Brownlee GerryHon GERRY BROWNLEE (National): I think several words should be in the title of this bill; one is facilitation" except that we haven't really been told what the bill actually facilitates and how it's to do that apart from relatively vague comments made by the Minister earlier in the committee stage. The other would be by way of some sort of explanation for exactly what is supposed to happen and why it is that—the words I'd put in there would be "The Bill that Announced What's to be Announced" because that clearly also is part of what's likely to happen in the family tax credit situation.One of the things that's come about in the last few hours is that we've heard people on the other side of the Chamber say—I heard Greg O'Connor say "Well look $20 a week. It's not to be sneezed at when these people need it." Well no one is doing that but guess what Mr O'Connor. There is no $20 a week in this for anyone—not anywhere. It's less than half that in fact for most people. And when you look at just the rise in rent the average weekly rental rising even in this city about $150 in the last week—$150 per week—and you know that a lot of the people who are in receipt of this particular assistance will be in rented property then you know that this is nowhere near a catch-up. It is just an announcement for something to be announced something to make people feel good about where things are going.The speaker from the ACT Party spoke about the dangers of excessive expenditure when it comes to the so-called fiscal stimulus. Well no one really would argue at all against some of the assistance that's been out there over a period of time. No one argues about that. But what is interesting is that if you look at the Statistics New Zealand information about the September quarter—and we heard the Government talking about it today; the economy's going well apparently. It grew by some $17 billion in GDP in the year to the September quarter. Well that's great. How would you get that sort of growth when we've got this COVID thing that we're trying to deal with and much compromise in the way business activity happens so much overtime lost by people in their jobs so much earning capacity for people in their jobs stripped away? This is surely a good result.But then you look at the borrowing for the Government and find that in the same period they borrowed an extra $43 billion taking the total Government debt somewhere close to $100 billion.Andrew Bayly: $120 billion.Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: So then you'd say—well a $120 billion my colleague corrects me—a huge amount. But in that quarter alone there is a question "Where's that $26 billion gone—between the GDP growth and the borrowing where's it gone?" Michael Wood over there can't answer. I don't think the Minister's going to answer. There's no chance any of the backbench will answer. Where it's gone is it's frittered off on all sorts of other things that the Government sees as sort of important projects all over the place.Now we're bound to get a list of all sorts of infrastructure etc. etc. but most of the infrastructure they talk about is just announced; it's not even under way. We've seen the disaster around the expenditure for the Let's Get Wellington Moving sort of approach today. Well that's classic isn't it. It actually achieved nothing moved nothing but spent millions of dollars talking about moving things. That's along with the whole concept of announce an announcement so that when you get the announcement you can announce what the next announcement is going to be about. No real activity. So this bill should be called the "Taxation (COVID-19 Facilitation and Support Payments) Bill Once Everyone Knows What the Mickey Mouse Red Amber and Green System Means and the Announcement about Working for Families Tax Credits to Come at a Future Time Bill." That would be a fair description of what the bill does. It doesn't actually tell us though what's in the bill. Nor was the Minister able to tell us that today when he was taking various calls.So yes we accept that it facilitates some business support for businesses who are struck down or impeded or otherwise and other individuals it would seem in the same category when it comes to the effects of COVID-19. But no parallel between the current alert system which has four categories to it and the new system that has three categories to it. So when will that information be available to the public? Because only at that time will people have the confidence to truly open up their doors get on with the thing that they're good at and start trying to recoup some of the extraordinary investment that they've made in keeping jobs open for so many New Zealanders."