Newman Muriel: Taxation (Annual Rates Maori Organisations Taxpayer Compliance and Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Newman Muriel: Taxation (Annual Rates Maori Organisations Taxpayer Compliance and Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:606;Page:4103] 
Dr MURIEL NEWMAN (ACT NZ) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of the ACT party to speak on this bill which introduces race-based tax laws. We absolutely oppose every part of the bill. 
Part 1 is the part that concerns our income tax rates and it tells me and every other New Zealander that Labour has turned its back on working New Zealanders. Traditionally working New Zealanders used to vote for the Labour Party. My family voted for Labour until 1996 because we were a poor family and we thought that Labour stood up for poor families and poor workers. This bill confirms that that has absolutely changed and Labour has now turned its back on its traditional voting bloc. Under Labour working families are worse off than they have ever been. They are 2.4 percent worse off than they were before Labour came into power. That means that the average family is working harder and going backwards. I say to the Minister sitting in the chair that he should take a call and try to explain why it is that after New Zealand has had the best economic conditions in decades working families have slipped backwards. I would like to hear the Minister’s answer to that. 
Low-income working New Zealanders pay the highest taxation rate in the world. Those people being taxed at 19.5c in the dollar in New Zealand would be paying 3.5c in the dollar in Britain. Their income tax would be 3.5 percent of their income there whereas here it is 19.5 percent. That is too high. We should be seeing right now a bill to lower taxes for workers. If this bill lowered taxes for workers ACT would be supporting it. Instead it is a bill that lowers taxes for Maori. I tell members why that is. The reason is that Labour has a strategy of trying to buy support from Maori Pacific Islanders people on welfare and superannuitants—not from workers who are out of the door. Labour has figured out that if it looks after that lot it will have over a million voters and it will stay in power. That is absolutely shameful. We need a Government that provides incentives for hard work and that rewards people who go out of their way to try to better their families. We should be doing that through lower taxes for those families and giving the money back to families to use in their best interests not giving it to a Government to buy votes. 
This Government is very lucky. Firstly it had a low exchange rate—as a result of Labour getting into power all confidence left New Zealand and the exchange rate plunged—which has meant that exporters have done well. There has been a windfall gain in earnings which the Government did not expect. Secondly the Government stuffed up the immigration numbers. An extra 33000 people came into the country who had not been planned for which has driven the economy. So there have been two different events driving the economy. But that is not sustainable. One just has to watch the world news to know that New Zealand’s economy will get crunched along with all the other economies. 
This Government has not put the economy on a sound footing. To do that it should lower taxes and reduce compliance costs on small business and get on with the process of welfare reform. Instead of being soft on welfare so that more people go on to it the Government should be helping those people who are on welfare to get themselves off it and into jobs so that they can be independent of the State. John Tamihere brought some of those things up in the House and what happened? Labour bashed him gagged him and silenced him. We want to know whether Labour members listened to Mr Tamihere. I suspect they did not. ACT has been saying those things since we came into Parliament and it is shameful that Labour has not realised that that is a plan for growth. Lower taxes are the key to getting this economy on a sound footing so it can weather any storm that comes up. 
Part 1 of this bill tells us that the Government is ignoring common sense and experience from around the world. Every other sound economy has lower taxes than ours not higher taxes. What Labour is doing is absolutely shameful and for Labour to be turning its back on working families is even worse. Those people used to vote for Labour but now they have to vote for other parties in Parliament instead.