Leary IngridINGRID LEARY (Labour—Taieri): Like my colleague Anna Lorck I would like to acknowledge International Women's Day. It's a day when we can reflect on the gender pay gap when we can break the bias and we can remember that our Prime Minister is not some girl in a skirt on a power trip" as described by one of the protesters at Parliament but rather a respected leader on the global stage who has saved thousands of lives who has kept our economy on a strong footing throughout this pandemic and in the words of David Seymour just now who is tilting the market to first-home buyers.I'd like to just address the rather shouty comments from Andrew Bayly and David Seymour on tax. They're repeating the speech from Chris Luxon over the weekend which was about reducing the top tax rate or eliminating it altogether. That was basically a 3650 word speech about tax cuts for rich people. Now this was a week when the world order was changed by an aggressive foreign invasion of a democratic neighbouring State when New Zealanders experienced dramatic scenes like we haven't seen before outside Parliament when other New Zealanders have continued to hunker down bracing for Omicron. So it's a brave new world and what did the Leader of the Opposition have to say about that? Tax cuts. And by the way in all of those 3650 words not a single mention of Māori. So no thought of how Māori feature in the economy either as tangata whenua or as citizens of New Zealand. I may be showing my age here but Mr Luxon's suggestions have come straight out of the John Key playbook. In fact they're no different than any of the other several leaders that we've had lately whether that's Collins Muller Bridges—the list goes on. An election bribe is just that. I am getting to it Mr Speaker but I'm responding to the tax cuts question because the tax cuts that are mentioned by the Opposition will actually be worse for most New Zealanders. I refer now to my colleague Dr Duncan Webb who talked about the suggestion that they made that if they were passing this bill they would take away the top tax rate. Now that would leave a person on $25000 a year $100 or so richer and a person on $250000 a year about $7000 richer. So there's a massive difference in benefit there. As Twitter has put it doing those kind of tax breaks is really about giving better service to those who are already flying in first class. It's refusing to clean up any other section of the plane and it's refusing to actually refuel the plane. If I turn now to Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 64 which deals with interest deductibility in the brightline test this Government believes every New Zealander should live in a warm dry safe secure house whether that is through owning a home or through rent. There is no quick fix to the housing crisis as other speakers here have said. The Prime Minister said today at question time that we are absolutely focused on fixing this. Now our policies are on track to do this and what we've heard from the Opposition today is that when it comes to interest deductibility even though they will admit that there is a housing crisis they would do absolutely nothing. National would rather sit on their hands and do nothing. So let's be clear: this SOP 64 doesn't impact renters it doesn't impact first-home buyers and it doesn't impact owner-occupiers. It impacts not those who invest in new builds and those new builds increase housing supply. So it affects highly leveraged speculators who own two three four five or 25 houses. Now why do some people in this country own 25 houses when others can't even afford to get a roof over their head? Well that's because those groups of investors are one of the only groups in this country who have never had to contribute anything from the profit of their investment. The inaction of doing nothing for that group is actually not only worse for first-home buyers; it makes inequality worse. So National cannot in all honesty say they're interested in closing the inequality gap when these tax cuts that they propose and what they don't want to support in terms of interest deductibility is about feathering the nests of their rich friends and trying to buy their way into Government with promises of tax cuts. We've heard from the Minister that the IMF is warning that doing nothing about the ballooning housing market could end up in a slump. Now that has knock-on effects for the economy. We have to tackle this head-on and it's incredible to me that the National Party the ones who say that they're a safe pair of hands would rather do nothing and be so wilfully blind to this risk. I commend this bill to the House."