Groser Tim: Taxation (Personal Tax Cuts Annual Rates and Remedial Matters) Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Groser Tim: Taxation (Personal Tax Cuts Annual Rates and Remedial Matters) Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:647;Page:16314] 
TIM GROSER (National) 
: 
 Part 2 of the bill contains only a few words but they are very important words. Essentially they represent the Government’s final response to a question that I think not only National as the Opposition has been asking but also New Zealanders have been asking now for 9 years. The question is when will middle New Zealand share in the good times? When will middle New Zealand which produced better results in at least the first 5 years of this Government—the roots of those results of course predate this Government—get an economic return on that? This legislation is the answer 9 years on. 
I am searching for adjectives to describe yesterday. I could say “unusual” or perhaps “irresponsible” when I think about the Government’s response. Actually I think that the word I would choose would be “bizarre”. I found it absolutely bizarre when I thought about the importance of the message in Part 2 of this bill. We had Dr Cullen finally gritting his teeth and spitting out the figures that we see in Part 2. I thought that an extraordinarily clever cartoon that appeared in the  
Listener 
 a few months ago said it all politically. It had the Prime Minister wearing a sheriff’s hat and holding up a Colt .45 that was still smoking. Dr Cullen was lying on the ground muttering the words: “Over my dead body.” and the Prime Minister was asking her caucus: “Has anyone else got any objections to tax cuts?”. 
Yesterday we had the strange spectacle of Dr Cullen spitting out tax cuts which unfortunately given his ideological conceptions had to include some relief for the people he calls what is it the rich— 
Hon Member 
: Pricks. 
TIM GROSER 
: No no; the word in the expression “He is a jolly good brick.”—is that the word I am searching for? Unfortunately Dr Cullen had to swallow hard. He had to deliver at least something for political reasons after 9 years of denying the people of middle New Zealand a share in the good times that they have produced. It is not Governments that create wealth; it is the people out there in New Zealand who create wealth and the Government can either facilitate or get in the way of that. 
Then we had the Prime Minister—and this is truly bizarre—talking to New Zealand about her glory days during the Springbok Tour and the Viet Nam War. Last night we had the Minister talking about what was it 16 image consultants that he thought he had found in the Opposition third-floor wing and Minister Shane Jones was talking about some meaning in te reo of Mr Henare’s first name involving some informal slang. If I was sitting in the pub and not in Parliament then I might have had a bit of a laugh with them. But I find it utterly bizarre that yesterday which is the most important day in the political calendar barring election day itself we had Ministers of the Crown and the Prime Minister not talking about the substance that we are addressing here in Part 2 of this bill but essentially either making jokes or irrelevant observations. It just raises the question of whether they have lived so long in their hermetically sealed zone of silence that they have completely excluded from their attention what is actually going on out there. When they give a $16-a-week tax cut to the average New Zealander I wonder whether they realise that the cost of filling up a Toyota Corolla has doubled in the last 12 months. The $16 does not even cover that. Do they realise what it means to have had a $26 billion increase in spending in the last few years? Do they realise how much pressure is going on middle New Zealand as a result of having the second-highest interest rates in the developed world and what that means for people in the mortgage belt of our country? 
New Zealanders have been told for 8 years that they could not have tax cuts because it would mean higher interest rates and then we have—