Williams Arena; Watts SimonARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa): Thank you Mr Chair. Acknowledging that there are a number of questions that are still outstanding for my colleague the Hon Dr Deborah Russell—and I am interested in those but in the nature of what is you know a brief committee stage I will introduce a new line of questioning about the considerations that went alongside the adjustments that are being made to Schedule 1 in clause 7. So if you follow along with me the rationale that the Government is using in all of the accompanying material to these changing thresholds is that despite growing incomes the tax thresholds have not changed and so that's what's required but also alongside those growing incomes some families are still seeing rising costs placing pressure on their living standards and particularly housing. In today's Budget documents released by Treasury we saw that there's a marked increase in housing costs for most families and rents in particular are forecast to continue to rise in this forecast period.So my question is: last time the Government considered these changes in its 2017 bill the changes were done alongside an increase to the accommodation supplement. The rationale for that was that rising housing costs have increased the proportion of income spent on housing. So when you make the kind of threshold adjustments that are being made in this bill tonight by the Minister there's still this unfair burden on low-income families who are paying more of their income on housing. So the Government in 2017 said that as a result of that low-income families had been seeing a decline in their residual and after-housing-costs income and so they implemented changes to the accommodation supplement to deal with that example.I want to just explain this; it'll just take me a minute. Recipients of the accommodation supplement who receive a main benefit have seen their residual incomes fall in real terms and so the recipients of the accommodation supplement who don't receive a main benefit or New Zealand superannuation have also seen residual incomes fall—their after-housing costs. That's not necessarily helped by the changes that are in Schedule 1 proposed by clause 7. So my question to the Minister in the chair Simon Watts is: has he considered alongside the changes that he's proposing in Schedule 1 an increase to the accommodation supplement that would acknowledge those changes?I'd like to come back to this because I'm sure the Minister can explain for us the trade-offs that he's made in not providing for an accommodation supplement increase but I'd be really interested to tease out with him what other measures are appropriate given that he made that trade-off and what the Government will be doing in the face of Treasury's findings today that were published that rents will be continuing to rise markedly in the forecast period.Hon SIMON WATTS (Minister of Revenue): So just in response to the member's question in regards to the accommodation supplement I think—well the member's actually answered it in part in the way in which she acknowledged that there are a number of trade-offs that are made in regards to these decisions. We haven't made any adjustment in regards to the accommodation supplement. We've targeted our tax relief in the areas that we've outlined in this bill and that is an area that we haven't looked to adjust at this point. The reality is that there is a wide range of considerations around that but in regards to what we've delivered it's consistent with our coalition Government's priorities and those included within our coalition agreements.