The Minister of Taking Departs Stage Left

'We are all broken, that's how the light gets in.' Hemingway.

The Revenue Minister who has presided through two governments – absurd in itself - over the demise of the Westminster Principle in our courts, and thus of the remnants of a classical liberalism in the tax field that has clung so desperately by its fingernails to some small liberty we were once left, has resigned in a scandal that is quite frankly farcical.

The Minister is Dead: Long Live the Minister. Because we all know nothing changes as we lurch faster down the statist road to our serfdom; just a new hand at the helm as the Humphrey Appleby’s in the Department in concert with the judiciary continue their crusade against the taxpayer, applying changes in tax precedent retrospectively, re-writing a taxpayer’s history, with apparent impunity as if we were just another despotic banana republic.

And Peter Dunne’s mid-life crisis aside, at the centre of his demise, was his refusal to hand over forty two emails to the commission looking into the GCSB spy report leak: if you ever come up for an IRD audit, try withholding forty two pages of documentation, and see how it goes for you. With the shock and awe powers of the IRD, compared to which our government spooks are as children, you are given no such right to privacy, or to choice. There’s a fair set of rules for you, quite another for the Arrogance of Altruists residing in the Fortress of Legislation, whom strangely feel themselves qualified to run our lives, despite this one of their number seems to have destroyed his career on what may well be a middle aged man's infatuation. 

To Mr Dunne, and your assumed entitlement to the lolly shop of my wallet, this blog has never been against you personally, just the Big Brother ideas you represent; your use of the brute fist of state to enforce your ideas over the way I wish to live in the voluntary and prosperous community of the capitalist transaction. I guess this episode at least portrays your fallible humanity: as Hemingway said, 'we are all broken, that's how the light gets in.'  I wish you’d understood that lesson when running the unforgiving machine of IRD and its unconscionable penalty system implementing a hotch potch mess of tax laws as obscene as those laws are incompetently drawn. And building a global surveillance state not for our protection, but to take our money.