Shaw JamesHon JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): Why thank you Mr Speaker. Can I just start this intervention by saying one of the few things that I do like about urgency debates is that you actually sometimes do get a debate rather than just people coming into the House and making statements then buggering off again. So I will in that spirit pick up the point that Andy Foster just raised which is that he said that people want to have trust and confidence in how we spend their money. In a previous part of this debate I agreed with him on that point. But they also want to have trust and confidence that the tax system is fair and transparent that when we say we're spending their money—whose money? Where is it coming from and how much proportionately are people paying?Actually what we have seen is an erosion in recent decades of trust and confidence in our Governments and in this Parliament because we have consistently passed laws that have increased wealth disparity in this country and created a multi-generational underclass and a multi-generational class of people whose wealth is inherited rather than earned. What we do know—the very few things that we do know about the tax system in New Zealand—is that it currently reinforces that. So the Act that is being repealed simply provides some transparency and builds trust and confidence because it means we're all operating off the same set of information about the nature of the tax system.I wanted to respond to some of the back and forth with the Minister in the committee of the whole House stage immediately preceding. One of the things that the Minister said was that if New Zealanders want this information they can get it through the Inland Revenue system of annual reporting. One of the other things that he said is that the purpose of the repeal is to focus Inland Revenue's resources on the things that this Government prioritises. But if New Zealanders want to intervene in the annual reporting process and get the information that was provided by the Act then the same amount of resource—in fact probably more—will have to be deployed responding to the requests of New Zealanders who want that information. So it will save no resource other than making it harder for New Zealanders to access the information that the Act provides for right? It's an inconsistent argument. It doesn't reduce the amount of resource that Inland Revenue will have to devote but it does make it less transparent and less accessible for New Zealanders.Again the arguments that the Government side have laid out during the course for why the Act is being repealed are spurious. They're so thin. They're wafer thin. And the next question that I've got is: why the urgency? Why is it such a rush? Why is it so important so desperately important that we repeal an Act that provides transparency about the tax system at this point? It's because they don't want to know. They do not want to know what the reports provide. The Minister himself said that regardless of the amount of work that Inland Revenue have already put into the first report this year he doesn't want to see it. He's not received it. He's not asking for it. Any work that they're currently doing will have to get binned. Even though the report is due effectively tomorrow in real terms he doesn't want to know what's in that. He doesn't want New Zealanders to know what's in that because they already have a pretty good sense that it'll just show the same thing that we've already discovered through other work that Inland Revenue have done which shows that we have a deeply unfair and unproductive tax system in this country.That's why they want to repeal the Act that's why they want to repeal it under urgency that's why they want less transparency in the tax system—because the interests that that Government serves do not want New Zealanders to know where the money comes from that pays for the public services that the Government provides. They don't want to know and they don't want New Zealanders to know because all it would do would be to inform us that we have a system where the wealthiest New Zealanders pay less as a proportion in their tax base than other New Zealanders. [Interruption]All of these people on the other side are sitting there going No it's all to do with hard work. It's merely a function of hard work." Well let me tell you something. The wealthiest New Zealanders pay less proportionate tax than the people who clean the offices of the members present. You try and tell those people who come in here in the dead of night to vacuum their floors and clean their desks and empty their rubbish bins that they don't work hard and that those people should continue to pay more tax as a proportion of their wealth and income than the wealthiest New Zealanders. That's what they're saying. That's what they're hiding in repealing this Act. The interests that they are serving are the people who made the largest donations at the last election which were the millions of dollars that went from the richest New Zealanders to the parties that formed the Government—millions and millions of dollars in donations from the wealthiest New Zealanders—on the basis that those tax affairs would be covered up again and we would continue to operate in the same darkness that we have for a very long time.So you really have to wonder when the parties of Government got up to say during the course of the election campaign that they would be relentlessly focused on reducing the costs of living to New Zealanders how much does the repeal of this Act reduce the living costs of New Zealanders given that there are 2½ fulltime-equivalent resources devoted to it? If you divide those 2½ people by the 5 million New Zealanders how much will our living costs go down by repealing this? It is completely inconsistent to say that average New Zealanders will see their cost of living go down by having a less transparent tax system.They've said that they don't want glossy reports. They don't want that kind of thing. But at the same time they've said that they're going to be a Government that's based on facts and evidence—but only facts and evidence that are convenient to them and the people that support them. They're not interested in facts and evidence that are inconvenient to their political agenda. It is as ideological a Government as one I have ever seen. It is not based on facts and evidence at all. It is based entirely on serving the interests of the people who put them into power.So when you come to the question of trust and confidence there is no reason why New Zealanders should have trust and confidence in this Government when one of its very first acts—other than making bus fares more expensive for our poorest New Zealanders; other than making it more expensive to decarbonise as a country; other than to make it more fragile for people to walk into employment on the basis that they could get fired for no reason within the first three months of that employment on the basis that they'd make it harder to actually bargain for better wages so that'll drive wages down as it always has demonstrably over the course of the last three decades.I can see the Minister asking me to move on and to speed up because he wants to go home for Christmas. He wants to get out of here and he wants to go home. But it is his responsibility that this bill is in the House and it is his first act as a Minister of Revenue that we are debating this and all he wants for Christmas is a little less transparency. All he wants for Christmas is to repeal an Act that made it obvious what the state of our tax system is in this country and then he wants to get out of here and go home and have it all be done by Christmas so that people forget about it and don't worry our pretty little heads about the fact that the status quo is being preserved and the poorest New Zealanders will get poorer and the wealthiest will get wealthy under this Government. Because that is exactly the agenda that they have outlined in the first three sitting weeks of this Government. New Zealanders can look forward to a lot more than that. They're putting it through under urgency because they want to get it out of the way. They want to do the stuff that's unpopular they want to clear the decks and then they want people to forget about it. Well we won't forget about it. We will continue to hold them to account for their inequitable and unjust policies for the entire time that they remain in Government. The signals that they have sent to New Zealanders about what their priorities are and whose interests that they are serving over the course of the last three weeks and in particular over the last set of bills that we have debated in the course of this week—it is a cruel Government. It is a Grinch-like Government right before Christmas for the vast majority of New Zealanders except for those people who backed them in the election campaign."