Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. I'm very pleased to stand up and support this bill the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2022-23 Platform Economy and Remedial Matters) Bill (No 2) and I'll start my contribution by talking about the portion of this bill that directly relates to my member's bill which is currently in the ballot the Income Tax (Clean Transport FBT Exclusions) Amendment Bill which was about evening the playing field when it comes to employer incentives for travel to and from work.Long before I came to this House as a member of Parliament I worked as a transportation planner and my very first job was at engineering consulting services firm SKM now Jacobs. One of my jobs when I was still doing my Master's was project manager for the internal environmental management systems plan which included the travel plan. For many people watching this at home if they are employed by a large organisation like a district health board or a hospital a university a private company like Spark they will have travel plans for their staff. The point of that travel plan is to provide incentives support and encouragement for people to travel to work in more sustainable ways. This can help the organisation but it also helps the community around the city because it helps reduce peak-hour congestion in the morning but it also helps us with respect to our environment and our climate.One of the biggest barriers to employers providing incentives for sustainable transport like public transport was the fringe benefit tax (FBT)—the fact that they'd have to pay fringe benefit tax on public transport passes. So what this bill will do is remove that. So all it's really doing is a relatively small thing but a very smart thing; it is removing the barriers for employers in providing public transport passes. The more people who take public transport the better off we all are. Unfortunately there are many ways in which single-occupant car use especially at peak time is unintentionally subsidised by the current set-up and that's one of the biggest drivers of congestion.As Dr Deborah Russell alluded to in her contribution back in 2012 there was a proposal by the Minister of Revenue Peter Dunne and the National-led Government to finally address this big subsidy which was the tax-exempt status of employer-provided car parks which is unfair for many reasons but especially counter-productive because it provides a subsidy to people commuting by car at peak time which directly undermines the goals of many cities to reduce congestion in the morning. Unfortunately—I remember very clearly that I was on the Finance and Expenditure Committee for that bill—the IRD officials at the time weren't even looking at the transport benefits even though the New Zealand Transport Agency had published a research report talking about how changing fringe benefit tax settings could help achieve better outcomes for our transport system. IRD was looking at it purely from a revenue point of view.And what was really notable and this is also related to another part of this bill is that when we were at the select committee—so the bill had already been introduced had been through its first reading the National Party had supported this at its first reading—the big end of town got together with the Employers & Manufacturers Association (Northern) and launched this big campaign against the car park tax". Unfortunately—I know there were some of my colleagues in the Labour Party who agreed this was a sensible thing and were going to support it—the Labour spokesperson for revenue at the time was David Cunliffe and he saw a populist opportunity to jump in there and attack the Government over the car park tax which was unfortunate I thought.It just shows how vested interests who want to maintain the status quo who are only thinking about their sort of narrow selfish interests can be very organised and mount a successful campaign against making the tax system fairer and making sure it works for our communities and our environment. This is one of the things that the Green Party will continue to call out and we hope to change because ordinary New Zealanders would have been better off by this change to bring employer-provided car parks into the FBT regime 10 years ago. We would have had huge benefits over those 10 years. And of course the value of an employer-provided car park is about the same as an annual public transport pass in most cities. So we missed out on benefits for 10 years because of quite frankly a misleading campaign which claimed some massive cost. It actually massively overestimated the number of car parks in Auckland city centre but it was very effective.And we saw a very similar rapid campaign mounted against the original version of this bill as it was introduced to try to tidy up GST with relation to financial services related to KiwiSaver. I think if anyone watching at home wants to read a really enlightening article about that there is an article by Tom Pullar-Strecker from Stuff which talks about how really the numbers used in that very brief and effective campaign against that change were really overestimating the cost to KiwiSaver. Really this is just about some financial services being treated equally with respect to GST as other providers of services in New Zealand. Interestingly if you're going to count the compound impact on KiwiSaver you also have to count the compound benefit for the Government of having that additional revenue and having it compound and offset borrowing costs of that time. Actually all of New Zealand would have been better off and is better off from a fairer approach to raising revenue.Here I have to speak to the Opposition National MPs' very classic speeches on this bill where they along with the vested interests who benefit from the status quo attempt a framing of the debate that is quite misleading that demonises any change to our tax system when in fact there are huge benefits to all New Zealanders of a fairer tax system. We do raise revenue to purchase things together because it's more efficient and it's better for all of us if we purchase these things together like healthcare public health; like education our schools; like our infrastructure. Those are things that we're all better off by purchasing together than leaving it up to individuals. The National Party and of course the ACT Party engage in a kind of framing that comes from the 1980s that demonises tax and it's really misleading. It's a kind of divide-and-conquer approach because what they say to ordinary middle-class New Zealanders who aren't earning high incomes is "The Government is going to tax you." when in truth the proposals the National Party puts forward are all about helping those who already have money and property get even richer at the expense of everyone else basically. That's the truth of it.You can see that really clearly. If we look at the Australian tax code—Matt Doocey: How's equality under your Government?Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: I mean I do think it's fair to say that those New Zealanders who are on lower incomes who work multiple jobs are overtaxed relative to the very wealthy people who earn higher incomes and particularly those who earn their incomes from property and assets who just sit back and let their property inflate in value and benefit from that.If we look at something like our neighbours in Australia and their tax code they don't have any tax up to A$18000 a year and then their marginal tax rate is higher. So if you earn A$120000 you pay 37c on the dollar for every dollar over that and if you earn over A$180000 you pay 45c on the dollar for every dollar over A$180000. And Australia has a capital gains tax. I mean it's not as ambitious as it could be but they do have a capital gains tax. So when we look at countries we aspire to be more like they have more progressive tax systems the wealthier pay more the property owners don't get away with it scot-free. They actually make contributions on their capital gains and by doing so the country can invest in those core public services that make sure that everybody actually has an equal go. I mean we're nowhere near that of course but we can aspire to be more like that.So the Green Party will be supporting this bill. We're happy to see the removal of fringe benefit tax on employer-provided public transport passes. We would like to see other changes to fringe benefit tax to incentivise other types of sustainable commutes like e-bikes bikes maybe even a reduction for electric vehicles or zero-emissions vehicles and we would like to see the loophole really closed and enforcement finally come in on the exemption around double-cab utes which is clearly being exploited and leading to a real proliferation of large double-cab utes when they aren't really needed for work purposes simply as a means of tax avoidance which has unintended negative consequences for our transport system."