Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Mr Chair for an opportunity to speak on this bill. Normally in the normal course of events the Opposition would support these annual tax rates bills. We've usually got a large number of little technical tax matters that need to be dealt with across the House. But these are not normal times sadly because we won't be supporting this bill because the main thing it does is it sets the tax rates for this year and they are not the tax rates that New Zealand would have had if the National Government had been re-elected and the adjustments of the thresholds had been made. So as we had legislated the income tax thresholds would have changed so that the average New Zealander would have paid about $1000 a year less tax. So instead of only the first $14000 of income attracting 10 percent tax rate we would have extended it to $22000. So for the entire first $22000 that anybody earned they'd be paying a tax rate of only 10 percent. Then we extended the next rate up as far as $52000 so for that next $30000 you earned from $22000 to $52000 you're only paying 17.5 percent. That's good low taxes adjusting for inflation and we haven't seen that because of this bill. The first thing that this Labour - New Zealand First - Greens coalition Government did—or the New Zealand First and Labour coalition Government with the support of the Greens—was cancel those tax cuts and stick with these meaner adjustments that they have put in at the moment. Why did they do that? Well the first reason was they said that the last thing they wanted was for rich New Zealanders or wealthy New Zealand families to get a tax cut. Funnily enough the second thing they did was give those very same wealthy New Zealand families $6000 worth of free university education which seemed to me to be somewhat contradictory in stance. I suppose that is the key issue here: that we are not getting the tax cut because this Government has not got in control of its spending. It keeps spending—wants to spend more and more on very poor quality spending decisions. So we've got the free fees at the university which has led to no more students going to university. So you've paid an extra $2.6 billion or whatever it is to buy something that you're already getting—which are students going to university. In the meantime all that money going into student support is not going into the quality of institutions and our universities are falling down the international rankings accordingly. So we'll all have free access to third-rate universities if we're not careful. And so those sorts of poor decisions are what are driving this tax bill that we're talking about here. Of course the other area of loose spending is presided over by my colleague on the other side of the Chamber Shane Jones and the Provincial Growth Fund—the $3 billion that they are flinging around the countryside in a rush to get it all out the door before the next election. In terms of quality of spending what we've seen is that it's turned into the second sort of cut if you missed out on the Budget. What I'm focused on here is the quality of spending which is driving the desire for more tax which has driven the fundamental decision of this bill which is to deprive New Zealanders of the tax cut that they were going to be getting and to repeal those tax cuts and put in these—CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! If the member can concern himself with the tax rates—the annual rates—rather than what it's being spent on. That will come up in later parts of the bill—unless you relate what you're saying to the annual rates in Part 1.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Thank you Mr Chair. The only point I'd make is that you only need to have these rates brought in because of decisions made by this Government. So I'm just explaining the existence of these rates that we are debating at the moment. These rates wouldn't be as they were if it weren't for the fact that this Government has got a very poor control of its spending and that has led to the decisions that we have confronted in this bill which is why our hearts are broken that we can't support this bill that in many other respects is doing worthy things and the Minister can no doubt point at a number of little issues around the role of tax intermediaries and everything else in this bill which will make a slight difference to make the lives of taxpayers easier.But we can't support it because at its core it's more proof of the rapacious nature of this Government in terms of collecting tax. So on that basis we do not support this bill and we're very much looking forward to hearing from the Minister as to how he justifies not adjusting for inflation in the tax rates that we are debating here today. Thank you.