Clark David: Taxation (Transformation: First Phase Simplification and Other Measures) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClark David: Taxation (Transformation: First Phase Simplification and Other Measures) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 24 May 2016. Volume:714;Page:11160. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): I wish to disagree with the previous speaker a little. I think he may be understating the potential of this problem. The Inland Revenue Department may in fact be trying to cut off at the pass a serious concern about minors wanting to withdraw from the scheme. I was not on the Finance and Expenditure Committee so I will defer to those who have wider knowledge but my concern arises from the fact that in the last Budget the Government cut the KiwiSaver kick-start.The terms of the KiwiSaver scheme have changed. In Dunedin my home town I know that as a result of those changes 14000—14000—young New Zealanders probably first-time savers the majority of them will have missed out on that kick-start payment. If someone signed them up and they thought they were going to get that they may well have felt aggrieved and may wish to remove themselves from the scheme.Rt Hon Winston Peters: How many thousand?Dr DAVID CLARK: 14000.Rt Hon Winston Peters: That’s unbelievable.Dr DAVID CLARK: It is unbelievable.Rt Hon Winston Peters: Doesn’t he come from Dunedin?Dr DAVID CLARK: It is shocking—and the Minister comes from Dunedin. There are 14000 people missing out on that $1000 KiwiSaver kick-start as a result of the last Budget. It is indeed an outrage.So I think it is entirely possible that young people who have been signed up to a scheme where they thought they were going to get a savings boost from the Government will find out later that the Government has taken it from them in the previous Budget as is its wont at the moment. And goodness knows what we will find out later this week as it plays to the mega-wealthy. I mean we have seen what the Government is doing with the Panama Papers and so on. We will see what it does with the Budget this week but I am betting that middle New Zealand will be cut out of the picture once more by this Government which is increasingly arrogant Mr Bishop and out of touch. Mr Bishop knows it: he laughs he laughs and he laughs. He takes this lightly but I genuinely think that New Zealanders will be disappointed—those people in the middle who are struggling to get by—and I think some of those young people who might have discovered that they have been enrolled in this scheme would quite rightly be aggrieved and may wish to withdraw.I politely put it to my colleague that this might be an issue and that in fact it might be in the interests of Minister Woodhouse to play it down because it is his Government that has robbed middle New Zealand and is making it tougher and tougher for them so that it can look after its mates who are the ultra-wealthy. It is this Government that is screwing the scrum in favour of those who have privilege already.It is my concern that this clause may in fact be there for the right reasons. I would seek the Minister’s assurance that that is the case when he delivers his short address on why the existing system will be able to deliver all the changes in this bill because he promised me that when he interjected before. I am looking forward to that speech. I hope it is not the Minister just pushing this out into the never-never as though his Government is above explaining itself because that is becoming a pattern that New Zealanders are becoming increasingly concerned about: a Government that makes changes and says: “Well to hell with the rest of you. We’re going to make the changes we want because we do not want to engage with the public any more. We’re just going to make the changes that we want to do.”I come back to the point that is around clause 213 in the bill where those deductions can be looked at and people can withdraw from the scheme.