Cunliffe David: Customs and Excise (Budget Measures—Motor Spirits) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCunliffe David: Customs and Excise (Budget Measures—Motor Spirits) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10350. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn): Mr Chairman—Hon Trevor Mallard: That’s an outrage. Toss him out. It’s disorderly.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: It is an outrage. However for the public out there the Committee stage is the part of the debate where we go through the bill clause by clause and we dig down into the detail. I just want to recognise the contributions that some of my colleagues have made such as Trevor Mallard rightly pointing out that this bill the Customs and Excise (Budget Measures—Motor Spirits) Amendment Bill is not even necessary. The Government has a thing called a regulation-making power in the main Act. It does not need to pass this amendment. It can do this by a Cabinet decision an Order in Council in January. So why are we here? We are doing this simply and only because the Government wants to be able to claim a wafer-thin surplus in the Budget. This is a political tool because this is one card of the house of cards that is propping up that wafer-thin line. Without this one without the $600 million extra tax that the Government is magicking in that year without the $1.1 billion corporate tax the $400 million tax receipts and without all of the other “Shon-key” funny money manipulations of the Budget documents none of that would have got there if it had not put this petrol tax rise in as well.I want to acknowledge my colleague Phil Twyford who has quite rightly gone through the list of some of those roads of national significance and made the crystal clear point that they just do not stack up on the traditional benefit-cost ratio. The “Holiday Highway” has got a benefit-cost ratio that is about 1.0. That means they get a dollar back at best for every dollar they put in and that is a complete waste of money. It would be so much better to cut that back to about $300 million not $1.2 billion and spend the $800 million difference on getting that city rail loop in Auckland so that Britomart was not a one-way street that you have to back the trains out of after you have put them there. You could actually run them around in a circle and have a decent commuter system which would make the whole Auckland rail network more efficient. The Government could do that in partnership with the Auckland Council if it could discover the meaning of that word.What about the Kapiti Expressway? I see we have got my colleague Kris Faafoi from Mana here. He has led the charge on that issue. Not even the locals want it. The Government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars that it does not need to spend because it could simply improve the existing arterial road. It is cheaper and it is what the locals want—Hon Trevor Mallard: Nearly as bad as Transmission Gully.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: Mr Mallard said it is nearly as bad as Transmission Gully and who would disagree? My colleagues are almost—almost—unanimous on this point.Grant Robertson: Almost.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: So we will leave it to the deputy leader to sort out the Wellington colleagues on that matter.I want to come back to the point that my excellent colleague Iain Lees-Galloway made about the unaffordable tax grab that this measure is part of. This is what they call trickle-up economics right? The money is trickling up from every Kiwi family to the Government’s coffers. It is trickling up not trickling down. The Government is taking from the many and giving to the few. As Mr Lees-Galloway has pointed out the reason that the Government is in this predicament is that one of the first things it did when it came into office was to reward its rich mates by giving unaffordable tax cuts as 40 percent of the money went to the top 10 percent of income earners—40 percent went to the top 10 percent. It was ridiculous. The Government enriched the rich andimpoverished the poor and worse it created a billion-dollar fiscal hole that these tax increases are having to make up for.In my earlier contributions to the first and second readings I went through in more detail the other cards that are required to prop up this bogus surplus in this Budget and they are extensive. It is the cuts of new operating spending in 2014 it is the artificial tax flows and it is the fact that the Government has not declared the cost of the research and development tax credits and there is probably a couple of hundred million in that. Mr Chairperson you are quite rightly drawing me back to the substance of this part of the bill Part 1 but it is gobsmacking that we are here raising everybody’s petrol prices by 9c a litre in a bill that we do not need to be here for because the Government—even if you agree with the idea—has already got the power to do it. So why are we here in a parallel universe? According to our calendar it is still Thursday but for everybody else it is Saturday. Why are we here to pass a bill that does not need to be passed? The answer is that it is only to make the Budget look like it balances. It does not anyway. But if anybody out there in New Zealand wanted proof positive that this Government’s whole Budget is a complete sham this is it. We are here in the weekend passing a bill that is not legally needed.