Clark DavidDr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): I have 5 minutes so I have no choice but to make it brief. I think one of the most important things happening in this bill is the obvious bit that is right up front: the annual rates. We are confirming the annual tax rates for New Zealand. That is an important process that this Parliament does every year—as annual" suggests—but then a notable thing this time around is that we are in March and these tax rates are due to expire in June. I suspect that by the time this bill gets through the House it will be April. It may even be an April Fool's joke that we are experiencing as it goes through. It is a bad joke to have the tax rates confirmed this late in the piece. It is shoddy—9 months down the track the tax year is nearly gone and it is chaotic. It shows that this Government really is kind of all over the place when it comes to what goes on in this House but we also see it in the policy setting.If we cast our minds back to when these tax rates were first introduced to New Zealand in 2010 we remember that they involved a switch around of the tax system where over 40 percent of the benefits of the tax cuts that were given went to the wealthiest 10 percent of New Zealanders. The bottom 20 percent in that 2010 tax package got just 2 percent of the value of those tax cuts in 2010. And—and—the Prime Minister of the day introduced a great big GST increase that swallowed up all of the benefit for those lower income earners who thought they were getting a tax cut in that 2010 package. That in itself broke a promise that the Prime Minister had made: he said he would not increase GST but he did. So there was some level of deception—I suppose that is the kind way of putting it—in that particular tax package. That is the tax package that is carried through to today.The point I would want to make around that is that this Government has borrowed to fund that tax package that gave the very wealthiest New Zealanders—those in the top 10 percent—over 40 percent of the value of that tax package. This is a Government that has borrowed and borrowed and borrowed and borrowed to fund tax cuts for the very wealthiest New Zealanders and I think that that gives us all here pause for thought. That shows the priorities of this Government. It has debt now of $80 billion. This is the biggest borrowing Government in New Zealand history standing opposite us here in this Parliament. This National Government has borrowed more than Muldoon's Government borrowed—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Back to the bill.Dr DAVID CLARK: —and it has done that to fund those tax cuts that were put through in 2010—and we are affirming those rates here today in the bill that I have in my hand here. Part 1 says on page 21 of the copy here that we affirm those tax rates yet again and they are there in a way that ensures that the very wealthiest have got the biggest tax cut.It may well be that this is now the right tax package. You know? For now we have people who are gaining from the particular tax package that we have. But in the meantime health services have been cut—$1.7 billion in health services have been cut. And then the Government has just been borrowing—borrowing borrowing borrowing—to afford this particular tax package that we have got now for those wealthiest New Zealanders. That does not seem right to me—that does not seem right to me at all.Now on this side of the House we will support this tax bill going through because it does tidy a few things up and we believe that a tax system should be fair and tidy without too many loopholes in it. That is what we believe on this side of the House. We want a fair tax system where everybody pays their fair share. Look we think it could be better we think it could be fairer and we think the tax system in New Zealand needs an absolutely thorough review—not the kind of piecemeal approach you get with these bills that the Government is putting though which has this minor change here closing this look-though rule there and so on. I suspect part of it is that because they took so long to upgrade the IT system in 2012 the then Prime Minister of that Government said it would be a shame if we could not put a policy through because we had an outdated tax package to run it. Well that tax package is still in place. I suspect that is part of what is holding the Government back but I think it is just out of ideas. That is why we are seeing this particular piecemeal tax package and are affirming again that tax package that included borrowing to fund tax cuts for the very wealthiest New Zealanders."