Willis floats bracket creep fix and R&D credit change, detail after PREFU
Finance Minister Nicola Willis says National will campaign on adjusting income tax brackets to address bracket creep and on changes to the research and development tax credit.
She gave the indication at BusinessNZ's election conference in Wellington on 14 September. The conference opened with a political panel on the economy, according to RNZ.
The panel brought together Willis for National, Barbara Edmonds for Labour, ACT leader David Seymour, New Zealand First's Shane Jones, Green co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick and TOP's Qiulae Wong. Te Pāti Māori was not represented on the panel.
Willis did not set out rates, thresholds or design detail for either proposal. On the R&D credit, she said a specific announcement would wait until after the pre-election fiscal update on 29 September. The sequencing matters. It ties any tax commitment to the Treasury's pre-election numbers rather than to current baselines.
Edmonds referred during the discussion to Labour's already-announced capital gains tax. Swarbrick said the Greens would act to boost market competition, particularly in the energy and supermarket sectors. No new policy detail from those parties was reported from the panel beyond those positions.
The hints come after a Budget 2026 that provided $3.8 billion of new spending offset by $1.7 billion in savings, according to RNZ. Separately, Budget 2026 tax legislation includes a donation tax credit threshold of $100,000 with a maximum tax credit entitlement of $33,333.33, according to Inland Revenue's Budget policy summary.
The broader context here is fiscal permission. For Press Gallery regulars, the decision to hold the R&D announcement until after PREFU will be familiar. It preserves optionality. Ministers can test a line with business without locking in a costed promise before Treasury opens the books. It also puts the onus back on PREFU. Any bracket adjustment will need to be read against the operating outlook, debt track and the Government's existing fiscal strategy.
Looking at what this means for the campaign, the two tracks point in different directions. Bracket indexation speaks to households and to the tax-to-GDP debate. R&D settings speak to firms, commercialisation and productivity. BusinessNZ was a logical venue to float both together. The test will be specificity. Voters and analysts will want to know whether bracket movement means threshold shifts, rate changes or indexation, and whether R&D means rate, eligibility, refundability or administration. None of that was settled on the panel.
For Labour and the Greens, the exchange restated known lines rather than opening new ones. Edmonds kept the capital gains tax in frame. Swarbrick kept competition in energy and supermarkets in frame. That leaves the next move with National after 29 September, when PREFU provides the baseline against which any tax pledge must be costed and judged.
