Seymour David: Debate on Budget Policy StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSeymour David: Debate on Budget Policy Statement[Sitting date: 09 March 2016. Volume:711;Page:9539. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): I have greatly enjoyed tracking the Green position on dairy throughout today and in fact throughout this afternoon. First we heard from Metiria Turei that the current levels of farming need to be steeped in and subsidised by the Government then we heard from Catherine Delahunty who as it turns out hates “Old McDonald” after all and wants him to farm fewer cows. And now we come back to the member who has just resumed her seat Eugenie Sage who believes that the level of farming has been overly subsidised which makes me wonder why Metiria Turei wanted to subsidise it to remain at that level in the first place. It has been a very confused afternoon for the Greens on dairy.I want to direct my comments to a long-suffering long-forgotten and much-neglected group of people in the Budget Policy Statement and that is the taxpayer. Without a taxpayer we would not have a Budget we would not have Government revenues and there would not be much to debate about today. Have they not been neglected because what we see in the Government’s fiscal strategy is very clear: from $65 billion in taxes up to $85 billion in taxes in just 5 years.Is it not interesting to look at the new spending allowance—that is we are going to spend this much more money before we have identified a particular purpose. It is $1 billion in 2026; $2.5 billion in 2017 which just so happens to be an election year; $2 billion the year after that; and I think it was back to $1 billion for the mid-term of the electoral cycle the year after that.This Budget Policy Statement says that the taxpayer is going to be neglected and is going to pay and pay and pay. I asked the Minister of Finance just a couple of days ago how big the surplus needs to be before he will start cutting taxes. He could not give an answer. National members like to say that they will cut taxes but the truth is they have not really thought about it. They have not really committed to when they are prepared to start offering tax relief to New Zealanders who work New Zealanders who have families and New Zealanders who have businesses.If the Government was to deliver some ambition for giving relief to the taxpayer I could make a couple of minor suggestions. These really are quite modest but let us just have one. Time after time the Minister of Finance says that there is not enough revenue coming in because there has not been enough inflation to push people into progressively higher tax brackets. Well since when did a centre-right Government support fiscal creep as a means of raising revenue? This Government should be indexing tax brackets to inflation and there is no better time to do it than when inflation is low and fiscal creep is having a lower effect than usual.What indexation would do is ensure that this Government and future Governments if they want to take more money would have to be honest and go to the taxpayer and say: “We want to raise your taxes not creepily allow them to drift into higher thresholds due to inflation.” That is the first thing they could do and the cost to the household is real. The average household in New Zealand has paid $1500 in additional tax over the past 5 years just because of fiscal creep—just from being pushed into higher tax brackets by inflation. That is the average household; not even high-income households who have paid far far far more than that due to fiscal creep.The next thing that the Government could do if it got really ambitious about looking after the taxpayer is that it could examine the fact that we have one of the highest effective tax rates of capital in the OECD. It could actually make a conscious decision to reduce extra spending by just $120 million a year. When it is planning to increase spending by $1 billion to $2.5 billion a year it could set aside $120 million of extra spending to knock a point off the company tax rate and make Kiwi businesses competitive with the rest of the OECD.Finally if the Government is worried about debt it has got $28 billion in the New Zealand Superannuation Fund that it could get rid of tomorrow because I do not know anybody in New Zealand who would borrow money on their mortgage to play the global equity markets. That is what this Government is doing and for the taxpayers’ benefit it should wind up the New Zealand Superannuation Fund pay off debt and finally reduce risk so we can start actually cutting taxes for the people who make this Budget Policy Statement possible. Thank you.