Moroney Sue: Taxation (Annual Rates and Budget Measures) Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Moroney Sue: Taxation (Annual Rates and Budget Measures) Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:672;Page:18995] 
SUE MORONEY (Labour) 
: 
 Here we are on a Friday in Parliament under urgency debating the title and commencement clauses of the Taxation (Annual Rates and Budget Measures) Bill. I know the Government is ashamed of what it is doing in this bill. How do I know that? Because Government members have not even been brave enough to say in the title of the bill what it is doing. The title of the bill does not make any reference to KiwiSaver. Who will save KiwiSaver? It will not be that Government; it could be only a Labour-led Government. The title of the bill does not mention Working for Families. Government members are ashamed of what this bill does. The two things this bill does is cut and gut KiwiSaver and Working for Families yet would Government members dare mention the name of those two schemes in the title of this bill? No they have not been able to bring themselves to do that. They have hidden the cuts to those schemes in a title that could mean 101 different things. 
It will be if passed by this Parliament the Taxation (Annual Rates and Budget Measures) Act 2011. I challenge members opposite to take a call to explain why they would not even mention KiwiSaver or Working for Families in the title of the bill because that is what it is all about. It is all about taking the knife to those two initiatives that came from this side of the Chamber. They came from Labour and they have made huge differences in the day-to-day lives of hard-working New Zealanders. Government members are sitting on the other side of the Chamber knowing that the Prime Minister is getting an extra $1000 every week in his back pocket from the tax cuts in last year’s Budget and they will not contemplate looking at that yet here they are having a go at hard-working New Zealand families. Those families have a day-to-day week-to-week struggle just to make ends meet. This Government comes along with this Budget and the only thing it can think to do is disadvantage those people even more by moving up thresholds for Working for Families payments meaning fewer families are eligible for those payments. The Government is also giving people a disincentive to save for their retirement. How mean is that? 
I will talk about the commencement date of this bill. Much of the bill—in fact five parts of the bill—does not come into force until 1 April 2012. That will be a pretty interesting day: April Fool’s Day. It is another April fool’s joke from this Government. We should note that the date is next year—2012. So what is the urgency for? Why is it that we are in Parliament today pushing through taxation legislation that will not even hit the ground running until 1 April 2012? It is not as if we have to do it quickly so that people cannot adjust the way they have their money structured in order to take advantage of the changes as they were announced just yesterday in the Budget. None of those things matter when it comes to this bill so I ask why we are debating it under urgency. The commencement clause makes it quite clear that there is no need for urgency to debate this. 
I think my colleague Stuart Nash was onto it. I think the only reason there could be urgency for this bill was so there could be no select committee process. We are in urgency so that there could be no select committee process and Government members would not have to listen to the response they knew would come from hard-working New Zealanders. The Government did not want to hear from ordinary hard-working New Zealanders about the impacts on them of cuts to Working for Families. Government members do not want to hear—and they are not listening—the impact on people who really do want to save for their retirement. Those people had a helping hand in that from the Labour Government but they have had it stripped away from them by the National Government. The Government did not want to hear the stories from those people of how this bill will hurt them and their ability to save. 
That is the only reason I can think of in terms of why we are in urgency to consider this bill when it does not come into being until 1 April 2012 on April Fool’s Day. Here we are on a Friday in Parliament with the Government thinking that it is urgent to strip away people’s rights without first even listening to what those impacts will be. So there will be no select committee process. There will be no opportunity for New Zealanders to tell that Government about the week-to-week struggle they have and how this Budget will continue to hurt them.