It is said that nothing is certain but death and taxes. Make that death, taxes and excise duty on motor spirits.
No matter how much the complexion of government’s may differ, they all seem to have one thing in common: they all end up proving to be incapable of resisting the temptation to tinker, tweak or fiddle with whatever kind of fuel tax is operative under their jurisdiction.
To understand why you have to time warp back to the 1920s and Parliament's passing of the Motor Spirits Taxation Act.
The measure placed a duty on petrol which saw the price of that fuel rise by between 20 and 25 per cent.
As the writer, historian and current National list MP Paul Goldsmith aptly describes it in his book A political history of tax in New Zealand: "Finance ministers recognised they were onto a gusher and rarely retreated".
Little wonder. Imposing duty on petrol is money for jam.
When a government has the kind of ultra-ambitious plans to drastically rejig the configuration and infrastructure of land transport as is the case with Labour and the Greens, it extracts the cash it needs from wherever it can find it.
Excise duty is a reliable source of income. As it is sourced from items such as petrol and alcohol, the sums that will be collected are relatively easy to forecast.
When the increase in excise duty which was announced by the Prime Minister last Tuesday takes full effect in three years' time, the higher rate will be pumping close to $400 million extra into government coffers each year. The money will be designated strictly as funding for the various transport initiatives which should be well under way by then — and for nothing else.
What was somewhat surprising—and which was something that Ardern and Phil Twyford, her Transport minister, should take serious note —was the seemingly lukewarm reaction at best in Auckland to Tuesday's announcement.
Maybe that was due to the lack of detail about the thrust of the new approach to transport reform.
May be it was the "statement of the bleeding obvious" nature of the 62-page draft Government Policy Statement on Land Transport which was released just prior to the announcement on petrol tax.
Maybe it was a case of Aucklanders becoming punch-drunk following years of a never ending series of reports and vision statements from all and sundry concerning the city's future.
Maybe it was Labour hitting Auckland with a double whammy by imposing a regional petrol tax on top of the nationwide increase in petrol tax of between 9c and 12c a litre.
What was most surprising of all was the suggestion that in serving up such a twin hit — which will see Aucklanders paying up to 20c extra a litre — Labour has signed its own death warrant.
True, antipathy to the revised rates may well snowball the further the distance from Auckland.
The notion that Ardern and Labour will pay the ultimate price for all this at the general election in 2020 is utterly fanciful, however.
You have to go back to Labour's infamous 1958 Black Budget for an example of a government being pole-axed — at least in part — by a dramatic hike in petrol tax.
In that case, it sure was dramatic. The duty on motor spirits was raised by a whopping 76 per cent. Labour's fate was sealed by even bigger increases in duty on alcohol and cigarettes.
In marked contrast, the boost in fuel excise duty flagged by the current Government will be phased in over three years with increases limited to 3c or 4c a litre in any one year.
That is little different from the increases that National scheduled over a similar three-year period from 2012.
Ardern and Twyford are similarly punting that such drip-feeding of the unpalatable will result in the public barely noticing the jump of duty, if at all.
The increase is technically still just a "proposal" at this stage. That is just a well-practised technique to soften up the public so it comes around to accepting — if only grudgingly— what was always going to be a fait accompli.
What would be much harder to sell to the voting public would be any introduction of "congestion charging" with the objective of cutting vehicle volumes entering central Auckland.
That concept is currently subject to joint investigation by the Auckland City Council and the Government.
Strangely, while there are references to Auckland's "congestion" in the draft Government Policy Statement, that document makes only very oblique reference to the idea of a charge.
That would be something for Labour's opponents and critics to really moan about.
So far, however, they have tried to put the heat on Ardern by arguing the increase in fuel duty contradicts her assurance during last September's election campaign that any changes in tax policy hammered out in Labour's back rooms would not take effect until after the 2020 election.
It is hard to see how a hike in excise duty can be defined as a new tax especially when National had increased the amount of excise several times during its nine-year stint in power.
As for Labour's intention to institute a regional fuel tax which would be applied across the Auckland metropolis, such a measure was a policy plank in Labour's 2017 election manifesto.
Ardern thus has a mandate to bring such a measure before Parliament during the current three-year term.
Given Labour's tax working group is now up and running and already calling for submissions with the expectation that it will produce an interim report in September, it might make a lot of sense to delay legislation dealing with the regional fuel tax.
There is, however, no reason, constitutional or otherwise, which prevents the Prime Minister from forging ahead with the new tax regardless.
Broken promises? In Ardern’s case, such a claim by Labour's adversaries simply does not wash.
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