asylum seekers: • Review family reunification categories and Pacific quota to ensure they are effective and that Pacific families are not excluded from family reunification. • Revitalise the settlement programme. • Increase the number of refugees New Zealand accepts.
People in prison: No official policy available.
Children: • Paid parental leave extended to 26 weeks.• Free early childhood education (ECE) increased to 25 hours a week — and more for the vulnerable. • Restore
funding for 100 per cent qualified teaching staff in ECE. • More Plunket visits. • Scrap the Families Commission. Fund an independent Children’s Commissioner.
Families: • Restore $13m per year for Adult and Community Education. Another $9m per year on top of that from 2018 • $1m per year of extra funding for ACE English
for speakers of other languages (ESOL) • Build 10,000 houses and take other measures to kickstart the rebuild in Christchurch and Canterbury. (http://campaign.
labour.org.nz/all_our_announced_policies). • Employ 100 additional special education teachers. • Review the system of special needs support. • Provide free annual health checks for people with an intellectual disability. • Build 100,000 starter homes for families. • Require landlords to make their properties warm and dry. • Introduce a capital gains tax. • Introduce a top tax rate of 36 per cent on income over $150,000. • Raise trustee income
tax to 36 per cent. • Target tax avoidance. • Restore contributions to the New Zealand Superannuation Fund. • Fund 2000 Maori Trades Training places over four years. • Develop a National Careers Strategy and increase funding for career guidance in schools. • Hire 2000 more teachers. • Reduce the average size of secondary and primary school classes. • Invest $104 million in new classrooms. • Fund schools $100 per student a year if they don’t demand donations from parents. • Establish Centres of Vocational Excellence to drive training and
innovation in industries. • Extend Reading Recovery so children falling behind can catch up.


Act New Zealand
www.act.org.nz
Leader: Jamie Whyte MPs: 0
Poverty: • Free up land supply for residential housing by relaxing Metropolitan Urban Limits. • Amend the resource consents charges so landowners are not forced to pay more for resource consent than the value that will be added from the renovation/construction.
Health: • Service levels set in a transparent way. • Introduce greater funding contestability wherever possible. • Monitor performance better. • Make services more
available to the public. • Health consumers co-pay, if they have the means.
End-of-life care: No official policy available.
Unborn children: No official policy available.
Refugees, asylum seekers: No official policy available.
Migrants: • Support the points system for new immigrants. • Ensure that
immigrants have readier access to work. • Ensure immigrants do not have easy access to welfare. • Lower the tax burden so the best immigrants may be attracted. • Monitor emerging
literature that suggests immigration may make the domestic population poorer through a process of capital widening.
People in prison: • Three strikes and then jail for burglary.
Children: No official policy available.
Families: • Reform the Resource Management and Local Government Acts. • Reinstate the rights of property owners to develop their land as they see fit. • Make school
boards of trustees more autonomous. • Introduce better mechanisms for State and Integrated schools to expand and contract according to demand. • Increase the subsidy to private schools to the extent that it is expenditure neutral. • Add interest to student loans. • Remove the
Resource Management Act’s anti-development bias. • Create a presumption in favour of private property rights.


The Green Party of Aotearoa/New Zealand
www.greens.org.nz
Co-leaders: Metiria Turei, Russel Norman MPs: 14
Poverty: • A billion dollar plan to reduce child poverty, paid for by a new top tax rate of 40 per cent on incomes over $140,000. • Roll Family Tax Credit and the In-work Tax Credit together to create new child payment for all low and middle income families. New Children’s Credit will deliver an additional $60 a week. • Introduce a capital
gains tax, excluding the family home. • Reintroduce a benefit for unsupported unemployed and sick young people aged 16 and 17. • Extend adult minimum wage to 16- and 17-year-olds. • Introduce student emergency benefit over summer holidays.
Health: • Greater emphasis on improving health and preventing illness, and treating illness in community-based primary care. • Emphasise prevention and treatment of
chronic conditions — cardiovascular disease, diabetes, respiratory disease, cancer, depression.
Unborn children: • Decriminalise abortion.
End of life care: • Increase funding to enable everyone to access high quality palliative care regardless of location. • Improve palliative care training for medical, nursing and allied health staff. • Enable people to experience end-of-life care at home where possible. • Conventional and complementary treatments available to palliative care patients. • Undecided on euthanasia.
Refugees and asylum seekers: • Increase refugee quota from 750 to 1000. • Increase resources for refugee resettlement. • Establish fair process for refugee family
reunification, with published priorities and standards. • Fund more support of refugees — more than six months where required. • Ensure refugees and asylum seekers enjoy equal rights with New Zealanders. • Refugees and asylum seekers have access to appropriate mental health
and wellbeing systems. • Guardians for young refugee and asylum seekers separated from their families. • Require secret intelligence reports from overseas regimes to be considered under legal rules of evidence.
Migrants: • Priority in skilled migrant category to skills needed for a sustainable society and economy. • Strict scrutiny of applications in investor category
for overall benefit to Aotearoa-NZ. • Employers give temporary migrant workers at least the same pay and working conditions as local workers. • Allow temporary workers with valuable skills to apply for residency. • Cases of all informal immigrants are decided according
to international law. • Immigrants in investor and entrepreneur categories with limited English to enrol in full-fee language courses.
People in prison: • Increase provision for rehabilitation of inmates. • Increase access to education, drug and alcohol rehabilitation and mental health programmes.
• Ensure sufficient “family houses” for pregnant women and mothers in prison.
Children: • Another $500 million a year in children’s health and education. • Set up a national school lunch fund. • Provide free after-school and holiday care in
decile one to four schools.
Family: • Extend payment of the Parental Tax Credit ($220 a week for 10 weeks) to the 13,000 newborns whose parents are on a benefit or student allowance. • Set up schools in lower-income areas as hubs where health, social and welfare needs of children and their families can be met.


Internet-Mana Party
www.mana.net.nz
Leader: Hone Harawira. MPs: 1
Poverty: • Increase the minimum wage to $18.80 an hour and index it at 66 per cent of the average wage. • Require employers to offer extra hours to existing staff,
up to 40 hours a week, before hiring new staff. • Repeal youth rates for workers aged 16-17 years. • Work towards implementing a Universal Basic Income (UBI) so everyone 18 and over would receive a minimum, liveable, tax free income after which progressive tax would kick in.
• Abolish GST. • Introduce a tax on financial speculation — the “Hone Heke tax”. It will replace the $15 billion collected by GST each year. • Invest in key policies such as job creation and whanau wellbeing. Make full employment a top priority.
Health: • Free healthcare for eyes, ears, and teeth in the public health system. • Extend free after-hours medical care to children up to 18 years, those who are
dependents, and senior citizens. • Provide free family planning advice and free contraception.
End-of-Life care: No official policy available.
Unborn children: No official policy available.
Refugees, asylum seekers: No official policy available.
Migrants: • Introduce a full amnesty for Pasifika overstayers. • Introduce an open entry policy for Pasifikapeoples who want to live in New Zealand — as for Australian
citizens.
People in prison: • Abolish prisons. • Immediately establish an independent research entity to investigate the development of non-custodial options. • Develop habilitation centres which are focused on restoring the wellbeing of wrongdoers and their whanau, and which include the restoration of those who have been wronged.
Children: • Introduce government-funded breakfast and lunch programmes in all low-decile early child education facilities and schools. • Support the development
of school, marae, and community gardens. • Replace the Adoption Act 1955 and update it with new legislation which takes into account whangai adoption, an understanding that the welfare and rights of children should be paramount, and that gay, lesbian, and transgender couples should be granted the same status as anyone else in regard to adoption law and practice.
Families: • Ensure there is enough rental housing that is safe and affordable. • Stop the sale of state houses and eviction of tenants. • Build 10,000 new state homes a year for rent. • Help low and middle income earners into home ownership. • Provide a yearly one-off hardship grant of $1000 for every person aged 18 and over who is on any income of $30,000 or less. • Abolish pokie machines from local communities and allow a community veto on pokies in casinos. • Extend paid parental leave to 12 months. • Support quality pre-school and out-of-school education.


Maori Party
www.maoriparty.com
Leader: Te Ururoa Flavell MPs: 3
Poverty: • Reward schools for addressing underachievement and succeeding in innovation. • Student loan repayments start only when income is 1.5 times the average
wage. • First $25,000 of annual income earned tax free. • Food exempt from GST. • Increase minimum wage to $16 per hour. • Eliminate child poverty by 2020. • Look into reintroducing the universal child benefit. • Raise core benefits including superannuation and veteran’s
pensions. • Solo parents/those on low incomes sponsored into workforce training. • Reinstate the training incentive allowance. • Lower the superannuation age of entitlement to 60 for
groups with a low life expectancy. • Incentives for Maori skills, qualifications
and participation in the labour market. • Incentives to encourage the growth of privately and collectively owned Maori businesses. • Implement a financial transaction tax. • Review KiwiSaver to see if it is fair. • Invest in deep-sea fishing boats — creating 5000 jobs. • Focus on job creation in areas where there are skill shortages — health, infrastructure,
finance and green energy.
Health: • Free health services for under-sixes and over-sixties. • Ban tobacco. • Initiate wellness checks every six months. • Fund programmes to reduce high
rates of diabetes and heart disease. • Implement annual oral health checks for low-income families. • Whanaufocused alcohol and drug addiction restoration services, including in prisons. • Encourage regular cervical and prostate cancer checks. • Ensure universal coverage of the vision and hearing screening programme. • Develop iwi environmental monitoring/evaluation of rivers/ lakes/sea/water supply.
Families: • Establish a Ministry of Families. • Financial literacy a core part of the curriculum. • Free ECE for four year-olds. • Playcentres and Kohanga Reo funded under the 20 hour allocation of free childcare. • Increase Te Reo courses and increase Maori language teachers. • Start a three-year recruitment drive for Maori teachers. • Reduce
tertiary fees and introduce a universal student allowance. • Better public information on school performance. • Mana whenua representation on all public school and tertiary governance boards. • Whanau Ora the way forward, where families determine what is in their best
interests.


New Zealand National Party
www.national.org.nz
Leader: John Key MPs: 58
Poverty: • Extend the Youth Service approach to teen parents and many 18- and 19-year-old beneficiaries. This support includes: – Payment cards for groceries and
essentials; – A capable adult from a community-based organisation working directly with them; – Support into education, training support and guidance, or work. • Add $100 million to supporting people off welfare and into work. • Expand the Apprenticeship Reboot to 20,000
places and reduce compliance costs. • Reduce building costs by $3500 on average by suspending duties and tariffs on building products. • Restrict what councils can charge on new sections and developments. • Reform the Resource Management Act. • Budget up to $15 billion
on housing, employment, health and redevelopment for Christchurch and Canterbury.
Health: • Offer free doctors’ visits and prescriptions for all children under the age of 13 (as opposed to under 6 now). • Expand drop-in sore throat clinics
to target 90,000 more children at risk of rheumatic fever. • Offer two subsidised cochlear
implants for children with profound hearing loss. • Invest another $110 million over four
years to deliver even more elective surgery. • Another $33 million over the next four years for better cancer services, including $8 million for more colonoscopies. • Budget up to $15 billion on housing, employment, health and redevelopment for Christchurch and Canterbury.
End-of-life care: • Provide $20 million a year more for hospice palliative care services. • Add 60 palliative-care nurse roles. • Allocate $13 million to community palliative care services.
Unborn children: No official policy available.
Refugees, asylum seekers: No official policy available.
Migrants: No official policy available.
People in prison: No official policy available.
Children: • Extend paid parental leave by four weeks, including caregivers other than parents. • Increase the parental tax credit from $150 a week to $220 a week, and
increase the entitlement from eight weeks to 10 weeks, from 1 April 2015.
Families: • Add $155.7 million to budget for early childhood education and boost subsidy rates for parents. • Add eight children’s teams to support and work with at-risk children and their families. • Increase access to the KiwiSaver First Home Deposit Subsidy and Welcome Home Loans. • Invest $359m over four years to recognise excellent
teachers and principals by introducing four new rolesin schools. • Another $284 million for more schools, classrooms, and improvements to school property. • Roll out ultra-fast broadband and faster broadband to all schools by 2016. • Budget up to $15 billion on
housing, employment, health and redevelopment for Christchurch and Canterbury.


Conservative Party
www.conservativeparty.org.nz
Leader: Colin Craig MPs: 0
Poverty: • A policy of no tax on the first $20,000 earned. • Scrap Working for Families.
Health: • Support better treatments for preventable diseases such as obesity and adult onset diabetes. • Make more choices available, especially in line with
overseas models that are working well. • Support free health checks/visits for children.
End-of-life care: • Support full resourcing of palliative care. • No policy on euthanasia at this time.
Unborn children: Three clear policies on abortion: • Proper application of existing law. • Free and informed consent. • Parental consent for minors.
Migrants: • Immigration necessary to fill skill shortages in New Zealand. • Open to lifestyle/retirement choice for those coming from the United Kingdom. • Need
to keep our young and skilled people and address issue of “revolving door”, or “high level of transience”.
Refugees, asylum seekers: No official policy available.
People in prison: • Those who commit crimes do the time they are sentenced to, with longer sentences for violent crimes. • Prisoners undertake some hard work
to repay victims and society.
Children: • Early intervention to tackle poor home environments. • Social workers work alongside failing parents.
Families: • Funding for day care also available for parents who raise pre-schoolers at home.

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