Leary Ingrid; Pugh MaureenINGRID LEARY (Labour—Taieri): It's a really sad sad day to see one of my favourite pieces of legislation be so cynically pulled and repealed without a select committee process and five days before Christmas. I would ask viewers at home to ask why are they repealing it—why are they repealing it?—and why are they doing so at this time?Secondly I would like to raise the issue of accountability and this is an area that I really plan to interrogate with the Minister in the committee stage. Because what this Act did—the one that is being repealed—is it gave a beautiful coherence to the architecture of our financial system. Andy Foster on the other side raised the issue of accountability. Well what they are doing by repealing this bill is taking away that accountability on the taxation side.We've heard in the House today that some of the reasons that they may be repealing it is a fear of data. Now why would the Government be scared of data? Perhaps it's not; perhaps they are scared of fairness. And if we look at the timing of the bill as has been alluded to there is very likely to be a report sitting in the Minister's office that contains information that they don't want the public to see. Is that transparent and is it fair? What is in that report that they are so worried about? We've heard it would be bureaucratic to keep this legislation in place. Two and a half staff members—that's far fewer I would say than those that would be needed to change all the road signs around New Zealand into English first. Although obviously Chris Bishop didn't get the memo because he is still calling it Kāinga Ora. This bill that we're appealing helps to inform decisions. It's around data and information and we haven't seen data information in the tax arena. Look at the tax cuts that the Minister of Finance is proposing. There is still no detail as to how they will be paid despite her repeated promises that she would say how she was going to fund those tax cuts; that information is not out there.The question that I will have for the Minister is: how will the tax system be accountable to the budgets that it funds? This was raised really eloquently by the Hon James Shaw. Because we have accountability in the budgeting process but when it comes to taxation we don't have a way of understanding how decisions are being made. There is no transparency around the different pillars around fairness. Now the Act does not purport to say what is fair; what it does is say that the information will be available so that New Zealanders can see for themselves that decisions are being made according to different principles and those principles will have different weightings. That is what accountability in the tax system looks like. There was a small change that we made in the select committee which I was really proud of because we added the words comparative wellbeing" into the principle that was around flexibility and adaptability. That talked about changes in inequality it referred to the extent to which the tax system keeps pace with technology and so on and it referred to inequality—and we added "or comparative wellbeing". Now the reason that's significant—and I'd really like to hear the Minister's views on this when we question him about it—is because wellbeing was also put into the Public Finance Act 1989 in 2020 under section 26M(2)(aa). That meant that there would be reports done on the Living Standards Framework which would show the level of wellbeing being achieved by budgeting. To have that at the outcome end is one thing but to have it at the input end—at the taxation end—gives the system a coherence. It means that all the way through the financial system there is a wellbeing lens across it. The Auditor-General has said it is not to make substantive judgments about whether wellbeing has been achieved; it is to inform public discussion so the public can ultimately hold Governments to account in how money is spent. Well the same should be true as to how money is gathered and that's what this report would allow. It would allow those discussions and their engagement which ultimately leads to more trust in the system and it enables taxpayers to have certainty about which principles are at stake. That comes up every three years during an election cycle. If they don't like the way those principles are being applied they can change the Government.I don't understand why this Government is so scared of having that level of accountability. It's something the Auditor-General wants. We are very disappointed in this bill.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): The member's time has expired."