King MattMATT KING (National—Northland): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to speak for a second time on the Excise and Excise-equivalent Duties Table (Budget Measures—Motor Spirits) Amendment Bill. Now the Government have a Government policy statement and it's radically different from the one that we had and it's focused a lot on Auckland and it's focused a lot on trains but the excise tax is taken off motorists. So I heard Julie Anne Genter talking before about car fascists" but she wants to tax the very "car fascists" that pay the excise tax. The people that are driving these vehicles on our roads they're happy to pay tax. And yes over nine years we put our tax up about 24c. You guys at this current rate it'll be something like 50c or 60c over nine years but we know you won't make nine years so we're not too worried.This excise tax is meant to be—or the motorists believe—it's to be spent on the roads. In the 1980s I drove up State Highway 1 to Northland and it used to take me over five hours in my family's HQ Holden and that road is paid for by the excise tax. Over the—SPEAKER: Not by this change it wasn't.MATT KING: Over time using the excise tax and other means we've improved the road. The road is now not fit for purpose and we need to be spending that excise tax on upping the road. So we're building—Hon Shane Jones: Nine years; National neglect.MATT KING: —and we've started. Shane Jones is going "Nine long years." So we talked about the four-laning of that road—back in 2012 we floated the idea. We were opposed by the Opposition at the time about spending excise tax on a four-lane highway. But four-laning is the way of the future. If we build a four-lane highway in Northland we're future proofing it for 40 years. This Government is proposing to use this increased excise tax on a tram to Auckland.So the thing about the four-lane highway—they're talking about the spending on safety all over the country right. Well the four-lane highway that we're building is the safest most resilient road in the country—they're the safest roads. We've had no deaths on those roads.SPEAKER: Order! Order! I've been listening carefully to the member and other than one sort of time that I waved the bill at him he hasn't actually referred to the bill and what the bill does. What a Government policy statement doesn't do is actually not part of this bill.MATT KING: OK. Well I'll shorten it up a bit. This excise tax increase is a direct attack on the low-income people of this country. In Northland we pay this excise tax and we pay a regional fuel tax and we're going to see no benefit from them. That four-lane highway has been cancelled in Northland. The excise tax goes on the lower part of my electorate; the regional tax is paid on the lower part of my electorate. The motorists in my electorate are not going to get the benefit of it because this Government has cancelled the four-laning. So this excise tax you're drawing on is going to be used predominantly for projects in Auckland—Matt Doocey: Trams.MATT KING: —public transport trams—a tram down the Dominion Road that's not even going to be going to the airport although it's been promised; it's not going to go to the airport.So this sort of excise tax—all it does is load up and increase the costs for low-income people. Shane Jones he can afford to pay this tax but there's a lot of people in my electorate that are going to find these increases—and all the taxes across the board that this Government is doing—really tough.So of course we are opposing this tax. We support a more graduated slower—over nine years—increase in excise tax over time but we're not going to support this one because this Government has whacked the taxes up across the board—Matt Doocey: That's right—raising cost of living.MATT KING: Yeah cost of living. So we oppose it."