Russell DeborahHon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour): I would like to begin by acknowledging the reason that this bill was brought to the House and that is the desire of Mr Rawiri Waititi and the Māori Party to address the cost of living to find some way of helping with the cost of living. We've been promised help with the cost of living but it hasn't eventuated yet. And of course we do need some way to help people but we do not think that taking GST off kai is going to get the right result.I just want to take the House through some numbers and some evidence on this to explain why we think there are better ways to address the cost of living. So back in 2018 in the midst of all its paperwork the Tax Working Group did produce a background note on GST and in it it very explicitly examined the possibility of taking GST off kai and looked at some of the numbers. They estimated which households would get a benefit from it. Now by the time that's adjusted for food price inflation since 2018 there's been about a 28 percent food price inflation. A decile 1 household—so that's the lowest-wealth 10 percent of our households—would in today's terms get maybe about $19 a week benefit from taking GST off kai; a decile 2 household would actually get $18 a week; and a decile 3 household would get $23 a week. That's the kind of benefit that would flow to low-income households from taking GST off kai. But a decile 8 household would get $46 a week and a decile 9 household would get $53 a week and a decile 10 household would get $68 a week. The benefits of this change would flow primarily to high-income households. That's the evidence of the Tax Working Group in 2018.In fact that group suggested the better way to help low-income households to meet the cost of living was through targeted means—and these are some of the means that we had put in place in the Government—such as indexing benefits to wages such as providing lunches in schools such as providing low-cost public transport. Maybe it's even things like money for rural roads. There are better ways to spend that money.The actual fiscal cost of doing this of taking GST off food would be—again in today's terms—about $3.3 billion to $3.9 billion. That $3.3 billion is the $2.6 billion that the Tax Working Group estimated back in 2018 adjusted for food price inflation since then. The $3.9 billion is a library re-estimate. That's a lot of money. That's $3.9 billion in any fiscal year and that could be used for a lot of purposes and specifically directed towards low-income families.So because the benefit-flows from this bill alas go mostly to higher-income households and because the way of helping lower-income households could best be achieved through targeted measures the Labour Party does not support this bill. That's our primary reason.There are some other reasons as to why we cannot support the bill. But rather than going through them I do just want to express one regret that this evening we'll be voting against the bill in that it doesn't get to select committee. I think there is actually an unexamined assumption around taking GST off some products and not others and that is that it is difficult to do and it has very high compliance costs. Now certainly that's the argument that's always put forward when this is suggested but I do think that's an unexamined assumption since GST was first put in place on 1 October 1986. I think it would be worth examining that assumption again thoroughly. The Tax Working Group did a bit of work on it but I would like to see some work put into that at some stage because I can see why people do get upset and feel that we oughtn't have tax on a necessity like food. So perhaps we should be looking at that at some stage. However as I said that's a regret that we'll be voting against this bill that we won't be able to test that assumption. But what we will always support is assisting low-income families and that is our major reason for turning this particular bill down.