Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): I can confirm for the Minister that the revenue from the 39c tax rate is 0.42 percent of what the Government spent last year but we don't boast here.Hon David Parker: You said it was 0.1 percent.DAVID SEYMOUR: Well everyone's got to stand for something. Does the Minister believe in light of his answer regarding the high-wealth individual project that he will still get the information he sought in time to release how much money a certain sector of New Zealand has right before an election campaign as originally scheduled for June 2023 when the project was launched?Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister of Revenue): Yes I—it's not especially related to the election date.David Seymour: Really?Simon Watts: Not especially related.Hon DAVID PARKER: No well it's not related to that at all; in fact this was one of the projects that I made clear to the Prime Minister when I sought the revenue portfolio that I wanted to do some work around because I do think that there is a big gap in the understanding that we have in this Parliament and in our society as to what effective tax rate is paid by different sectors of society. We know that very well for wage and salary earners for people that earn their income through interest in the bank. We know the distribution of that across society. We know that low and middle income people spend about roughly two-thirds of their income on GST-inclusive goods and services and the bottom eight to nine deciles—the mix of the third that is not on GST-inclusive goods and services changes within those deciles for lower-income people. They're spending about a third of their income on rent which doesn't attract GST. For middle-income people it's on their mortgage and higher-income people it's phasing out of mortgages and going into savings. But generally in those bottom 80 percent or 90 percent roughly two-thirds of people's income is spent on GST-inclusive goods and services which means that the effective GST rate for all those people is roughly about 9 percent of their income in addition to their income tax. Why I'm sure Chlöe Swarbrick is interested in those issues is that you have to have an understanding of the distribution of GST payments across society in order to have a real understanding as to what is the distribution of overall taxes by decile. So that's one of the reasons we're giving that information.Now to do that we had to change the law because the law didn't allow clearly—it was arguable whether the commissioner was entitled to gather that information for policy purposes as opposed to tax administration purposes and the risk that Revenue faces when they ask for that sort of information is that taxpayers can say I'm paying all my taxes; this is a fishing exercise. You're not entitled to this for policy purposes. Go away." We thought that wasn't right to have that gap in information and in order to do that we had to change the legislation. We actually did that very quickly in the first Budget following the election. We passed it under urgency. Some parties criticised us using urgency. If we hadn't done that we wouldn't be able to do this information gathering during this triennium which we thought should be within the power of Government to do. So we passed that amending legislation which then enabled the revenue department to gather that information. We set up the rules based on their advice as to how we do it. We've got an advisory group as to how that information should be gathered and analysed which includes public and private sector experts in tax matters. That information is currently being gathered and as soon as it is gathered it will be analysed and as soon as it is analysed that information will be released publicly."