Learning experience 3: What’s fair?

Community survey

Have the students design a survey to find how people in your school/community feel about paying tax. Ask the students to analyse the survey results to find out what your community feels.

Two sides of the fence

Choose an historical tax issue that has caused disagreement. Ask the students to find out about it. For example: GST, raising or lowering of taxes, cigarettes, RTDs. Other examples may be found at Te Ara – Taxes

Use the Two sides of the fence chart to identify the points on each side.

Cartoon

Show the cartoon of people with different perspectives about tax obligations. Introduce the idea that people’s views about taxation are influenced by their idea of what is/is not fair. Perceptions of fairness can vary across situations from person to person.

Values continuum

Select a range of scenarios from the list below. Ask the students to place themselves on a values continuum according to how fair they think these situations are (most unfair – unfair – can’t decide – fair – very fair). Discuss the differences between and within each continuum, focusing on their conceptions of whether the earners are behaving fairly, or whether the outcome for all is fair.

Scenarios:

• Sally is sixteen and has left school. She looks after her sister’s children every day from 8:30am till 4:30pm while her sister works. Her sister pays her $120 per day. Sally doesn’t pay tax.
• Bob is 65 and is retired. He does painting jobs in his neighbourhood for cash. Bob does not pay tax.
• James is a self-employed electrician. He regularly puts in his GST and tax returns and pays what he owes.
• Rawiri has a large piece of land in which he grows vegetables. He sells these vegetables at the local market and receives cash in return. Rawiri does not pay tax.
• Emma makes jewellery from old treasures. She spends little on materials and everything she makes she sells to fund her way through uni. She doesn’t need a student loan. Emma does not pay tax.
• Jackie is a nurse. She works at the local medical centre and is on a salary. Tax is deducted from her pay before she gets it.
• Bill, a dairy farmer, has arranged the farm’s affairs so that on paper it does not make a profit. Bill does not pay tax.
• Mary receives superannuation and interest from savings accounts with tax deducted from them. She does pay tax.
• Government is funding the rebuild of a city, destroyed by a natural disaster, by increasing tax for all people over the country.
• Renee works full time and pays tax on the money she earns there. She makes extra cash selling her paintings through the Internet. Renee doesn’t pay tax on the money she earns for her paintings.
• Fatima works as an extra on an American TV series being shot in NZ. She receives a daily payment with no tax taken out.

• Go to Learning Experience 4 – Young people and tax

Assessment opportunities

Possible assessment opportunities could be to assess students’ ability to:

• formulate good questions for a survey
• make judgements about the fairness of situations.

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