Bayly AndrewANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): Thank you Mr Chair. I thought I'd take the opportunity to respond because that was a welcome opportunity for the Minister as to where we might find the money to pay or allow lower-paid people to keep more money in their pocket. I think that's a great suggestion. I just want to correct the Minister because he inferred that people that earn more than $70000 were going to get a whole lot of money and get welcome breaks. As the Minister if he looks at my Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 250 the top two tax rates in fact all the four tax rates stay the same; it's just the threshold at which they change. But the last one: anyone over $70000 under the current Labour Government arrangements will still have to pay tax at 33 percent. Under my SOP 250 using our National Party tax rate anyone over $70000 will still have to pay 33 percent.So this is not about helping the rich. This is about helping at the lower thresholds those people who don't earn much money in New Zealand and that's what it's about. If you talk about fairness and equity Minister that is exactly what tax should do. That means don't rip the money out of the pockets of taxpayers especially when they can't afford it and then try and hand it back through increasing the minimum wages all those other accommodation supplements and all that sort of stuff. What you're actually better to do is leave that in their pockets from the start. That means they have more money to spend on the first day—they don't have to go through a mincing machine which might go through some of the ministries to be able to reimburse them for that money. But that is what it's about.Where do you find four billion bucks? Well as Mr Carter very succinctly described it is the Shane Jones slush fund that most people I think are now getting a bead on and seeing how unproductive and wasteful that expenditure is. If that was driving economic growth and that means sustainable economic growth with new jobs and investment in businesses that are going to employ a lot of people we'd all say that's a great outcome. But unfortunately what we've seen is just a whole lot of disparate announcements money thrown at things very little job creation and probably just going to get blown and unfortunately not create the sustainable businesses that we want. So there's $3 billion. We've got a billion that was given to the Deputy Prime Minister for carpets and curtains in Sweden ambassadorships and things like that. Then we just had another billion dollars into rail. So there's $5 billion.We like the idea of spending on social policies. We like to see nurses and people employed and paid reasonably; all that sort of stuff. That's not the cost. This is about more efficient spending. As my colleague just said this issue is around tax spend and borrow so as he quite rightly pointed out the tax revenue of this Government under current settings with no further taxes will go from roughly $72 billion or $73 billion to just under $100 billion in the next four years. Even in the last 19 months this Government has imposed new taxes six of them worth a current value of about $2.6 billion already although I may be slightly out with my numbers with their recent tax changes rushed through at their Budget and under urgency of course.But the other thing I think Mr Carter didn't refer to is the borrowing. So whilst this Government is going to rake in basically another $18 billion of tax over the next four years at the same time the same projections that Mr Carter is looking at the debt of this country is going to increase by a further $10 billion. So that's effectively $28 billion of additional tax and debt that has been taken off New Zealanders and posed as a liability on New Zealanders; that is not a good thing. That is why this SOP 250 is an appropriate thing.This is about looking after the most vulnerable New Zealanders. I think that it's time for the Government to actually recognise that at some point this fiscal creep which they call fiscal creep is where people increase through into the next upper bracket of tax payment simply through inflation—is a pernicious thing. It's one of course of the big issues that we've announced as a policy already which is to make sure they're inflation linked and this SOP 250 is a way of dealing with that pernicious outcome where people are getting forced into the top taxpaying route.