Swarbrick ChlöeCHLÖE SWARBRICK (Co-Leader—Green): E te Māngai tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. Just to get rid of the surprise for the Government members the Green Party will be opposing this bill today. The reason for that is that we come together as communities as individuals as neighbourhoods as people in this country to form something together that we call society. The reason that we do that is so that we can achieve things together that no one individual could achieve alone. That looks like things like our hospitals and our schools. It looks like climate action it looks like public transport and it looks like mass State housing builds. That is the point of Government: to generate the revenue to pay for things that no one individual could pay for alone.What we've heard from this Government today is their commitment to continue entrenching and deepening inequality in this country. They have pledged their allegiance to an unfair and unproductive tax system with trickle-down tax cuts at the expense of pretty much everything else. To that effect we saw in the financial reports from the Minister of Finance today some cherry-picked statements from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the OECD in order to justify some of the things that the Government has done. But what they have done in cherry-picking those statements is decide to intentionally neglect the point that both the IMF and the OECD in line with market economic orthodoxy have argued: for Aotearoa New Zealand to implement a capital gains tax—Andy Foster: What else did they say Chlöe?CHLÖE SWARBRICK: —in order to have a more productive and fairer tax system where we do not simply see money funnelled into housing Andy Foster and we end up with a generation of more jobs and productivity.So who are getting these tax cuts? Well under the tax settings today as in this legislation an average four-person family would receive approximately $126 from this Government. But under the Green Party's tax plan which we went to this election with they would receive more than double that at $288. We would also see the implementation of a tax-free threshold for those who are earning less those with an income of less than $10000. We would do that by implementing a wealth tax. And I know that that's just anathema to the dogma that we hear from the Government parties but let's just unpack some of the facts that they have at their disposal and that they knowingly are neglecting and ignoring today. A year ago we had the Inland Revenue Department—and the Minister of Revenue is currently heckling me. We had a report that told us that the top 311 families in this country pay an effective tax rate of less than half of that of the average New Zealander. But more so than that they hold more wealth combined then the bottom 2.5 million New Zealanders. That's not an accident. It is a consequence of a tax system that sees those at the top continue to accumulate more and more wealth and more and more power at the expense of everyone else. That is what drives inequality and that is where poverty comes from.We have also seen this Government knowingly make decisions to cut funding for the likes of Kāinga Ora for the likes of rangatahi housing in order to fund these tax cuts. And what does that say? Well we have in the child poverty statistics or rather the projections released alongside this Budget today that the Government has made no commitment to reducing child poverty in this country. It will plateau.What all of this exposes is that we are not so much dealing with a cost of living crisis as this Government campaigned on throughout the election last year; we are dealing with a cost of greed crisis and we in the Greens are asking New Zealanders to connect the dots. While New Zealanders out there have paid record prices in rents for their groceries for their energy guess who has made record capital gains and profits? It is the supermarket duopoly it is the energy gentailers and it is landlords—who this Government handed a $2.9 billion tax cut to only to increase the cost of housing as the Reserve Bank of this country says. Our ask as the Greens is to see New Zealanders not let this Government pull the wool over their eyes because the truth is out there and the evidence is clear: this Government is knowingly increasing inequality.