Prebble Richard: Customs and Excise (Motor Spirits) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Prebble Richard: Customs and Excise (Motor Spirits) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:623;Page:18695] 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE (ACT) 
: 
 I rise to speak to the Customs and Excise (Motor Spirits) Amendment Bill. I follow the Green MP Jeanette Fitzsimons and I am appalled that she should use her time to applaud a group of people who are trespassers and who are breaking the law. The Green Party’s idea which it promoted again today is that it is perfectly OK for the Green Party to break the law but for no one else to do so. Those people on Marsden B power station are not activists they are criminals. I hope that when they come down from the private property on which they are trespassing they are arrested and that the courts finally decide to get tough on people who claim that their principles enable them to break the law. 
I will make another comment for the Green member about the Kyoto Protocol. One of the reasons that the ACT party has always opposed the Kyoto Protocol is firstly it will not solve the greenhouse problem. If we were to look 50 years into the future it will have made almost no difference. Secondly it is fundamentally unfair to New Zealand because of the appalling way that successive Governments negotiated our position. The member should understand that the targets for each country are different. I will give one simple example. A friend of mine who owns a reasonable-sized farm did a purge on possums and was staggered to discover that he took off 8000 possums. He had a look into this and found that 20000 tonnes of green matter is eaten by possums every day. He asked why the Government did not just get rid of possums and thereby meet our greenhouse target easily. Getting rid of possums would meet the target but the Government will not do it because the Green Party said that getting rid of possums should not count and it will not. So even if we do get rid of possums it will not count. Of course all the forests in Russia count but New Zealand’s forests do not. That is because of the way that the Green Party the Labour Party and the National Party negotiated the Kyoto Protocol which is very unfair on New Zealand. 
What is proposed under this excise tax is to increase fuel tax by 5c per litre. The ACT party is opposed to this measure. Are we opposed to more roads? No we are not. In fact if members were to go back and look at the parliamentary record they would see that the first party in Parliament that stood up and consistently argued that we have under-invested in roads and that we need more of them especially in Auckland was the ACT party. The parliamentary record shows that. Is there a shortage of money to build roads in New Zealand? Of course there is not. There is no possible argument for any Government to say that we should increase taxes when it is running a record surplus. Currently there is a tax of 18c per litre plus GST on fuel. Half of that money goes into the Government’s own accounts so there is no justification for an increase in taxation. 
I will raise for the House an even more serious issue and it is a constitutional one. By indexing fuel taxes to inflation the executive is removing the necessity for the executive to come to Parliament and ask for permission for tax rises. Those who have studied history will know that the reason we have parliamentary control over the Crown and the little control Parliament has over the excesses of the executive is that every Government no matter what colour its stripes has to come to this House and justify an increase in taxation. But this bill means that the Government does not have to come back to Parliament again to increase fuel taxes. The Government might say that there is a precedent for that move because alcohol and cigarette taxes are now inflation-adjusted. Indeed I was part of the Government that did that. I think it is wrong. The more I think about it the more strongly I think that it is wrong and that no real Parliament should ever agree to it. 
The Westminster system means that whatever party is in Government it must ask for approval from the House to increase taxes. But this tax is even worse because with this bill the Government has said that it wants the ability to increase tax from 1 April but it then wants the ability to decide whether it will. We all know how the Government will decide; it will have a look at the public opinion polls to see how it is rating. If it thinks that it is polling high enough to introduce an unpopular fuel tax it will introduce the tax on 1 April. If it thinks that the polls are not that good it will put it off until after the election. Then we will have the constitutional monstrosity of a tax going up under the new Parliament that is elected at the next election. That breaks the rule that states that one Parliament should not pass laws that bind the next Parliament. 
We all know that that is the constitutional position. I find it appalling that our officials such as Crown Law and the like who are supposed to advise us on these matters did not put in a document to oppose this bill and to point out that it is a constitutional outrage to have a measure whereby this will be the last time possibly that we will ever debate fuel tax increases. Because after this the Government will say that the tax should go up according to a change in the consumer price index. Where is the evidence that the consumer price index is the right principle to use to increase a tax that the Government says is for roading? It is not very difficult for members to realise that it is quite possible for the consumer price index to have increased but for the cost of roading to have gone down. That has been the situation a number of times in my parliamentary career. The Government has only put forward this fixed formula to avoid parliamentary scrutiny to avoid having to debate its roading programme and to avoid having to discuss transport. They are the only reasons that this bill has been put together. 
I point out to the House that when the Government inflation-proofs its revenue and it is now doing it on petrol alcohol and cigarettes it means that the Government does not care about inflation. In fact the more inflation we have the more money it gets. But the Government will not inflation-proof income tax. We all know that because income tax has stayed the same despite wage rises the average New Zealand household after tax is no better off than it was 5 years ago. The economy may have grown but after tax—because income tax rates have not been inflation-proofed and because things like cigarettes alcohol and now fuel are going up—the average household is no better off. That is yet another reason why the ACT party says that this is a bill that no Parliament worth its name should ever allow. I am appalled to see that this bill is able to be got through because of the Green Party. It is so ideologically blind in its views about energy that it is not prepared also to realise that as parliamentarians we should never agree to a bill of this sort. It just gives the Government revenue without any accountability.