Cunliffe David: Customs and Excise (Budget Measures—Motor Spirits) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCunliffe David: Customs and Excise (Budget Measures—Motor Spirits) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10332. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn): I rise to oppose the Customs and Excise (Budget Measures—Motor Spirits) Amendment Bill recalling first off what itdoes to petrol prices. When the Labour-led Government left office the total petrol excise duty was 42.5c a litre. It has already gone up by one-fifth; it is 50.5c a litre. And this bill will put it up another 9c to 59.5c a litre raking another $7 billion over 10 years out of the pockets of middle and lower-income New Zealanders.That is not enough to fund the roads of no surplus because it has to be done in conjunction as we said in the first reading with a number of other measures that are required to contrive what has been repeatedly described as a wafer-thin surplus but which the Labour Opposition argues is actually a bogus surplus because you do not get there without having to simultaneously manipulate about $3 billion worth of revenue and spending measures. The Government is taking $200 million out of the 2014-15 operating allowance. It is refusing to give back $700 million worth of ACC levies against the advice of officials. It is magicking $400 million of tax credit offsets in one year only—the year that it needs to hit surplus. It is contriving a $1.1 billion increase in corporate tax receipts for that year only and a $1.1 billion increase in PAYE and employee tax as well. With all of those things this adds up to a Budget that really is not a surplus.I want to examine two other aspects of this today in this part of the debate the second reading. The first is what the impact is on the economy and on the Government’s other objectives of passing this measure and the other fiscal measures that it is part of. There is a thing in the economic jargon called a “fiscal impulse” and for the folks listening in at home that is what the net effect is if you like of all the things that the Government is doing here—all the taxes it takes out and the spending that it puts in. Is it putting your foot on the accelerator to make your car go faster or is it putting your foot on the brake to slow it down? If you put money in you make it go faster; if you take money out it slows the economy down.The highest application of the brakes the biggest negative fiscal impulse is in the magic year where it supposedly hits surplus and that is because the Government is having to hold back on spending and amp up the tax it is taking and stop giving stuff like ACC levies back in order to get to the wafer-thin magic line. The net effect of that is a minus 1.2 percent fiscal impulse. That means GDP growth is about 1 percent lower than it would be if that had been neutral—all right?So the Government is shrinking the size of the Budget shrinking the size of the State relative to the economy taking energy out of the economy. In so doing what happens? Our unemployment rate is staying up at 6 percent not the 5.2 percent it was forecast to fall to in last year’s Budget—that is more people by the decision of this Government are going to be out of jobs than need to be and indeed more people are going to be out of jobs than it said would be just a year ago. Those are real people real families who have lost hope who have lost self-esteem and who have lost income. Of course for other taxpayers that means they are having to pay for those families to live through the unemployment benefit when they do not need to be. That is the aggregate effect of a 1.2 percent slow-down in GDP growth as a result of the Government trying all these tricks to get to a surplus that does not really exist. We agree with the idea of getting to surplus. We would do it too but we would do it in a much more genuine way without these negative side effects on the economy.The third thing that I want to reflect on today given the enormous amount of money that we are watching the Government clawing out of the pockets of ordinary Kiwis through this bill—$7 billion over 10 years—is to ask that age-old question about fiscal and revenue policy: who gets what and who pays what? Because at the end of the day politics and the arguments around this Chamber are very much about who is getting and who is paying. What New Zealanders are now crystal clear about is that who is getting under this Government is the top few percent and who is paying is everybody else.If we needed to refresh our minds with a little bit of history back to 2010 we look at the famous tax switch where the Government put up GST 2.5 percent for everybody and then gave the top tax rate a massive tax cut. What was the effect of that? It was to raise $14.3 billion in tax out of everybody else. Average income earners got $12 a week; someone on John Key’s salary got $243 a week—Joe Average: $12; John Key: $243. The upper income tax cuts were not neutral. The Government would not have to do all this smoke and mirrors and raise your petrol tax if it had kept the promise to make this tax neutral. In giving more to the rich and taking it off the poor the Government was under by $1 billion over 4 years. It was $1 billion short according to its own Treasury documents.It does not stop there. This debate gives us an opportunity to run through the list just to call to mind all the other sneaky little taxes that National has been up to. We caught it out twice in the last few months: the car-park tax which it has rolled back off and the famous iPad tax—the famous iPad tax. You know the Government thinks it is good enough to charge ordinary workers office workers fringe benefit tax for the private use of their work iPad or computer. You are supposed to go through and work out how much of your use of your computer is private and then pay the fringe benefit tax on that. What a ridiculous idea. The Government however did not have the courage to take on the guys who make the iPads like Apple and the other big IT companies and make them pay a fair share of cross-border tax. They can just shift their costs and they pay almost no tax at all.The Government has forced people to pay 20 percent higher early childhood education costs a 31 percent average increase in school donations and 22.5 percent higher tertiary and post-school fees. Student loan repayment rates have gone up and ACC charges have gone up—get this—67 percent on the work account 23 percent on the earners account and 31 percent on the motor vehicle account. Workers’ ACC costs have gone up 67 percent in the life of this Government. Officials told the Government it was going to be charging $1 billion too much in 2014-15. You know what? It said: “Forget it—we’re not giving it back because we won’t hit surplus.” I call that being unfair and not straight up with New Zealanders.What about KiwiSaver? The Government has put up the compulsory payment on KiwiSaver and reduced the tax credits. Prescriptions charges—just lots of nasty little things—have gone up from $3 to $5. Fuel excise has already gone up one-fifth or 20 percent under this Government and it is going to put it up another 9c a litre through this bill. Tobacco charges have gone up. Road user charges have gone up. Local government rates have gone up. Alcohol excise has gone up. Aviation fees have gone up. Company filing fees have gone up.The point is that this is a Government that came in and gave massive tax cuts to the top 1 or 2 percent and then it has spent the last 5 years getting everybody else to pay for them. This is not good enough. This is not what New Zealanders want to see. This is not the New Zealand that we grew up to believe we had a right to live in. We thought we were going to grow up in a country where everybody got a fair shake of the sav—where the kid of a doctor and the kid of a driver could aspire to the same success in life; where it did not matter what the size of your parents’ wallet was or what your skin colour was or what your gender or your orientation was everybody got a shot.That is not National’s vision of New Zealand and this bill is yet another bill like all the other rubbish we have seen come through on this Budget where you New Zealanders are paying too much and the rich are getting away with too little. We need a vision we need a positive future we need everybody to have a stake in this country—to be proud of being New Zealanders again. We want a bit of positive national identityand we are not getting it from this Government which is disappointing overtaxing and dismally failing New Zealanders.