Uffindell SamSAM UFFINDELL (National—Tauranga): Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise to oppose the annual rates taxation bill because I think this is a real missed opportunity. Now we think Labour—on this side of the House we can see that this Government is addicted to spending. My colleague Nicola Willis pointed out quite rightly that under this Government tax revenue has leapt up $43 billion in five years and that is a staggering amount of money. To put it in a scale that we could probably better understand that is $17500 per household—a considerable amount of money and we do this at a time when we're in a cost of living crisis.On this side of the House we believe that New Zealanders should keep more of their hard-earned money because they are under intense pressure and there was a real opportunity here to help address that. We've been saying that Kiwis deserve to keep more of their money and this bill ignores the impact of inflation. What could've been done is what National has been proposing to adjust income tax brackets. Now that might not put a huge amount of money back in your pocket but it is going to make a difference. So for your average household out there you've got mum and dad or both parents or both people working earning $120k a year. They would receive under National's income adjustment tax brackets $1700 more a year. If you add that on to our childcare policy that came out on Saturday—an excellent policy I might say—that would or could deliver up to $3900 a year and that would give households $5600 more a year which is enormous when you consider that under this Government they are being taxed $17500 more per household.We have a Government over the other side of the House that is addicted to spending and they've tried to sneak in an app tax" here. They tried to put in a tax on your KiwiSaver and I'm glad thankful that that has been walked back—somewhat humiliatingly walked back but walking it back was the right solution. We had ute taxes we had petrol taxes—the Auckland regional fuel tax is still in effect—taxes on your wages and now they're coming after your Ubers. I heard the comments from the member who spoke before me Ingrid Leary—we know what this is going to do and the advice given to the Minister is that this is going to be passed on to the consumer. We are already in a significantly inflationary environment and this is only going to add further fuel to the fire. You know this—you know this. I know you know this because your own officials have told you this.We want to do things to make it a little bit easier for struggling Kiwis to meet the rapidly rising cost of living but this is a further tax grab by the Government and they've got more lined up as well—we know they do. We know the "jobs tax" has been parked but if we are all unfortunate enough for you to win the next election then it will be coming straight back in. We know it'll be coming in hard.We've got interest deductibility taxes—that didn't help anyone. What'd that do? The same thing the officials told you it would do: it pushed up rents. That had a significant impact on people and it's probably one of the reasons why we have a significant increase in homelessness under your Government.Now let's look at equity because we've heard it mentioned. We want this to be an equitable system and we already have an arrangement in place where if you earn over $60000 as a provider of goods or services you will pay GST. Now what this "app tax" does is it completely circumnavigates it and it applies it as my colleague Nicola Willis said earlier to anyone no matter what they earn in that space. The New Zealand Law Society described these changes as representing "a significant deviation to the orthodox GST treatment of services supplied in New Zealand." So if you want to talk about equity then we can do that but this isn't an equitable tax. This bill is a missed opportunity and we could so much better. I oppose this bill."