Joyce StevenHon STEVEN JOYCE (National): Thank you Madam Chairperson Williams. I'd like to take up a couple of points if I could that were partially answered by the previous Minister in the chair. Now that we have the finance Minister back I'd like to get him to expand on them if possible. My colleague Nick Smith raised the issue of 100 percent effective marginal tax rates and the officials I understand have basically said There will be some; we haven't found them yet." I think it would be very helpful for the committee to understand other high effective marginal tax rates that might apply as a result of this package in particular say perhaps in the bands of 70 80 or 90 percent which are very high effective marginal tax rates anyway. I am confident the officials will have done the work to check the impact of the Best Start payment in combination with other entitlements on effective marginal tax rates and I'd very much appreciate the Minister being able to share that information with the committee which will give us a bit of an indication as to how big an issue these effective marginal tax rates are that the committee is worried about.The second point I'd like to address is the tabled amendment in my name—as to why instead of doing the Best Start payment it wasn't considered that the same amount of money could have been added to the Working for Families family tax credit. Now Mr Iain Lees-Galloway suggested the reason for that was that they wanted it to be universal and yet the objective of this particular bill is to focus on incomes for low and middle income families so that would suggest that if the concern is for those families then using the abatement regime of the Working for Families programme would achieve a better targeting and it would also mean that we don't have a doubling up of abatement rates of the type that would give us those effective marginal tax rates. It would be very straightforward to just simply as I have proposed in my amendment add a new band at nought to three. If that's the Government's key concern as the Minister says through the Children's Commissioner's work then why not do that in preference? It would be a much simpler cleaner and easier to understand approach than the current approach of a new package.Hon Iain Lees-Galloway: You may not have liked the answer but you got this question answered about 20 minutes ago.Hon STEVEN JOYCE: No it hasn't been answered Mr Lees-Galloway because your answer was if I may say given your personality a little bit flippant and therefore we'd like a more substantive answer because I think it's a very reasonable proposal.The other point I'd like to raise at this point is these tax thresholds at the low end of—or the low tax threshold. Now the Government is proposing to reverse the current law which was to lift the bottom tax threshold from $14000 to $22000. They're proposing to undo that which does seem to not only cut across the objectives of the legislation but also cut across the stated policy of one of their key coalition partners—well confidence and supply partners—the Greens who have themselves proposed the idea of adjustments at the bottom end of the income range and around that $14000 a year tax bracket.So I have proposed a number of amendments that would go some way to acknowledging that that bottom bracket should be adjusted as an alternative to the very sensible approach of the previous Government. It is a chance for the new Government to show that actually they're not religiously against moving tax thresholds in principle but actually they are prepared to show some adjustment for hard-working Kiwis. It is something also that the Greens could support given that it is indeed their policy. I'm assuming that as confidence and supply partners they could at the very least consider actually endorsing an amendment to the bill that provides an opportunity for the lowest tax threshold to be adjusted.So these things are I think really substantive questions for the Minister. They go to the heart of some of our concerns about this particular bill. Why not do something that addresses these very high effective marginal tax rates which occur when you have too many entitlements that all abate on people? Why not simplify the system and include the money in Working for Families—and I want a substantive answer to that not the one we got before from Mr Lees-Galloway. And these low tax thresholds—why not adjust those?"