O'Connor SimonSIMON O'CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): Thank you Mr Speaker. Look the Government is hurting working New Zealanders. I know it my constituents know it and New Zealanders know it as well and I suspect even those on the Labour-led Government benches know it too but they're blinded as we've heard in the contributions today by their own ideologies and special interests. They spend where they shouldn't they're cutting where they shouldn't and they tax everywhere they can. It's incredibly disappointing because as an electorate MP—and I know that's probably a bit of a novel concept to the members on the other side—I know they're not happy.The members of Tāmaki are not happy. They are paying more for their fuel they are seeing their rents going up and they are being hit by the threat of more and more taxes. No one in the good place of Tāmaki has not worked out already that this Government is looking to tax more and more into the future. They begin of course to mock the good people of Tāmaki because they think it's just a bunch of people who sit in the wealthy suburbs. Well one actually they are the people who work jolly hard and pay the most taxes; secondly they involve also the great people of Glen Innes who are some of the poorest people of New Zealand and who are paying more and more now because of the fuel taxes and otherwise because of this Labour Government. I'm predicting that come the next election my vote and the vote of National will go up in the likes of Glen Innes because they will begin to see the duplicity that comes out of this Government.SPEAKER: Order!SIMON O'CONNOR: Actually that's a very good point and I withdraw.What we are seeing though is an increase of costs—I've obviously prefigured taxes. The fuel tax is the most obvious. It's been said in recent days that the Prime Minister Minister of Finance and others don't seem to understand that. They seem to have glibly ignored it. It's a real cost. In fact we have seen in Auckland in particular that their friend the Mayor of Auckland Phil Goff who's Labour to his heart and core has also put a tax on Aucklanders who are paying substantially more for their petrol now increasing the cost day to day of every activity and it probably doesn't register in the minds of the Government that all those costs are passed on. When they increase the minimum wage when they threaten to increase it even further when they threaten capital gains taxes that all puts greater uncertainty and cost into business which is why while the taxes are going up the confidence is declining.The other side we've got to is of course wrong priorities. That's a cost to this Government as well and to this country. Actually it's not a cost to the Government; the Government's got no idea. Actually while I think about it one of the problems that we've got from the Prime Minister—you know it's only a few extra cents in tax. Well that's all well and good when you are on half a million dollars a year same with the Ministers on quarter of a million. They don't necessarily know what the costs are; they don't care.But also we've got wrong priorities. We have all this talk particularly during the election campaign about how the Labour Party really cares about the workers. Well why is it that we've got more rolling strikes anticipated with the teachers? The costs to New Zealand are actually involved with wrong priorities. So we are more interested it appears to be setting up an embassy in Stockholm—and no offence to the good people there—but why do we need to set up a new embassy in Stockholm instead of paying our teachers more?Kieran McAnulty: The member's getting worse.SIMON O'CONNOR: I don't hear anything coming from the other side apart from Kieran McAnulty but no one's ever quite understood what he's had to say. But that's a wrong priority as well perhaps sitting right there—right there—wrong priorities.Look in fact even when we think—we just had the Minister of Health speak. We found out the other day that actually there's almost unlimited funding going to go to gender reassignment surgeries but where's the money for cochlear implants where's the money for grommets for children where's the money for these women protesting and petitioning outside the Parliament yesterday for Ibrance? Those are just a few of the health cases—wrong priorities of this Government which are more obsessed with virtue signalling even to almost empty halls at the UN.The final element really is what I would call the costs of unhealthy obsessions—unhealthy obsessions. This particularly comes from the Green Party. They're obsessed with legalising drugs—the likes of cannabis and other products. Even in recent days when the psychoactive substances have been in the headlines and people dying we had the likes of the Drug Foundation and the Green Party supporting it. Why is that a cost? Why is that a cost? It's because it's a belief that everybody should do whatever they want but everyone else will pay the consequences. Everyone else will pay the consequences. The cost is never in personal responsibility; it's that everybody else has to pay for it. And the irony too is it comes ultimately from those people—Chlöe Swarbrick: Your actions are costing lives.SIMON O'CONNOR: —and there's one of them yelling in the House at the moment—whose life experience is such that they have never really understood the cost of the people that they heard.Chlöe Swarbrick: Look at the evidence.SIMON O'CONNOR: They talk about evidence when really again the life experience is the best.