Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Mr Chair. I'm very pleased to take a call on the minimum family tax credit part of the Taxation (Budget 2021 and Remedial Measures) Bill. I think we've traversed the circumstances for this in a reasonably liberal fashion in the first two readings and this will obviously be a little bit pointed. Although I want to indicate to the committee that because this bill is a bill about taxation and remedying things I think there are a number of other remedies that we could put. Actually what we have had is a long dissertation from the Minister of Finance and the Government of the day about fixing 30-year-old problems. Well my aspirations in the committee of the whole House are a little more modest than that. I'd like to fix one problem that is a longstanding irritant and that is the failure to amend the thresholds for the tax rates that are in the Income Tax Act 2007 and there is a tabled amendment now on the Table in the name of the Hon Simon Bridges to do just that—this would I think constitute a new part and so I won't elaborate on that too long; I'm just doing some introductory remarks—and a second tabled amendment is in my name to remedy the punitive changes that the Government made recently to punish higher-earning hard-working New Zealanders who are already paying a vastly disproportionate share of the income tax base in this country by removing line 5 of Schedule 1 of the Income Tax Act—that is the 39 percent threshold.So I'm going to come and talk about that at the appropriate time but I want to just ask the Minister in regards to the minimum family tax credit change that we are debating whether he felt it necessary—or why rather he didn't feel it was necessary—to increase the threshold more than he has or more than the Government intends to because effectively what we are doing if my calculus is correct is that the adjustment rates that are set out in Part 1 in clause 4 are effectively a dollar change. But the higher the jobseeker support revenue becomes relative to the income earning threshold of workers then the lower the proportion of difference there is. And we're actually closing the gap in a percentage basis between the tax credit for those who work and the income for those who don't. Now the Minister in his first reading speech made it very clear that it was—despite the proud shouts of socialism from the many speakers for Labour in this bill—still at least the Minister of Revenue's intention that our framework should enable work to be more valuable than not working and I think despite the Greens' interventions and then their abstention almost every other member of this House would say that work is always better than not productively working with all the qualifications that the Greens would put around the value of unpaid work which nobody denies and the importance of volunteerism and parenting and all of those things. But actually paid work is the thing that pays the bills. It pays the bills for the household it pays the bills for the Crown because the Crown doesn't have any money except that which it taxes or borrows and then spends. So it strikes me that while there is this incremental adjustment the gap in a proportionate basis has actually diminished a small amount and therefore the value of work as compared to income support for job seekers has actually closed and I wonder if he could just explain whether or not that's the case.