Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. The Green Party is supporting this bill. I didn't have the privilege of seeing it through the select committee—that was my colleague Chlöe Swarbrick—but I don't doubt what members have said about committee process being excellent and—oh kia ora Mr Temporary Speaker. I don't doubt the process. It was good and I congratulate the officials on all their work the many officials who did all of the detailed work. This sort of bill comes up pretty much every year to confirm the annual rates and to undertake remedial matters. That's pretty standard. The details of that are different in any given year. I thought before speaking to the detail of this bill I did just want to briefly respond to some of the comments Mr Woodhouse made earlier in this debate about bracket creep. I think it is a legitimate concern the bracket creep but it is not mathematically possible that people will be worse off when they move up a bracket because with the way progressive income tax works when you move up into a higher bracket you're paying—let's say you've moved into the over $70000 bracket. You're earning over $70000 a year but you're only paying 33 percent on every dollar over $70000. So there's no way you could be worse off because of going up a bracket. You're still earning more money than you would be otherwise. There is a lot of focus of course from that side of the House on perceived injustices or difficulties with having to pay more tax. Personally I think we need to reframe that quite considerably because ultimately tax is what we do together and what we can do together is so much greater than what we can do as individuals. When it comes to things like infrastructure our public education system and our public health system none of us can buy that as individuals. But with our collective shared wealth we can provide that value to all citizens and residents in New Zealand and we all benefit from that. Those who focus on a personal loss are really encouraging a kind of individualism that actually misses out on the fact that the individuals in a society are better off—perfectly exemplified by the COVID-19 response. We couldn't have done that if we didn't have a Government if we didn't have a public health system if we didn't have customs or if we didn't have the ability to pull together resources and set up a managed isolation and quarantine system. We all benefit from the near-eradication of COVID-19 in Aotearoa New Zealand and of course none of us could have done that as individuals. I guess that brings me to the other slight critique. Obviously what this bill is not doing which the Green Party would like to see is bigger moves in the direction of making sure that our tax system is actually fair. I believe earlier in the debate Andrew Bayly was speaking about the many different ways people can legally avoid tax. He was referring to some of those mechanisms and it is true. There was a report recently that was released in public that I believe was either IRD or Treasury working together reporting to Government Ministers on the different rates of tax paid particularly by high-wealth individuals and it showed that it was quite likely that 42 percent of high-wealth individuals—that is millionaires—are paying less than 10 percent of their economic income in tax. Now that's legal. It's legal that the very wealthiest people in New Zealand are paying a lower rate on their economic incomes than the lowest income earners—the cleaners the front-line workers who helped us all during COVID—who are barely making ends meet. Now that's not right that's not just that's not fair and that's not efficient and although people on the right in their weird dream world like to justify this and claim that millionaires shouldn't pay their fair share of tax in fact they should. So one thing this bill is not doing which the Green Party will continue to speak up about is making the tax system fair. It's just a mathematical thing. Constantly referring to things like punishing people for doing well—no. We're just asking for fairness and the mathematical reality is that when the rate of return on capital is greater than the growth rate of the economy then wealth will become concentrated in a smaller and smaller number of people. That's not about values; that's just maths. I know the right struggle with maths but it is the case. So this isn't any sort of moralising thing. If you believe in fairness and if you believe in justice then there has to be redistribution because it is a mathematical fact that a smaller and smaller number of people will become wealthier and wealthier irrespective of what contribution they have made to society. It's just maths—look it up. So the Green Party will be here talking about having an actual fair tax system and to do that we're going to have to make structural changes which mean that the very wealthiest do contribute a fairer share to the group here in New Zealand—to the team of 5 million—that we all benefit from. We will all be better off when that happens.