Falloon Andrew; Williams PotoANDREW FALLOON (National—Rangitata): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. It's a pleasure to be taking a call this afternoon in the first reading of the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2018-19 Modernising Tax Administration and Remedial Matters) Bill. I will be joining my colleagues in voting against the bill this afternoon and that's frankly despite there being some good parts to the bill.I just wanted to reflect on some comments made earlier this afternoon by Deborah Russell and also by Michael Wood. Deborah Russell's contention was that because there's some good things in the bill National should vote for it—despite the fact that we want to lower income taxes not raise them we should vote for this bill—and then we should try and fix it up in the committee of the whole House. Well actually I have to tell Government members that it's their responsibility to draft legislation. It's their responsibility to talk to MPs across the House to gain their support and try and get other parties' support. They didn't do that with this bill. They didn't come to us before they brought this bill to the House to try and gain our support. If they'd done that we would have given them the advice to go off split it into two bills bring the KiwiSaver stuff as a separate bill—which we support—and bring the taxation rates as a separate bill which we would have opposed. They didn't do that and for that reason we have to vote against this bill.I just want to reflect on some of the good things in the bill though because as I said there are some good things. I've said in this House before that KiwiSaver is fantastic. I'm a huge supporter of KiwiSaver. It's the reason I was able to buy my first house. Since I started work I've put 8 percent of my income into KiwiSaver and that enabled my wife and myself to buy our first home which I'm very grateful for. What the bill is going to do is expand that out to have more contribution rates because at the moment as it stands there's a 3 percent rate a 4 percent rate and an 8 percent rate. There's a lot of advice out there that the gap between the 4 percent rate and the 8 percent rate is too wide. There are a lot of people out there who'd like to be able to contribute a number in between that but they've been required to put in a lesser amount generally which is the 4 percent because they can't quite afford that 8 percent. So I support that 6 percent rate being brought in.The second rate that's being brought in is a 10 percent rate and I particularly support that because there's a lot of people out there particularly who have worked for a long time who are able to contribute a bit more and so that's very positive.But I do need to now come to the parts of the bill that we don't support and that's in relation to the taxation rates that are contained in the bill. Just a bit of history on this: when we came into Government nine or 10 years ago the country was deep in recession the books were pretty shot we were sliding into deficit and as a result we had to take on a lot of debt to keep paying for core services. That resulted in blowing out debt and then we were hit by the Canterbury earthquakes which resulted in even more debt. So we set about growing the economy again investing in the things that would grow the economy: investing in innovation investing in education investing in infrastructure and that worked. We got growth back on track. We got unemployment down. We created 10000 jobs every month. In my region of Rangitata midland South Canterbury alone we've got unemployment down to 2 percent. That's incredibly positive and frankly it's not down to the Government that that happened; it's down to the people out there in the economy who made that happen: people working hard people in their businesses people on their farms people investing in their businesses growing the local economies—that's how the economy succeeded and they deserve some reward.So at the last Budget in Budget 2017 this Government set out to reward those people. We gave them a tax cut. We gave the average worker a tax cut of $1060 every year aimed at the lower income earners—aimed at the lower income earners. This Government this current Government all of last year set about arguing for higher taxes—arguing for higher income taxes; arguing funnily enough for water taxes which would have cost my region about $50 million a year. Now fortunately they lost that argument but they have unfortunately gone on to legislate for higher taxes. This bill sets those taxation rates in place for the coming year and we oppose it. Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): I understand this is a split call.