Fenton Darien: Taxation (Budget Measures) Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Fenton Darien: Taxation (Budget Measures) Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 20 May 2010. Volume:663;Page:11135. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DARIEN FENTON (Labour) 
: 
 Mr Chairperson— 
Paul Quinn 
: It’s a very nice blue jacket. 
DARIEN FENTON 
: I thank Mr Quinn for the compliment; I know he will keep it up all the way through my speech. 
I am pleased to take a call on Part 1 of the Taxation (Budget Measures) Bill. I will talk also as my colleague Grant Robertson just did about the priorities that this Budget has demonstrated. I think that one of the saddest things we saw yesterday—and we will see it as time goes on and we start to examine the Budget in more detail—is that this Government thinks that spending $70 million on building a prison is more of a priority than early childhood education. There is $400 million gone from the funding for early childhood education. Early childhood education gets our children off to the best possible start and invests in our future. 
I look at the other priorities too and I see that this is a tax cut a tax swindle where the richest are getting most of the money. I will talk about Paul Reynolds. He may be feeling a little bit picked on but he is the “Seven Million Dollar Man”. He is the chief executive of Telecom. What has he done as the chief executive of Telecom? Well during his tenure he has sacked 12000 Kiwi workers—that is what he contributed to the New Zealand economy. What is more they did not get redundancy. But National thinks it needs to keep Paul Reynolds in New Zealand with this huge tax bribe using the money of ordinary working Kiwis. National has given him another $290000 a year which is coming from higher GST higher rent bills and the hard work of ordinary New Zealanders. 
If Paul Reynolds was not getting this tax cut with that money we could hire six more nurses or six more teachers. We could pay for 400 hours of early childhood education or 400 workers would not have to pay the added GST bill. When I compare that amount to what someone on minimum wage will be getting I think it is a disgrace. It is so unfair for $290000 a week in a tax cut to be going to one of the richest people in New Zealand when someone on minimum wage on $26000 will end up with $4.82 a week. That is before accident compensation levies—it is after GST but it is before accident compensation levies—and with petrol going up and 5.9 percent inflation — 
Carmel Sepuloni 
: And childcare. 
DARIEN FENTON 
: —and childcare of course. They will end up worse off. In fact they are already worse off with the lowest pay increases we have seen in a decade. 
One of the things that I spotted in the Budget document yesterday was a miserable little sentence on page 69: “The redundancy tax credit will be removed…”. What are the tax credits for redundancies? It is when people get compensation when through no fault of their own they lose their job and they get paid a lump sum payment that pushes them into a higher tax bracket. Labour fixed that by making sure that could not happen and that they could apply for a tax rebate to not pay extra tax on their compensation. So not only is this Government kicking low-paid workers but it is also kicking in the guts those workers who lose their jobs through no fault of their own. 
Chris Hipkins 
: Kicking them while they are down. 
DARIEN FENTON 
: Kicking them while they are down through not supporting them getting redundancy compensation; the few who do are made to pay more tax. I think that is incredibly unfair. 
The other thing in this Budget is the education cuts. There are huge cuts to education throughout this Budget and as my colleagues have said there is nothing in here about skills development. Where are the skills going to come from if this economy recovers as the Government says it will? Where will the jobs come from? Where are the job creation packages? 
One other little miserable cut that I have noticed is in the Department of Labour where it has cut the employment-related contestable fund—the education fund for workers and for employers. It has cut that. That is workers’ opportunity to learn how they can make a contribution in the workplace to growing productivity to productive employment relationships and to helping grow our economy. I think the problem with this Government is it does not think that people who do the work are part of the economy. It thinks that only big business is part of the economy. Actually the economy is people doing work and that is where the changes have to happen: in the workplace with productive employment relationships.