Kia ora from Jess,
Budget day is coming up, and to be honest I find it a bit hard - and I suspect quite a few other people do too. All the talk about money and whether it is too much or too little and who the winners and losers are. It makes me feel like we have lost sight of the reason we have budgets: to help us build the kind of communities and society that are good for all people to live in. To create the conditions in which we can care for each other and the environment well, to enable us to make meaningful contributions. The good news is that we can divert the narrative away from the dollars and cents, more for you less for me narrative, and point it back towards the public good.
Budgets are one way people in government signal what public good matters most. The budget will be talked about in the media, in our workplaces, around the dinner table and amongst friends. Taxes have also been a hot topic of conversation lately - and budgets and taxes are inextricably linked. We can seize this opportunity and start to shift the narrative!
Budgets are where we allocate resources and taxes are how we get the resources to allocate. If we believe (and many of us working on big challenging issues from climate to poverty do) that people in government are not allocating our shared resources in pragmatic and wise ways for the long term public good, then we need to talk about budgets and taxes in different ways. Now is the perfect opportunity to do so.
First up we always need to talk about the public good, budgets and taxes together. Tax especially has a very embedded set of mental models associated with it which are hard to overcome. Talking about tax on its own will only serve to surface unhelpful existing mindsets about tax. What we want to do is intensify a different set of mindsets about tax, one in which it is the means by which we can get nice things for all of us.
Talking about tax tip 1
Never start the conversation with tax e.g “We need a better fairer tax system. Tax gets us a better mental health system”
Instead start with the nice things we want for all of us, and talk about a tax system that works to achieve that e.g “We need a responsive mental health system that helps our children before they are in crisis. We need to allocate enough resources in our budgets to create that responsive system and we need tax system that ensures we have the shared resources to allocate”
How to talk about budgets and tax for the public good
To support you to shift the narrative on budgets and tax we’ve got a new briefing paper and an example of what it looks like to share helpful narratives in the world.
Thanks to the Wellbeing Economic Alliance Aotearoa and Partners for a New Economy we have been able to produce an insights briefing on how to talk about taxes and budgets for public good. The first tip we have for you is always link taxes to budgets!
You can download the free report:
How to talk about budgets and taxes for the public good
Helpful narratives grow in prominence by being shared widely
We can all play a part in sharing helpful narratives across our networks. Here is an example of The Workshop sharing a helpful narrative about tax and budgets on our LinkedIn account.
You can see the whole story on 1News
