Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): They say that the definition of insanity is to do the same thing again and again expecting a different result and I am not sure whether Te Ururoa Flavell is guilty of insanity by having far too much hope in the Labour Party.I rise in support of this bill and this Budget and I support this Budget and this Government because I have seen the alternative. Andrew Little for the first time I have ever seen failed to even use his allocated speaking time—he had so little to say. New Zealand First—we just heard from Winston Peters. It was a comic routine but there was no substance behind it. What a joke. Look at his op-ed in the New Zealand Herald this morning. Raising R & D expenditure to 2 percent of GDP—well the Government can very easily do that but simply pursuing a certain amount of money spent on something is not the same as getting a result.This Budget has one very good aspect to it and that is relief for taxpayers. Raising the thresholds is a victory for ACT and ACT's thinking because we have been on this for over 2 years relentlessly saying that bracket creep which has taken money out of hard-working New Zealanders' pockets week after week after week in greater amounts every year is fundamentally wrong. So we applaud the Government for doing that. But once you get past those minor tax adjustments which are going to take around about $1 of expenditure for every $7 of new expenditure that the Government is bringing in with this Budget there is not much more good news.I look from Labour to National and from National to Labour and then all the way back to National again and it gets very hard to see any difference. This is a Budget that is a tax and spend Budget it is a vote-buying Budget and it is a Budget that is designed to buy votes with other people's money. The transfers to Working for Families a policy once described by the National Party as communism by stealth"—well finance Minister Steve is wearing the hammer and sickle proudly on his sleeve today as this Government expands transfers from taxpayers to recipients of middle-class welfare.And what about the transfers that will take place from taxpayers to landlords in the form of the increased accommodation supplement? If you do not have a large—or even really any—increase in the number of properties being built in New Zealand and if you give more money to people to rent the same properties you know what is going to happen. Prices are going to go up and in this case rents are going to go up. It is an enormous transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to the holders of all-too-scarce rental property.Those are the criticisms of this Budget. It is a tax and spend Budget. It is a politically calculated Budget. It is the kind of Budget that we used to expect from Michael Cullen. The fact of the matter is that what this Government should have done is cut taxes and specifically it should have cut them by the $24 billion of forecast surplus that the Budget estimates tell us are coming down the line in the next 4 years. Rather than taking all of that money off hard-working New Zealanders and their businesses we should have given it back to them by allowing them to keep the money they earn in the first place through tax cuts.The ACT Party has shown how New Zealand could have a top income tax rate of 25c in the dollar without cutting any spending. In fact we would not only not cut spending; we would allow it to increase by $14 billion as forecast in the coming 4 years. We would deliver a top tax rate of 25c we would drop the bottom tax rate to 10c and we would drop the 17.5 percent rate to 15 percent. Three tax rates: 10 15 25. Nobody should pay more than a quarter of their income in taxes and that was completely possible in this Budget just by giving back the surplus that this Government will now keep for the next 4 years. Just remember that a Government surplus is a taxpayer deficit.But what about infrastructure? We have a huge problem in infrastructure because we cannot build enough homes and we cannot build enough homes because we do not have enough infrastructure to get to the sections and the land where people would like to build them. Well in ACT's Budget we would have given half the GST on construction to the council that consents it—a simply beautiful way of achieving the outcome of transferring an extra $1.2 billion in infrastructure spending all within the Budget figures that I have just presented. With a 25 percent top tax rate and money left to spare it would have given $1.2 billion to councils to build infrastructure so that people could build homes. It is so beautifully simple it is automatic and it would not require any photo opportunities. It would just transfer money to the councils which get on with consenting and building. That is what this Government should have done.The other thing it should have done was think about business because the fact of the matter is that there is nothing in this Budget for business at all—at all—unless you happen to be one of the few favoured businesses that provide enough photo opportunities to get grants from some of the honey pots this Government likes to keep largely for publicity purposes and that is a shame. ACT would have reduced the company tax rate to 25c and we would have done it by cutting the $1 billion of corporate welfare that this Government hands out in return for photo opportunities for Ministers each and every year.But there is something much bigger that is not in this Budget that should be and it is of great concern to New Zealanders under 40—that is the question of making superannuation sustainable. I now stand here as the only Millennial political party leader and as the only person in this House prepared to say that superannuation as it stands is not sustainable and that we need leadership rather than to be putting our heads in the sand on this issue. The Retirement Commissioner whom the taxpayer pays for and Treasury which the taxpayer pays for—in fact every time the Government pays for a report on the sustainability of superannuation these people tell us that we have to make adjustments and you have to wonder why the Government does not either take their advice or stop paying them to produce these reports. The fact of the matter is that there are currently four taxpayer-aged New Zealanders for every superannuitant and in 20 years' time there will be only two. That is not sustainable.The ACT Party in this Budget which has a 4-year time frame or forecast would have begun to raise the age of entitlement to New Zealand superannuation by 2 months a year in 2020 taking that age to 67 by 2032. That would be fair. That would mean that all generations would be involved in an adjustment that has to happen instead of what the current Government is saying to Millennials which is: "We acknowledge there's a problem. We're going to make an adjustment but we're not going to make it until 2037. That means we're going to tax your generation $58 billion to give superannuation at 65 and 66 and then we're going to pull the rug out just as you become eligible."This Budget is far better than anything the Opposition could possibly have put forward and yet it still carries so many imperfections so many long-term issues in housing and infrastructure funding. It lacks a commitment to the basic proviso on which the National Party was formed which is that people's property belongs primarily to them and the Government takes it only where necessary. That is what the $24 billion of excessive taxation—of surplus—is about. If this Government stayed true to its principles then what it would have done is taken that money taken those forecasts and let people keep it with a maximum tax rate of 25 percent.People might be interested in what that means to them in practical terms. If you want to find out how much money you could have saved under ACT's tax policy go to www.ACT.org.nz/tax punch in your numbers and find out just how much this Government's reluctance to stick up for the taxpayer has cost you. Thank you."