Twyford PhilPHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): It is good to see you Mr Deputy Speaker. I think the best that can be said for this bill is that it is a clever piece of election-year politics. It is an election-year Budget but it is not really the kind of leadership that this country needs. So what does this bill do? It adjusts the tax brackets it adjusts Working for Families and it increases the entitlements under the accommodation supplement. It is worth in total about $1.9 billion—$26 a week on average for the recipients. But it is not going to do anything for the people in my community who are living in tents and garages and sleepouts and families living in their cars. It is not going to do anything for the mental health services that are on their last legs all over the country. It is not going to do anything for the classrooms that are so overcrowded because this Government has failed to properly invest in the infrastructure to support a rapidly growing population. It will do nothing for the gridlock on the roads that make the daily commute a living hell for people in our largest city.So after 9 years in Government as one problem after another has been allowed to fester out of control this Government steps up 4 months out from an election with a Budget that is basically a case of spray and pray. This is an election bribe from Steven Joyce in his maiden Budget but it is not even a very effective bribe. And why is that? It is because the last few weeks have been spent trying to frame this Budget as a families package and we have heard one speaker after another from the National Government benches get up and say that it is targeted at people who need it most. I am shocked to see people like Nikki Kaye and Chris Bishop stand up with all this kind of faux outrage and indignation at the suggestion from this side of the House that it is in fact a package that is disproportionately benefiting people on higher incomes. They seem to have somehow suspended their critical faculties and they want to pretend to this House and to the public of New Zealand that this is a package that is designed to be most generous to the New Zealanders who need it most.Well it clearly is not and Michael Wood made the case very persuasively. This package puts the benefits into the hands of the top income earners. The top 50 percent of income earners in this country get 75 percent of the benefits of the package that is legislated by this bill—75 percent of the benefits go to the richest half of the population. How is that a package that is targeted at New Zealanders who need it most? The top 10 percent of New Zealand income earners get the same as the bottom 50 percent. How is that a package that is targeted to help the poorest and most vulnerable New Zealanders? It is not. The National Government clearly thinks that New Zealanders are thick to spin this line that this is a package that is setting out to help the New Zealanders who need it most. It clearly is not.Steven Joyce is giving a tax cut of $1000 a year to people earning the salary of an MP—$1000. And yet someone who is let us say a single person a full-time cleaner on the minimum wage gets an extra $11 in tax cuts—$11—but they lose $10 from the removal of the independent earner tax credit. They effectively get $1 from this package and yet Steven Joyce is giving the members of Parliament in this House—the backbenchers at least—a $1000-a-year tax cut. How is that fair? How is that rational? And how is that a tax package that is designed to help low-income New Zealanders? The finance Minister and the Prime Minister get 20 times more than what a single person working full-time on the minimum wage gets—20 times more. A property speculator earning $200000 a year gets $20 a week. The minimum-wage cleaner whom they pay to clean their office gets $1—the property speculator gets 20 times more. I hope the members opposite are listening to this. I do not know how we could make it any clearer: this is not a generous package designed to help the New Zealanders who need it most.Housing is the issue that hangs over this bill and hangs over this Budget. It is the No. 1 political issue in the election campaign that we are going to be debating over the next 3 or 4 months. It is set out in the commentary on this bill that one of the objectives of this tax package is improving the incomes for those people who have young children or high housing costs. Well that is a very big group of people. More than half of New Zealanders now rent and yet all over the country rents have been going through the roof because of a housing crisis that has been allowed to get out of control by this National Government. In Auckland in the last 7 years the average rent has gone up by $7000 a year—$7000 a year. So this package of adjustments to the tax brackets and the accommodation supplement and Working for Families is dwarfed by the increase in housing costs—not only mortgages but also rents and that is not just Auckland; that is happening all over the country. It should be the objective of this bill to actually make life easier for people who are suffering the effects of skyrocketing housing costs but it is not going to do much if anything at all to ease those pressures.I want to talk about the accommodation supplement because that is one of the three key elements in this package and it is commented on in the bill in the commentary attached to the bill. So what the Government is doing is it is increasing the maximum rates of the accommodation supplement. It is allowing students and other recipients to claim up to an additional $20 per week under the accommodation supplement in Auckland Wellington and Christchurch. This benefits 47 percent—so a little under half of people who currently get the accommodation supplement—by an average of $36 a week. More than half of the recipients of the accommodation supplement will not get any benefit at all.And here is the real kicker: families who have been claiming the temporary additional support which is a substantial number of families because they cannot live even when they are getting the accommodation supplement and extra benefits—they are not going to benefit at all because the increase in the accommodation supplement is offset on a dollar for dollar basis against the temporary additional support. So those people get nothing and that actually wipes out a quarter of what would have otherwise been the cost of the increased accommodation supplement. Two thousand households will see their accommodation supplement actually decrease under these changes up to $3 a week as a result.But I want to say more about the accommodation supplement because I think this is an admission of failure by this Government. The accommodation supplement is effectively a subsidy to landlords. It is a recognition that people's wages are not high enough to pay the rent and when you have got entrenched low wages which this Government has gone out of its way to try to depress over the last 9 years and skyrocketing rents because of a housing market that is turbocharged by property speculators that is the only thing that is left for the Government to do. We have said that we recognise that increasing the accommodation supplement as a short-term emergency measure may be justified and we will back it for the first year. But in the second third and fourth years you are looking at almost $400 million a year—almost $400 million a year—in increased subsidies to landlords.That is a total admission of failure by a Government that has refused to tax speculators that has refused to ban foreign buyers from buying existing homes that has utterly failed—that has totally failed—to increase the supply of housing that even in the Budget housing announcements that we saw in the last week will not even build any kind of significant number of affordable homes for first-home buyers and that has done nothing to give tenants more security of tenure. All that it has got is to bump up the subsidy for landlords by nearly $400 million a year. We do not accept that that is a good use of taxpayers' money. We will support it in the short term but in Government we will do a review of the accommodation supplement to find a much better way of using that taxpayers' money.