Tax cuts – they’re coming, in April 2017, should National be re-elected. Maybe. Depending on whether economic and fiscal conditions allow.

But what form will these tax cuts take? That’s a good question, to which no one is any the wiser. By April 2017, National projects that they’ll have accrued a pool of $1.5 billion, of which apparently $1 billion will be set aside for tax cuts, while the remaining $500 million will go towards debt reduction. Tax cuts will be targeted to lower and middle income earners, but how National intends to structure the cuts is a mystery.

And what will these lower and middle income earners receive in their back pockets? Well, here things get really strange. Last week, John Key was pulling numbers from thin aid, pondering anything from $10, $20, $30… Then over the weekend on TheNation, Bill English was denying that any numbers had been…

Back when John Key confirmed there would be no East Coast Bays deal for Colin Craig, I happily wrote off the Conservative Party. With no hope of winning an electorate seat, they had no choice but to make 5% of the vote, which was one hell of a long shot.

However, if I cast my eye around the internet, I’ve apparently been far too early to write them off. In the NZ Herald this morning, there’s John Roughan talking up the Conservatives in his opinion piece “Craig’s day in the sun may dawn“. The latest Herald Digipoll says National voters would prefer a coalition with the Conservatives, rather than NZ First. And over at the Dim-Post, Danyl McLauchlan publishes his bias-adjusted tracking poll and predicts “The Conservatives will probably cross the 5% threshold.”

Personally, I stand by my prediction that the Conservatives won’t make it. One poll…

ACT’s campaign launch occurred yesterday. It’s slightly odd that the party would launch their campaign after people have already started voting, but there you go. Keeping their powder dry and all that…

Party leader Jamie Whyte’s keynote speech to the ACT faithful was everything his party would have hoped for – a mixture of hard-hitting attacks on just about every party around (I think the only party he didn’t bother to attack was United Future, which is a good measure of Peter Dunne’s continued irrelevance) and the release of some old-fashioned back-to-ACT’s-roots policy.

Policy-wise, ACT would abolish the Overseas Investment Office:

It has no proper job to do. When foreigners invest in New Zealand, we benefit. There is no injury for the OIO to protect us from.

Likewise, the Resource Management Act would go to:

The problem is not with the administration of the RMA. The problem is with the very…