Prasad Rajen: General Debate 
Prasad Rajen: General Debate 
[Volume:666;Page:13996] 
Dr RAJEN PRASAD (Labour) 
: 
 Like my colleagues and members opposite I also record my good wishes to the people of Canterbury my admiration for their resilience and their ability to work so hard and come together at this time and my admiration for the way in which all the members of Parliament from that area are pitching in together to bring assistance to the city. I have not gone to Canterbury—I do not want to be a tourist—but when the time is right I will go and visit my community and express my good wishes to them personally. I know my colleagues there are doing an excellent job. 
I want to focus on another event that is about to occur and that is the tax switch and the GST increase that is coming up and the certainty of increasing costs especially for the most vulnerable. The previous member who spoke Louise Upston believes that this was scaremongering. I would like the member to explain where the scaremongering is. Indeed members on the other side have engaged in intellectual dishonesty by taking a particular case and not taking account of all the effects on each particular family that will come on 1 October. This Government talks about equity and fairness but Miss Upston might like to listen to the definitions of equity and fairness because that member’s Government is taking a rather odd definition of those. 
Mr Bill English talked about that in his response to the Tax Working Group report. He said that changes would have to meet the test of equity and fairness. Well the chickens are coming home to roost because the time is nigh when people will begin to see their pay packets. They will go to supermarkets they will buy groceries and they will look at their expenses going up. They will wonder about the myth that members opposite have put forward that everybody will be well off because they will not be well off. People simply do not believe it. There is no evidence to show it. The Government members are leaving out some very very important pieces. The equity and fairness they talk about is the certainty that 1 percent of taxpayers will receive 15 percent of the $14.3 billion tax package. I ask how members opposite define equity and fairness when that is the effect. If the facts be known this is a tax swindle. When we look at it we see that one-third of the $14.3 billion will go to the top 5 percent of earners. That may be equity and fairness in the minds of those members opposite; it is certainly not seen as equity and fairness on this side of the House. 
What members opposite have failed to do—and one does not understand why because they have all the tools—is satisfactorily explain why they have not modelled the total costs on an average family which is a family on an average income or low income a family with children and child-care and a family with a mortgage. Those are very ordinary everyday New Zealand families. When the members opposite begin to model those costs they will see that those families are not well off. There is any amount of evidence. We know that this opportunity will be taken by many others to go beyond what GST will do. For example members opposite know that rents have already increased by 5.9 percent. In addition 47 percent of landlords say they will increase rents further as they go forward. Rates have increased by 6.4 percent. When we look at the increase of that on the average person with a home— 
Aaron Gilmore 
: What is average? 
Dr RAJEN PRASAD 
: The average income is $50000; the member might have known that. General practitioner fees went up by 6.5 percent last year. Has that been factored into all of the costs that are going to happen? Most petrol companies hiked their prices by 3 percent. It is a bad deal and it will be a bad day for the people of New Zealand. Thank you.