Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Labour): The Hon Tim Macindoe can I say is one of the people who I think is very honest and straight in this Parliament. We have just heard from him that the statements that the Government had about the independent earner tax credit are different from those that we have got in the publicity materials from the Government and from the Minister of Finance in his speech yesterday. The Minister in the speech yesterday used this as a cover or an excuse for taking away from people on the minimum wage the tax break that they get from the tax margin changes. They virtually lose it all because the independent earner tax credit goes away. So someone on the minimum wage gets about only $10 a week out of the tax package anyway and all but $1 a year—is it a year or a month? A month is it not? Whatever it is—$1 a week. It is just about in the unmeasurables—Hon Members: A buck a week.Hon DAVID PARKER: It is a buck a week that they are left with because the Government has taken away the independent earner tax credit. And its excuse—I have got the speech from Mr Joyce because they must have known this was a weakness—was: It is only claimed by about one third of eligible recipients during the tax year." That is what he said in his speech. That is a direct quote. He said nothing else about it. And what is in the glossy pamphlet—the one that the journalists and all of us pore over? The excuse for this—the same wording: "Only 32 percent of eligible recipients claim it during the year they are eligible."So the Government is saying it is ineffective and therefore recipients are not losing anything if it takes it off them. That is the implication that it is saying. But it turns out that 80 percent of people are getting it—80 percent of people are getting it. And that is what the Hon Tim Macindoe has just admitted in response to my colleague Mr Wood's—apostrophe "s"—question. Ha ha!Michael Wood: We're multiplying.Hon DAVID PARKER: Ha ha! This is now shown for the scam that the language—the master of spin the Hon Steven Joyce was trying to say yesterday: "Oh look but really not that many people are losing it because only 32 percent claim it." But we did not think that "during the year" was so significant because they did not explain it until forced to under questioning in the Committee stage—when in actual fact we know that 80 percent get it.So this exposes again how poorly targeted this tax package is. That is why Jacinda Ardern's tabled amendment is dead on—separate the tax from the Working for Families. I do not want to overstate the generosity of the Working for Families changes given that the Government stripped out $500 million in an earlier Budget. But we support the changes to Working for Families. What we do not support are these poorly targeted tax changes. They could be so much better.I want the Minister in the chair Mr David Bennett to say why in this speech yesterday when the Budget was launched and why in all of the publicity materials none of this was disclosed. The Government knows that it is exposed at the poor targeting here. It knows that it cannot defend the fact that a multimillionaire gets—what is it—20 bucks a week and someone on the minimum wage if they have not got kids gets $1 a week. It is not fair. Is this the sort of country that we have become—truly? Is this really the sort of country that we want to live in where we have got these raging gaps in income and asset inequality? And this Budget makes it worse—this Budget makes it worse. The people on the other side might say: "Oh 20 bucks for the millionaire. That's not worth that much."Iain Lees-Galloway: It's $35—$35.Hon DAVID PARKER: It is $35 a week is it for the millionaire? Well I tell you what it would make a lot of difference for the people who are on the minimum wage. They do not get it and they are the people who are the most needy in our society.I do not know what other people see in their electorate offices. We actually get young men and women and middle-aged men and women coming into our electorate offices who look poor. Some of the poorest people in society now are our young people and middle-aged people who are single-income people. They have not got a spouse. They have not got kids. They have got the cost of living. They come into our offices and they look poor because they are poor.This Budget was an opportunity for the Government to do a little bit of social justice for them and get the distribution of this tax policy right by ensuring that the people on the minimum wage got something. And what did they get? They got given a tax break and then they got it taken away because the independent earner tax credit was taken off them. The Government knew that—it knew that. There is no way that you can explain this tricky wording in the Budget speech and in these documents in any other way. During the first day of this Budget when the media goes out the Government was trying to hide behind the fact that it said only 32 percent of eligible recipients claim it during the tax year which is what was said in the Budget speech and in the materials.I want to return in the time that I have got available to this other myth—this other myth—about the millionaires not getting the accommodation supplement. They are the ones who do get it. If you have got multiple houses in Auckland that you are renting out you are a multimillionaire. You are the one who gets the accommodation supplement. It passes through the hands of the person struggling to pay their rent but they do not keep it. Every cent of it goes to the landlord. Not 98c in the dollar not 50c in the dollar—100c in the dollar of the accommodation supplement passes through the hands of the tenant who is paying it to the landlord. Otherwise they are not allowed to get it. It is all going to the landlords. It is bidding up rents. It is holding up house prices to the detriment of first-home buyers and it is a disgraceful illustration of an abysmal housing policy for 9 years by the Government. It is absolute proof that the Government's poor housing policies have these distributional effects on income as well because the rich with all their assets are now getting more income through the increase in the accommodation supplement. That is why we have said that we reluctantly support it in the short term but by God we are not going to support the funding of this in the long term because it is wrong and there are better remedies.We know that under the term of this Government the amount that has been spent on this class of welfare payment which goes every cent of it to the landlord—every cent of it—has gone up from $890 million in 2008 to after this Budget comes in $1.5 billion in the next year or two. That is an increase from $890 million to $1.5 billion in this class of welfare payment and it is all going to the landlords. None of it stays in the pockets of the people who are so poor they cannot afford to pay the rent—or not even poor; middle-class people are caught up in this now. I used to hear about the Government railing against middle-class welfare. I am ashamed that I now live in a country where we have got welfare for the millionaires because that is what this is and it has gone up from $890 million in 2008 to after these changes $1.5 billion a year. What terrible management of the economy leads to that? This is just further evidence of the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots.Hon Damien O'Connor: Subsidy for landlords.Hon DAVID PARKER: A subsidy for landlords—you are quite right.Alastair Scott: It goes to the tenant.Hon DAVID PARKER: There we go again. They still do not get it. The tenant gets it only if he pays it across to the landlord. I always hear from the other side: "Oh we do not want top-down approaches for these things. We want bottom-up." That is their line—bottom-up when they try to take our language. The trouble with top-down over there is there is a block to the electrical signals because there is so much bone. How can you explain that response from Alastair Scott a decent man saying that this goes to the tenant not the landlord? They get it only if their rent is so high that they cannot afford their rent and they need more money from the Government to pay the rent to the landlord. So who is it going to? It is going to the landlord. I want to hear a counter view to that from Minister Bennett because I want him to defend this increase in the accommodation supplement from $890 million a year to $1.5 billion a year under the Government's watch."