I love restaurants.
I love walking into a place that’s been built from the ground up to make me feel welcome. I love looking at a menu and seeing dishes I could never cook, made from ingredients I’ve never tasted. I love the wonderful and rare skill great hospitality staff have that makes complete strangers feel completely at home. I even love a thoughtfully designed, decorated and provisioned restaurant toilet.
But here’s what I love even more.
I love hospitals. I love that when two of my close family members had serious health issues last year, they were cared for professionally, humanely and free of charge.
I love our police. I love that when I thought a woman walking by my office the other day was in danger, they scrambled several cars and found her 15 minutes later.
I love schools, universities and our defence force. I also love that when someone in New Zealand needs support, they can usually get it.
So when restaurants – including some of my favourites – go under owing hundreds of thousands (or more) in taxes, I feel anything but love for them. Pocketing the PAYE and GST that’s meant to fund our society is theft from you, me and our most vulnerable. When I say pocketing, I doubt they’ve used it to buy a second yacht or to renovate the bach. More likely it was used to bridge the gap between what the business was bringing in and what it cost to pay staff and suppliers.
But that’s not the point. It wasn’t their money. It was ours, and they stole it from us.
How any business can be allowed to run up tax arrears north of a million bucks is hard to wrap your head around. Maybe the IRD should have exercised some of its own host responsibility, calling time on restaurateurs running up enormous tabs on the taxpayer.
The taxman’s post-Covid leniency is only a part of it, though. Paying your taxes is at the heart of running any business, whether you’re fixing punctures, pruning trees or pairing squid ink risotto with a hard-to-find artisanal sherry.
Taxes make society work. We need that money to keep our tiny, remote, barely viable country going, please.
So, restaurants, if you can’t be bothered paying your tax, I’ll do it for you.
Next time I eat out, don’t bother adding GST to my bill. Leave it to me. I’ll pay you for the risotto, the wine, the 4-ply toilet paper, the great service and the rest. Then I’ll pay the remaining 15% directly to the IRD to pay for the hospitals, schools and police that all of us need.
Restaurants, I love you. I trust you to look after me, to feed me and to fool my friends or clients into thinking that I have excellent taste. I just don’t trust you right now to show the same love to New Zealand as New Zealanders show to you.
