Natalia Albert says finally the Green Party has mostly got its tax policy right

By Natalia Albert*

For the past 10 years the Greens have made tax their signature fight. Capital gains tax in 2017, a Green minimum income in 2020, and through it all, their love affair with a wealth tax. But it never mathed for me. The numbers didn't add up, and neither did the process of collecting them. How were they defining wealth? How would they find it? What about money in trusts? How much would it actually raise?

Why claim every business owner is greedy? Why the disdain for homeowners? Why criminalise wanting more money? I moved to New Zealand from Mexico precisely so I could make more of it. Something I will never apologize for. They kept framing the value of having financial goals and fighting for them as a character flaw. Being poor, or not wanting money, their moral high horse. I don’t subscribe, nor do I think it’s a noble political position. 

This year, I think they've finally cracked it.

For three elections running, the Green Party drew the wealth line at $2 million. This year they drew it at $10 million. The policy has three themes and eight clauses. Of the eight, six seem solid to me. Two still don’t quite square for me: the fixation on landlords, and how on earth they plan to enforce a 5% withholding tax on big tech. But first let’s unpack what they announced. 

What did they announce?

A 2.5% annual tax on net assets over $10 million, family home exempt. The Greens say this catches the wealthiest 0.3%, and is why Mārama Davidson keeps repeating that 99.7% of us won't pay it. Narrow, specific with solid exceptions.

A new inheritance and gift tax branded the Capital Acquisitions Tax: 33% on what you receive above a lifetime million, with family homes and family farms carved out. By their numbers it hits about 1,100 people a year.

A return to a 33% company tax rate, but only for the largest 0.7% of firms, the banks and supermarkets and energy companies. Everyone else stays at 28%. Finally excluding most companies which are small and medium, honest hard-working folk employing other folks, making our economy hum. 

A bank levy modelled on Australia's, a crackdown on multinational profit-shifting, and a reversal of the landlord tax changes National brought in. Plus, income tax cuts the Greens say reach 96% of us, paid for by a new top rate of 45% on income over $160,000. To me 45% seems high, but I unpack that further down. 

The $2 million line they held for six years

In 2020, the Greens wanted a wealth tax that started biting at $1 million. One percent over a million, two percent over two. In 2023 they simplified it to a flat 2.5% and set the threshold at $2 million. In their 2025 alternative Budget, the big swing-for-the-fences document, the threshold was still $2 million.

They defended it through two election campaigns and a full alternative Budget. The rate drifted up a little, from two percent to two and a half, and then held steady. This year, the rate stayed at 2.5%. The threshold jumped to $10 million. This is a party deciding, after six years, exactly who it was willing to pick a fight with, and who it wasn't. And I think that this is the right group to pick a fight with. 

Who got let off the hook

The jump from $2 million to $10 million spared someone. People assume the higher threshold was about protecting Auckland homeowners. It wasn't. The family home was always exempt, so moving the line did nothing for someone whose wealth is just their house. 

The people it actually spared are those with $2 million to $10 million in wealth beyond the family home: a Waikato or Taranaki dairy farmer whose land and stock put them in the low‑single‑digit millions; a Wellington couple with two rental properties and a six‑figure share portfolio; the owner of a solid local business valued around a million; the provincial, asset‑holding middle whose accumulated properties sit well above $2 million but nowhere near ten. It's a very particular group, and it's more or less exactly the constituency the Greens have never been able to reach, the one National and ACT mobilise hardest. A wealth tax at $2 million lands on a lot of those people. A wealth tax at $10 million sails right over them and settles on a few hundred genuinely rich families instead. Bravo Greens!

Why I think the guardrails work 

A few things in this document made me take it more seriously than the earlier versions. The Greens assumed they wouldn't collect it all. Their modelling assumes 28.5% of the super-rich tax simply won't be collected, lost to avoidance and minimisation, on advice from the Parliamentary Library informed by Treasury. Most parties pretend their tax take is simple and it really never is. The Greens are admitting wealth taxes are leaky, and costing for it. I had not seen that political maturity before.

You can see exactly who ends up paying the inheritance tax. The policy spells it out with examples, and they’re good. Inherit a $1.5 million family home and $250,000 in shares, and you pay nothing: the home is exempt, and what’s left sits under the million‑dollar threshold.

Inherit, instead, a $2.5 million commercial building and $500,000 in shares, or two rental properties worth $1.8 million plus $400,000 in cash, and you do pay: 33% on the amount above your $1 million lifetime threshold, with the family home and core farm assets still carved out. You only ever pay 33% on what you receive above a million, excluding the home. You can at least see exactly who this catches and who it doesn’t. Good!

The company tax rise is finally ringfenced, 33% for the biggest 0.7% of firms, 28% for everyone else. Earlier versions hit small and medium companies too, and I could never stomach that, because it rested on a shitty assumption that every business owner is greedy and every business is rolling in it. Both halves of that are wrong, and I'll die on that hill. Most small business owners are drawing a modest salary and carrying all the risk. 

But a hit aimed squarely at the supermarket duopoly and the banks? Let’s go! It's a far narrower and more defensible target than "raise company tax", and it drops the pretence that every firm is a villain. I just can’t agree with their narrative about folks being evil for making more money. It’s the framing which I challenge, but this policy is now going in the right direction. 

And then they got caught funding the tax department too well. Lol. The one number they had to correct was the money for Inland Revenue to actually collect the tax. They'd set aside $100 million to run the new taxes, but in the spreadsheet, it got added to revenue instead of counted as a cost. The fix knocked about $800 million off their four-year net.

A bad look, sure. But … they over-funded enforcement and then fumbled where the number sat in the table. A typo, as Swarbrick said and I get it. Political parties with smaller budgets like the Greens, are running on fumes and trying to do way too much with little. I'm less interested in the slip than what it reveals: they were trying to over-fund collection, not skimp on it. I'd take that any day. Be realistic about what it takes to actually enforce a policy. Yes, all day! 

The bad

The whole document leads with corporate greed: supermarket profits, bank profits, power bills. But the corporate measures are the small numbers. The big corporation’s tax, the bank levy and the big tech crackdown together raise less than the super-rich wealth tax does on its own. 

And then there is the framing. They treat wealth, business, and landlords as if they're the scum of the earth. The shitty rich-lister with the helipad and the couple with one rental and the family running a panel-beating shop folded into a single story: the greedy and the problem. It’s just not ok! And it's bad politics. You can argue the super-rich should pay more without implying that wanting to do well is an evil value. Sigh! 

The income tax side gives 96% of us a cut and lands a new 45% rate on income over $160,000. Sure. But actually, the Greens spend 40 pages telling you the banks and the supermarkets are the villains. Then they tax those companies at 33%, while taxing a New Zealander who earns over $160,000 at 45%. Under a policy built around corporate greed, the company keeps a bigger share of its next dollar than the dentist does. Make that make sense?

I get it: company profits get taxed again as dividends when they reach a person. But that doesn't rescue it. So, if concentrated wealth is the problem, why does the person who works for a high salary pay the higher rate? And why such a jump, so fast? The top rate goes from 39% to 45% and kicks in $20,000 sooner, all at once. Bring us along. Start at 41% or 42% and build? Just my two cents. 

The landlord fight

This one deserves its own piece, and it'll get one. But in a nutshell, because it’s a shit show. By the Greens' constant rhetoric, landlords come off as the worst thing to happen to mankind. It's exhausting, and it's the same flattening I keep coming back to, the speculator with 20 houses and the nurse with one rental and a mortgage get painted as the same villain. They aren't. I recently managed to own my first property, I will absolutely not apologize for that, and the Greens assuming I’m the same as a corporate greedy irresponsible developer is just not a pill I can swallow. 

What grates most is that we're this heated about a group we can't even find. Depending on whose number you use, New Zealand has somewhere between roughly 120,000 and a couple of hundred thousand landlords, maybe, we are actually not sure. There is no official source that can tell us. We're proposing to reshape the rules around a population we can’t measure or find within any data source.

Chlöe Swarbrick has worked this issue for years and knows it inside out, the policy includes a landlord register for example. A register is sensible. Overseas, Scotland has run one for nearly two decades for trivial money. But a register is a map, not a fix. It tells you where every rental is. It does nothing on its own about the ones that are cold, damp, or dangerous. That takes enforcement, and enforcement is the expensive part. It's a start. It just isn't the finish or this simple. Like I said, this is a large policy issue on its own. 

So did they crack it?

Mostly, yes. I still hate the framing of money bad, having less good. I still don't accept that wanting to do well makes you a villain, and the document never quite lets that go. But the policy underneath the rhetoric is the most honest thing the Greens have put out in a decade. They moved the line to $10 million, owned who that spares, funded the tax office to actually collect, and aimed their corporate hit instead of swinging wide. Lets see if this can get them the votes and conditions to make it to Cabinet. 

*Natalia Albert is a political scientist living in Wellington exploring how to govern divided societies in diverse, liberal democracies, with a focus on New Zealand politics. She writes weekly on her Substack, Less Certain. Albert stood as a TOP candidate in the 2023 election.