October 31, 2026

Swarbrick just confirmed $10 million is the wealth tax’s opening bid

Close-up of a brown cow lying in a field near a rustic farmhouse on a sunny day.

Chlöe Swarbrick has said what tax advisers have been telling clients for months. The Greens’ wealth tax threshold is a starting point, not a ceiling.

The Green co-leader told The Kaka podcast that the $10 million figure ($20m for couples, excluding the family home) was deliberately chosen to avoid “massive moral panic” and to “not be immediately equivalent to most people’s family home”. Then came the line that matters: “If we implement it, and we demonstrate to people that it works, then hopefully there is also the continuing arguments to obviously lower the threshold.”

Most coverage has treated this as a campaign slip. It is more useful to treat it as an honest description of how capital taxes work. Once the machinery exists, the argument stops being whether to tax assets and becomes how far down the ladder to go.

The policy as it stands

The Greens propose a 2.5% annual tax on net assets above $10 million, with trust assets apportioned back to individuals and high-value personal items valued at insured value. The party says it would raise $3.7 billion in 2027, rising to $4.1 billion by 2030. Labour leader Chris Hipkins has declined to adopt it, warning of people “just moving their money to where they don’t end up paying that tax”.

National campaign chair Simeon Brown called the threshold a “Trojan horse”, arguing “ten million dollars is where the Greens want to start, not where they intend to stop”. The Taxpayers’ Union’s Austin Ellingham-Banks went further, saying the Greens had “said the quiet part out loud” and that family homes, farmers and small businesses were back in the firing line.

Swarbrick’s response was to challenge Nicola Willis to a debate. She did not walk the comment back.

Treasury already showed the threshold is the main dial

The strongest evidence for threshold drift does not come from National or the Taxpayers’ Union. It comes from Treasury.

In 2023, officials modelled how threshold choice changes everything. At $10 million, about 16,000 people would have paid, raising $1.5 billion to $2.7 billion. Drop it to $3 million and the net widened to 99,000 people, with revenue of $3.9 billion to $7 billion. Same tax, six times the taxpayers. Treasury recommended against proceeding at the time, citing high economic costs and integrity risks.

A companion 2023 aide memoire showed officials already working with a 1.5% wealth tax at a $5 million threshold as part of a balanced revenue package. In other words, inside government the threshold was treated as an adjustable lever to make the numbers work. That is exactly what Swarbrick described.

Coalition maths points lower still

The more immediate pressure would come from coalition bargaining. Te Pāti Māori proposes a 1.5% tax above $2 million with rising bands. Any Labour-Green-Te Pāti Māori deal involving a wealth tax would start with partners $8 million apart on where the line should sit. The landing point is almost certainly below $10 million.

That is where the tax changes character. In 2021, Stats NZ found the wealthiest fifth of households had median net worth of $2.02 million. The $2 million to $10 million band is not the super-rich. It is dairy farms, orchards, engineering firms, accounting practices and the trusts that hold them.

Paper wealth, real tax bills

The practical problem gets worse the lower the threshold goes. A 2024 Deloitte analysis estimated a societal cost of $120 to $130 for every $100 of wealth tax collected, driven by valuation costs and liquidity problems. It highlighted entrepreneurs whose businesses carry large paper valuations from goodwill and IP, facing tax bills they cannot fund without selling equity. A farm worth $6 million on paper that earns a thin return in a bad season is the textbook case.

Why the politics just got harder

None of this means the debate is going away. An Ipsos survey found almost two-thirds of respondents support the wealth tax as proposed. Swarbrick argues New Zealand is “the only country in the OECD” without an explicit tax on inequality, and serious people across the spectrum accept capital income is lightly taxed here.

But a popular $10 million tax is a different proposition from a tax whose sponsors openly hope to lower it. As the Waatea analysis put it, businesses value certainty above the lowest possible rate, and constantly changing rules impose their own costs.

That is the real business risk. It is not this election’s threshold. It is that a legislated wealth tax becomes a live variable in every budget and every coalition deal that follows. Owners of farms, private companies and family trusts should plan for the number Treasury modelled, not the one on the Greens’ billboard. Swarbrick has been unusually candid about where she wants it to go. Voters weighing the policy should take her at her word.

Sources

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