Robertson Grant: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRobertson Grant: General Debate[Sitting date: 06 April 2016. Volume:712;Page:10247. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): New Zealanders ask a basic question of their politicians: “Are you on my side?”. They are not asking for much. They are not asking for the Government to tell them what to do or how to live their lives but they want to know that the Government is there for them and that if they do their bit and they pay their fair share they will get a fair go.What we have discovered about this Government over the last 8 years is that this Government does not subscribe to that. It does not subscribe to the idea that it is its job to be on the side of New Zealanders. The choice it is making about whose side it is on could not be more obvious. And we have seen it in the past. It is on the side of Mr Al Ali Khalaf. It is on the side of the Skycity directors. In the last couple of weeks we have seen just exactly who it is that this Government thinks it is working for.We first saw it with the response of the Government to the scandal that is multinational tax avoidance in this country. Whether the amount of money involved is $500 million as one newspaper investigation thought or as Craig Elliffe the tax expert from Auckland University said it is a billion dollars a year—it is a big problem. But this Government would not know because it has not even asked the basic question: how much are New Zealanders missing out on because multinational companies will not pay their fair share? This Government is not prepared to stand up for the New Zealand taxpayers who pay their tax who go home—the small business owners—and do the tax at night and who pay their fair share because they want to be part of this society. But the National Government will not stand up for those people. It will not even bother to find out how much tax is being avoided.Then we have the release of the Panama Papers. Let us be absolutely clear. New Zealand is donkey-deep in this—60000 of these documents mention New Zealand. What is the Prime Minister’s reaction? He does the shoulder shrug. He says it does not really matter. He brings to bear the ethics of Wall Street. Well I say to John Key how about remembering the ethics of Hollyford Avenue? How about remembering the idea that we look after each other in New Zealand? We give people a fair go we do not look after the most powerful and we do not look after the mega-rich. We look after New Zealanders.John Key has stood up and told us we are not a tax haven. Well I have got news for Mr Key: he is the only one who thinks that. He is the only person in the last few weeks who has been saying we are not a tax haven. This is what was in the Australian Financial Review. It has a list of the countries that Mossack Fonseca operates in. It says that it is across 21 tax havens and there is New Zealand.In 2005 before he became the leader of the National Party John Key said that he wanted New Zealand to look at how the experience of small island economies went how they would go and how we could replicate them. I am not sure that New Zealanders thought that he meant small-island economies like the British Virgin Islands the Seychelles Costa Rica Panama Belize British Anguilla the Cayman Islands—that is the company that John Key’s Government is keeping. He even said in that article in 2005 that he wanted to have a look at how Jersey had built its economy off the back of offshore trusts.That is not the economy that we want in New Zealand. We want an economy where people are not serving coffee to the 1 percent. We want an economy where we are actually making and building the things that will help people to have a share in prosperity that builds wealth from the ground up and that focuses on a productive economy. Instead we have got a Prime Minister who shrugs his shoulders who talks about the fact that the lawyers and the accountants earn $24 million from the fact that we are tax haven and who wants New Zealand to be the Switzerland of the South Pacific.John Key has lost his moral compass. He does not get the fact New Zealand is now on the world stage and having its reputation damaged day after day and he will not lift a finger to do anything about that. That is because he has proved to New Zealanders that he is on the side of the mega-rich and the wealthy and the 1 percent. He is not on the side of ordinary hard-working New Zealanders.New Zealanders deserve a Government that gets alongside them that supports the building of a productive economy and that gives everybody a share in that economy. They will get that only with a Labour Government.Debate interrupted.