Woods Megan: Taxation (Budget Measures) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Woods Megan: Taxation (Budget Measures) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee 
[Sitting date: 24 May 2012. Volume:680;Page:2470. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram) 
: 
 I am pleased to take a call on this bill the Taxation (Budget Measures) Bill. What we are seeing here today is that we are picking the pockets of our kids to fund an ideas deficit from the members opposite. They have delivered a Budget today that offers zero hope zero ideas and a zero future for young people in New Zealand.  
Only 6 months after re-election this Government has completely given up on its brighter future. It is quietly slinking away from any idea of aspiration and all it can do is tinker around the edges as it stumbles towards being thrown out of office in 2014. But all I can say to the members opposite is wait until the kids whose pockets you started picking today come of voting age. They are going to be angry and we have got a sure source of voters there. This Government is spent. It is out of ideas and it knows that its 2010 tax switch was a failure. Now all it can do is tinker round the edges and try to fix things up and this is just a straight-out revenue grab.  
I talked in an earlier contribution on this bill about the stunning economic policy we are seeing from the National Government being rolled out in this term and in its previous term. David Parker mentioned this in his contribution tonight. It started with its cycleway. Failure—no jobs. Then there was the “Holiday Highway”. That stimulated the economy but hang on. That is right: not all of the jobs that were promised in the last Budget eventuated. And then today we have this stunner—the third part in the trilogy—the paper route. This Government is taking it to the kids and taking the money off them.  
These are not the taxation issues that we should be talking about tonight. We should be talking about taxation and about how that can be used to stimulate our economy. We are told by members opposite that they do not want to be talking about the things that are not important to our nation. Well put something in the Budget that is instead of taking money out of the pockets of our children. For 4 years Labour has been imploring National to put children at the centre of its policy and to do something about the 270000 Kiwi kids who live in poverty. That is one in four or 25 percent of them. But we did not mean this in terms of putting children at the centre of your policy. We did not mean for you to go away and come up with a taxation policy that seeks to put your hands into their pockets and take away their pocket money. We did not mean this.  
As I have also talked about one can only imagine the thinking that got the National Government and its coalition partners to here. They were thinking: “Fourteen million dollars—we really need $14 million. There are those bludging kids. We need to go after them again. For too long they have had it too easy. They don’t pay for their own accommodation. They are on the take. They are demanding an education and do you know what? When they get a bit older they might even want to go on and do postgraduate training. We cannot let that happen. So we need to make sure that they know they don’t have a future in this country.” What are those members thinking? That there are too many grubby little hands looking for a hand up? 
 National is the party that talks of aspiration and this is a joke. These are just kids who are working hard and what the members opposite do not understand is the income that these kids are receiving. It is being chortled about what a small pittance this money is but this income is important to these kids and it is important to their families. Frighteningly increasingly this money is becoming part of household budgets in this country and becoming an important part of household budgets in making ends meet. One of the things that I think is interesting in the regulatory impact statements is that we see that the credit is received by approximately 68600 children averaging $240. But the regulatory impact statements do not go on to note that the tax credit does not apply to income from interest or dividends—meaning a child must pay tax on the first dollar of income from these sources. So for the members opposite is this about equality? Is this about thinking working children are just getting a bit of a break and you need to bring them into line? This is just not fair.