Brownlee GerryHon GERRY BROWNLEE (National): Well the first thing I would like to point out to Mr Strange who's just resumed his seat is that the Government has not started to pay down debt; the Government continues to borrow at an extraordinarily large rate—Andrew Bayly: $110 million a day.Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: —in fact as my colleague points out about $120 million a day. To suggest in any way that this bill is about paying back the debt is a total nonsense.Let's just have a look at it for a minute. The projections are over four years that this might bring in some $2.2 billion. It's a lot of money—$2.2 billion over four years of 2 percent of the taxpaying base—a lot of money; no question about that. But the debt in four years' time is going to be some $214 billion. So this is on a good day when everyone pays up—no one avoids; everyone puts the cash in—1 percent of the debt. This is 1 percent of the debt. So this bill does not have anything to do with repaying debt. This bill is entirely about the—you would say—placation of those who are anxious about others who earn more than them through the election promise to increase to the 39c rate.I think it was interesting when our colleague David Seymour pointed out that that's exactly what Labour did 21 years ago. How long did it take before people started creeping up towards that income level? Now of course 21 years later where that level was set is now below what the mean income is for New Zealanders. So you do get a lot of movement over a period of time and it seems to me that the idea that you're going to say Well at the $180000 mark you meet something magical and you must pay more tax." denies the fact that everybody in this country wants eventually to see their incomes rise. The other thing that is most worrying about this bill is the reach-back powers given to the commissioner into the private affairs of New Zealanders. For seven years backwards—back as far as the 2013-14 year—the Commissioner of Inland Revenue can ask trustees to provide information about that trust income. Here's one problem: why doesn't he already have it? Why doesn't the commissioner already have that information about income? He should be taxing any trust at the rate that they're due to pay it.Hon Stuart Nash: She.Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: She—well OK. In this case I'm using it as a very generic term. She's actually a very good State servant. But the question is: the information should be there so what is the additional purpose here? Well when we look at the bill we find out it's to help develop policy. So where's the information going? Who's taking that information? Who's using that information and what are they doing with it?I think it was a very good point that was made earlier in the debate that we worry all the time about privacy in this country. We strengthen privacy laws constantly. But then under urgency to try and get enough money to pay 1 percent of the debt—if we're lucky—each year for the next 200 years we suddenly change privacy laws. It seems to me that this is a bill that's very poorly conceived and that's written in a hurry simply to accommodate the ability for Labour politicians Labour members of Parliament to go out and say "We promised to put that top tax rate up and we did it." and then of course to hope that no one asks them why because the answer to why can only be because people earning over that much shouldn't keep as much of the income as they're earning. It can't be anything else. It can't be "Oh we want to reduce the debt." because it won't do it.We will not be supporting this bill. We don't begrudge for one moment the spending that the Government has done to help New Zealanders through a difficult time but we do not think that it is fair or that it's kind to create the illusion that somehow this bill is going to solve the massive debt problem that this country is accumulating day by day. Only productivity will do that."