Leary IngridINGRID LEARY (Labour—Taieri): Madam Speaker thank you for the opportunity to speak on what really is a technical bill but actually the debate has turned much more on to inequality and has really highlighted some fundamental differences between this side of the House and the other side of the House. Because what this bill does is it levels the playing field in favour of first-home buyers rather than speculators and that's via the interest limitation. And really that is one of the most significant things that we can do to close the inequality gap in New Zealand. Now the other side—National and ACT—are saying that tax cuts will do that. That is utter nonsense. Their tax cuts will benefit the top 2 percent—those who are earning $180000 or more. What we need to do and what we are doing on this side is two fundamental streams of work. One is around pivoting the housing market away from speculators towards first-home buyers and secondly we're providing targeted support. Now the benefit to the first-home buyers comes via this bill and as we've heard investors can generally outbid first-home buyers and that is because they have a significant tax advantage. We've heard from the Minister how inflation skews that interest advantage even more. Now Simon Watts has revealed and actually David Bennett as well the view from the Opposition that housing is a business—they have spoken about that many times this evening—versus this side where we see housing as a social necessity for all and shelter as a human right. So what we want to do is make properties less attractive for speculators but also stimulate investment in new housing and that is very much what this bill does.We're also phasing in the interest deductibility changes so that they occur between March 2021 and March 2025 so that they do send a signal—as my colleague Anna Lorck has said—they provide those signals for investors so they can make wise choices with their investments. And really importantly for everyone to remember is that the main home is not affected by these new rules. So even owner-occupier rental situations where somebody is owning their home but renting it out to others as well while they're in there they can still claim interest deductibility.It would be remiss of me not to mention the targeted support. I do this specifically in response to the claims made by Andrew Bayly and Simon Watts around closing the inequality gap but also to the comments made by Chlöe Swarbrick. From 1 April the second pillar of what we're doing is we are doing very targeted support to help close this gap and that's around supported living jobseeker support sole parent support the youth payment the young parent payment orphans benefit Working for Families tax credit Best Start tax credit student allowance superannuitants and so on—the list goes on. It is all about reducing inequality and it's inequality that impacts on some of our hardest workers. I absolutely reject the comments from the Opposition and also from the leader of the ACT Party David Seymour that only people who go to university and earn high wages are hard-working. We have seen through the pandemic that some of the hardest-working and most critically important workers are our bus drivers our cleaners our mothers our security guards and so on. Now National has said that there's a housing crisis but they refuse to take action. They appear to be supporting the highly leveraged speculators and that's not surprising given their interest in also providing tax cuts to the highest earners. But doing nothing is actually a really big risk to our economy. The IMF has not only said today that tax cuts would not be appropriate at this time they have also warned repeatedly that the ballooning housing market could trigger a housing slump. And so we have had to tackle this head-on. In summary what was actually a technical bill has been worth exploring because we've been able to see some fundamental philosophical differences. The other side see housing as a business; we see it as a social priority. National I think see the workforce as a hierarchy of contributions from the highest paid to the lowest paid; in Labour we see that everybody has a contribution to make and everybody should be valued and that some of those disparities have come about through history and through happenchance. So this is a great bill. It's a bill that I expected to speak more technically on but I'm glad we've had the opportunity this evening to reveal some of the fundamental differences in the way we view the workforce and the way we view inequality on this side of the House. I commend the bill.