Genter Julie Anne; Borrows ChesterJULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): As my colleague Barry Coates said the Green Party is supporting this bill. It is fairly non-controversial but it will be really important to keep an eye on the impact of these changes because it is really important that we are constantly monitoring and updating our tax law to ensure that it is achieving the outcomes that we want as a society. Broadly speaking Part 1 of this bill which is about the annual rates for 2016-17—it is about the income tax rate; it sets the income tax rates—the Green Party really does not agree with. The reality is that under this National Government our tax system has become more regressive. That is it is less fair. It asks that those people on lower incomes make a disproportionate sacrifice and those people on very high incomes do not contribute enough to what we need in this society.It is an unfair system and I think most New Zealanders want to live in a society that is fair: where we do have access to the critical Government services that we need in order to survive and where we do not have families struggling to make ends meet. But 300000 children are growing up in poverty and do not have access to the food that they need to learn well at school or have to live in homes that are cold damp and mouldy and make them sick—and we have an increasing rate of homelessness across the country. And as long as we have this National Government which is entirely focused on keeping tax rates low for those who have plenty and on reducing Government services as a consequence of that and saying we cannot afford the things that really matter to us then we are not going to turn this around. Things are slowly but surely going to get worse unless there is a change of Government.From a big-picture point of view I think it is very simple. We are posed often with this kind of trade-off saying: Oh well you'd like to have health services you'd like to have greater access to primary care but who's going to pay for it? We can't really afford it." That is just not true. That framing of the problem is not true. We decide together what is important to us as a society. We figure out what policies and services and infrastructure are needed to make that happen and then we figure out a fair way to raise the revenue to pay for that.There are many opportunities because New Zealand probably has one of the more regressive tax systems in the OECD and that is one of the reasons our country is not rising in terms of incomes. We stay in the middle of the OECD countries. Despite the fact that our GDP growth is supposedly at record highs people are still struggling. We are not seeing an increase in incomes for people at the bottom. That is something we can change if we have a fair tax system and we actually invest in the things that matter to people like healthcare education and housing—and of course protecting our environment because we cannot afford not to.Probably the biggest lacuna in this National Government's approach to taxes has been its failure to implement a comprehensive capital gains tax and that is in a large part why we have the worst house price inflation of any OECD country right now. That makes it more difficult for the average Kiwi to afford a place to live particularly in Auckland but it also means that we have not raised the revenue that we need to invest in the infrastructure that is necessary for our cities to function and for people to get around. If we had had a capital gains tax undoubtedly we would still be seeing house prices rise because the Government is not building enough houses and we still have a lot of foreign capital coming in—just as many other countries around the world are experiencing—which is disproportionately going into real estate and leading to housing bubbles. Of course we have got absolutely shocking protection for renters—virtually no protection for renters. If the Government simply did those four things then we might actually solve some of our problems: implement a capital gains tax which is only fair as the people who happened to buy a property 10 years ago and are going to make a huge amount of income off the sale of that investment property should pay tax on it just like teachers plumbers and everyone else who pays tax on their income and it is only fair that you pay tax on the income that you receive as a result of buying a property at a particular time and selling it at a later time; protect renters; build more houses; and ban non-resident buyers.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Peeni Henare—a 5-minute call for Labour."