Seymour David: Debate on Budget Policy StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSeymour David: Debate on Budget Policy Statement[Sitting date: 11 March 2015. Volume:703;Page:2151. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): A few weeks ago I attended a citizenship ceremony in Auckland. I could talk about all of the facts and figures of the Budget Policy Statement and about the projections for our economy and all of them are very good but the most sincere endorsement of where this country is headed I saw in 431 souls from 57 different countries who were making the ultimate endorsement of New Zealand by taking on New Zealand citizenship and throwing their lot in with the good ship Aotearoa.It is amazing that one of the things that we hear the most complaint about from some people around the House is actually one of the most positive things we have going for us—that is people voting with their feet and increasingly coming to New Zealand. This is the result of the terrible Rogernomics experiment of the last 30 years: more and more people want to come and live more and more prosperous lives in the most beautiful country on earth.It has been interesting to see the debate around this Budget Policy Statement unfold because the Opposition members are really in a bind. They want to criticise the Government for certain things but those things are also exactly the things that they would do so much more of. Take for example the criticism we heard of child support legislation—or at least the implementation of it by the Inland Revenue Department. Of course what they are not saying is that for every little bit of difficulty we have had introducing that law it would have been infinitely more complex and difficult to have a tax-free threshold to have a capital gains tax to start having supermarkets dividing up their floor space to decide which parts were GST-claimable and which parts were not—all of which were promised by the Opposition during the election. Today they come and criticise the Inland Revenue Department for not implementing relatively simple child support legislation but how much worse would it have been had they had their way at the election? Well they did not.Another example is watching the indignation of a certain member about Solid Energy. He can criticise and criticise Solid Energy and its performance as much as he likes but he forgets that as he does this he indicts the very ownership model that his party defends and says it would like to expand—Hon Clayton Cosgrove: No just your incompetence—your Government’s incompetence.DAVID SEYMOUR: The conceited answer from the member who has identified himself now is that there is nothing wrong with the policy or the model; it is just that it would work better if good people like him were running it. I believe that is a fatal conceit and the truth is that what is missing from this Budget Policy Statement—Hon Clayton Cosgrove: I seek leave to table a time line which is not publicly available detailing in excess of—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): The member will resume his seat. It is not appropriate to interrupt a member’s speech in order to seek to table a document.DAVID SEYMOUR: The truth is that this Government should actually be going further in the opposite direction to the one he would advocate. There is never a right time to sell a business with an uncertain future and the best time to sell is at any time—actually now. This is not a business that the Government should be in and there are a number of other State-owned enterprise businesses that the Government should be getting out of. Opposition members all tell us about the revenue stream that the taxpayer gets from these assets but they never talk about the risk. Well the Government should not be in the business of accepting the risks inherent in commercial enterprises.Another thing that is missing I am afraid to say is actually tax reform. I had somebody come to see me in my electorate office just the other day and it brought home the practicalities of having a number of different punitive tax rates. Every year—we heard this morning—$750 million gets left on the table by people paying too much tax. And I found out this morning that about just $8 million of that is low-income people getting their cheques from the Auckland Energy Consumer Trust withheld at the top rate when they should be paying a lower rate. If this Government really believes in success really believes in meritocracy and really believes in a practical and easily applied tax system then what it should be doing is moving top tax rates that have minimal fiscal impact but send a message to every New Zealander that “Your efforts do not really make a difference and if they do we are going to take not just more money in proportion to what you earn but more of it off you.”What I will finally close with is to say that what is really missing from this Budget Policy Statement is not a forecast for this year or next but where we will be in decades to come if we do not adjust our long-term settings for policies such as superannuation affected by demographic change. I look forward to talking to more and more members around the House about what exactly we can do about that. Thank you.