Russell DeborahDr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour—New Lynn) (remote): Thank you Mr Chair. It's a delight to speak on this bill albeit remotely. I want to just add a little bit of clarity to some of the numbers that have bandied about here especially by members of the Opposition parties.We had the leader of the ACT Party David Seymour standing up and ranting and raving telling us that it was horrendous that 12 percent of individuals in this country paid 48 percent of the income tax. I checked the numbers out; indeed those are correct. There's a table on the Treasury website and if you go to that table and look through the numbers indeed 12 percent of income earners do pay 48 percent of all the income tax. However there is no table on the Treasury website which talks about the amount of income they earn in the first place. But if you dig a bit further and do your homework properly and head through the IRD website you can find a table there which will give you an estimation of income distributions in this country. So if you're sitting there and crunching through the numbers and working with them a bit and it doesn't even take a lot of effort to do it what you do find is that 12 percent of income earners in this country earn 38 percent of all the income. A huge proportion of the income is earned by just a small proportion of people in this country. That's not even taking into account people who don't earn any income at all. The particular spreadsheet I'm working off only works with people who are aged 16 and older and does not include people who earn no income at all. So in actual fact that 38 percent of income is likely a lot higher.So if we're talking about a fair distribution of income tax then it turns out that the fairness we need to speak in terms of is fairness in relation to the income earned not just the single headcount—the single individualistic headcount that the ACT Party relies on. Tell the story but tell the whole story and that is what the ACT Party neglected to do; they neglected to look at income distributions. We have a long-established principle in this country that if you earn more income then you pay more income tax. This is a principle that goes way back to Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations writing about the principles of fair taxation. Adam Smith said that the more income a person earns the more that person ought to contribute to the general good—to the general good. So I think we can ignore the stats—the dubious stats—that the ACT Party have presented us with with only a partial view.And then from the National Party we had the idea that in fact we're all paying outrageously high income taxes in this country. That is just not the case. The Minister presented it early on in this debate; he pointed out that in terms of the 38 OECD countries in terms of what our overall tax take is as a percent of GDP we are 24th. That is that there are 23 countries that have higher tax takes than we do—23. And that's countries like the United Kingdom and Canada and the Scandinavian countries; places where it's actually good to live. So other countries have higher tax takes than us. And of course Mr Bayly also ignored—by concentrating only on income taxes he ignored the other taxes that are in our system things like GST and company tax and the like. So again only a partial story; a partial picture of what was going on.I put it to you and to the members of the House that in actual fact we could debate about tax rates all we like but I think we should talk about other principles. Mr Bayly has suggested that our income tax thresholds should be indexed to inflation but that suggests that they are already at the right level. It suggests that no Government should have a very careful think about the overall structure of our income tax rates; we should just leave them permanently indexed and set in relation to what they are now. Who knows what the future may bring? We need to remain flexible we need to have the flexibility to adjust income tax thresholds as we need for the benefit of all New Zealanders because we are all in this together. Thank you Mr Chair.