Bayly AndrewANDREW BAYLY (National—Port Waikato): Thank you Madam Chair. Well first of all I just want to return to the Minister's earlier response where he said Oh well it's great that we tax then. We need to increase taxes because we need to spend it on vital things like health and education and all those sort of things." Well actually we agree with that that it is vital that we spend good money on worthwhile projects like upgrading our health services improving our education facilities doing roads etc. but it doesn't quite stack up because what we do know is that the Government has just been hoeing into the COVID fund which has been like a slush fund to fund such a raft of worthless projects. And here we had Christopher Bishop in question time identifying that out of the 180-odd so-called "shovel-ready" projects many of them haven't finished—most of them haven't finished even though they were done for the express reason that they were going to be completed within 12 months and of course they haven't because we know about lack of delivery. So the point I'm making is that it's fine if you tax and spend the money wisely. Unfortunately we've had a Government that taxes and taxes and keeps increasing the tax—$15500 per family—and spending it and blowing it on wasteful stuff. And so that's the first point to his earlier response. I suppose the thing about the whole approach is the Minister's saying "Look we need to tax." and then of course "National's doing the wrong thing." Is the Minister aware that on 6 March this year 2023 just to be exact the bastion of capitalism the US—guess what they've done! They've changed the personal tax rate thresholds—exactly what National has been proposing. Now you'd think the US—wow they wouldn't be worried about those poor people those hard-working families that are struggling to go to the supermarket. I'm so glad to hear that Michael Woodhouse goes to the supermarket a modern man so he's grounded in what's happening—you know the price of milk—unlike some people. And so even the bastion of capitalism recognises that it's actually quite good to increase thresholds to try and deal with this inflationary pressure. And of course we've had rampant inflation in New Zealand largely driven by this Government who as I've said before has been wasting money on a whole lot of stuff. Even the Reserve Bank Governor agrees that fiscal and monetary policy need to work together and we've had fiscal policies that have been out of kilter. So I suppose this raises this big issue: what's best? What's the best economic approach? What the Government wants to do is keep on increasing the tax burden on New Zealand families. So as I said at the outset the tax take in New Zealand's increased by $42 billion per year—if you go back to 2017 it's now $42 billion higher—and it will continue to increase partly as a result of people being more productive in Government companies paying more tax but largely due to inflation. It's called fiscal drag that we're all aware of. So that tax take will keep increasing. And the issue is: are you not better to leave the money in the hands of the families that need it most? The point has been made earlier about it being the middle income the hard-working families that are the ones that have missed out and are facing the hardest onslaught of the cost of inflation. The Government's obviously announced increases to beneficiaries and superannuitants—that's one way of dealing with it. But it's the working families that have largely missed out on a way to deal with these huge cost increases that they're incurring. And so the issue is: do you actually reduce the tax burden on people so they keep their money—so when the pay packet comes in they immediately keep more of that money—or are you better to do the thing where the Government takes a greater share of that tax and then uses the ministry of social welfare that big mincing machine to then using several hundreds or maybe thousands of staff work out how to pay it and then pay back in the form of benefits? We think it should be firstly by reducing the tax burden."