Willis NicolaNICOLA WILLIS (National): The purpose of this bill is to ensure that people are still better off in work earning a tax credit than they would be on a benefit and that is why a lot of this debate has focused on housing policy because you're not better off in work if your rent keeps going up again and again week after week year after year under a Labour Government. And that's what's been happening. Rents have on average gone up $100 a week under Labour and that is a lot more than wages have increased. But don't worry because David Parker has entered the debate to share some news with New Zealanders. His news is this: housing policy is now working! So good on David Parker! That's the news he has for every first-home buyer in this country who is being asked to pay more for a house than in any other country in the Western World.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Come back to the bill—the member will come back to the bill.NICOLA WILLIS: And this applies to the families earning the tax credit who we're speaking about in this bill who will be having to face increased housing costs into the future. But I do want to just reply to a couple of the comments that Mr Parker made in relation to this bill in his contribution in the second reading because what he said was that actually the reason it's all going to be fine is that the Treasury have predicted that house prices while they've increased 17 percent in the past year under his Government will only increase 0.9 percent in the next year. Now suddenly David Parker has come to the mountain of the Treasury and said I worship at you O Treasury. If you say it it must be true." And this is of course in quite stark contrast to where his colleague the Hon Phil Twyford has been on this because when Treasury warned Phil Twyford "Mate you're not going to be able to build 100000 KiwiBuild homes. It's not happening." at that point what he said was "Well those are just silly kids at Treasury. They don't know what they're talking about." And of course we have 871 KiwiBuild homes. But the next part of Mr Parker's analysis that I just think we need to look at apart from his undying completely yielding adherence to everything that the Treasury says is this idea that the housing policy is working because actually we're building more houses now. Well I would remind Mr Parker that in 1973 we were building 13 houses per 1000 people of our population and today we've managed to get it to about eight. So we are not building houses as fast as we have in the past as a country and it is completely false to claim that. But the point of this bill is actually about making sure that work pays. And this is a very small step towards that. It deals with the threshold at which a family is eligible for a tax credit. And what we've been arguing on this side of the House is yep you've got to do those things because otherwise you create a truly socialist economy where people are better off on benefits than they are in work—and I think from the tone of some of the contributions coming from the other side that that is actually the utopian vision that some Labour members have as they ascribe their socialism and pin it to the wall. But we on this side of the House think that this should be a country of aspiration of reward for achievement; a place where kids grow up knowing that if you get up in the morning and you go to work and you work hard then there is a path to prosperity for you. The only way that we create that path to prosperity for every single child growing up in this country is if we create a productive economy with jobs industries businesses competing against the best in the world because only when this country is earning its way in the world and has businesses that can actually afford to hire more people and pay them more will we truly give children a pathway of aspiration. And that is why on this side of the House we beg of the members opposite: you have to do more than think of clever ways to divide the pie. This Budget lacks any focus on a path to prosperity a growth vision for the New Zealand economy. It is not enough for a finance Minister to look in the rear-view mirror and say "I remember something that upset people 30 years ago." Well we all remember that but what we want to know is your vision for 30 years in the future. Where will this country be when my five-year-old is 35? Because I want her to see a country where if she works hard she'll get ahead. I want that for every single child. Every beneficiary's child every working parent's child needs to be growing up in a country where if they work hard there's a high-paying job for them. It needs to be much more than just putting a little bit more in the benefit."