White HelenHELEN WHITE (Labour) (remote): Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise to take a call in support of this bill having been on the Finance and Expenditure Committee and I'd first like to thank the advisers for the help they gave particularly Therese Turner who was extremely informative and robust about what she said about this bill and helped us all.I wanted to talk first about what Michael Woodhouse has just talked about which is the issue about first-home buyers because you would have thought that he was on the side of those buyers. Actually the levers that have been pulled in this legislation are going to make a big difference to first-home buyers. When I first bought a house a lot of my friends were investing in houses and they were doing it because they went to seminars where they were told a couple of things. They were told You won't have any of the money that you gain on these houses taxed. No profit will be taxed." And they were also told "And there's this clever thing you can do: you can get the interest back on your mortgage. So mortgage yourself to the hilt and then when you've got one property and that actually goes up in value buy another and another and another." I have friends in that category who have made a fortune out of housing and those houses have not been particularly warm and dry. Let's face it. They have been rented out to people as the law has allowed and so there have been a lot of people lose out in that situation. Actually one of the groups that's really missed out until now are first-home buyers because they compete with that group of people.The National Party and the ACT Party can talk about mum and dad investors all they like but actually the majority of that problem is the actual psychology of investing in housing without thinking of it as being a home. So what this law does—its change in the amount on the brightline test for 10 years and the interest deductibility changes which are phased in—is it puts people on notice that as Anna Lorck said you need to buy new. If you want to be an investor in housing by all means. If that's where you've got your skill base by all means. But do it right. Do it right by your society and actually invest in new builds so that you're doing something productive.You know Elizabeth Warren who ran for candidacy in the Democratic Party in America talked about this as one of our major issues in modern society: that everyone is investing in houses and all the money gets caught up in houses when it could be going in some other things. It could be going into productive aspects of our society. I think we need to start to think about homes not houses and that's a very important change in our society.Now people do need homes in this country because of years and years and decades of neglect and what Labour is doing with regard to that is it's actually building the infrastructure which makes it possible for all those new builds to be built. So if you're thinking about switching into new builds then you'll find that the Government's helped you out because it's built a lot of the infrastructure without it being burdened on councils and it's actually made it possible for those to take place.I wanted to talk for a minute about one of the things that David Bennett said because David Bennett talked about how there was a double-dip here: that you had to pay interest on the rent but you also had to pay the tax that was now going to be due on the mortgage. I think it's worth reminding David Bennett that there was a paper in 2020 that was published in Stuff and it said that 37 percent of those investors were maximising the losses in their places of rental so that they didn't pay any tax at all. That mentality is not great; it's actually a problem and we need to actually look at ourselves and think "Is that a fair society?"So finally I want to come to the main part of this bill which is actually about the tax rates coming up. The tax rates are going to 39 percent for people over $180000 and it's graduated. So it's only on money above that. It's not a lot to pay for a society and as Duncan Webb put it it means for Chloe who was the caregiver under the proposed counter-proposal—that she'd be paying $112 because she had that much in a tax rate change. Whereas actually Mr Luxon would get something like $7500 even with his current job—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Can I invite the member to come back to the bill. This is a second reading. Thank you.HELEN WHITE: So the actual issue here is: who should be paying that tax? Actually I absolutely reject the statements of the ACT leader which suggest that hard work is somehow linked to your income so strongly. The people that I've noticed working really hard who need the tax system to work for them are actually those people like Chloe. They are our health workers. They are our nurses. They are our bus drivers. They are our essential workers in supermarkets. Those are the people we need to put first; not people on $180000 a year. Those people are doing OK. They are actually doing fine.So we need to focus on people who are actually facing a serious challenge to their ability to make ends meet and this bill does that and I'm proud of it for doing it. I am pleased to be the final speaker in this bill because I get to say these things at the end of what actually has been—some of it—quite frankly claptrap. I commend this bill to the House."