Wong Pansy: Budget Debate 
Wong Pansy: Budget Debate 
[Volume:608;Page:5881] 
PANSY WONG (NZ National) 
: 
 I think the public would have been confused when they heard the Minister of Immigration talking about how to stop abuse of the system. But on the same hand this is the Minister who gave a work permit to a patient receiving dialysis treatment. That person cannot even work. [ 
Interruption 
] I tell that member to take a call and not hold back now. Members on the Labour benches have suddenly woken up. They should take a call. This Minister of Immigration will also be remembered for losing a court case. [ 
Interruption 
] 
Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: Order! 
Rodney Hide 
: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. I draw your attention to this point. The senior Government whip continued to shout abuse after you had called for order. I do think there should be a bit of a pull-up of that member who is the senior Government whip. 
Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: I have called for order. 
PANSY WONG 
: I hope the senior Government whip from down south learns some manners in the parliamentary debating chamber. If he would like to take a call he is most welcome to speak in his own time. 
This Minister of Immigration will also be remembered for losing a court case. After claiming that the Labour Government was not bothered about the number of immigrants suddenly on 11 November 2002 she announced an increase in the difficulty of the English language test and all sorts of things which incited the association of immigration consultants to take a court case. This is also the Minister of Immigration who says she cannot take the criticism from students queuing overnight to get their student permits so she removes the same-day service of granting them permits. 
Let us not be distracted. I want to come back to the Budget that was delivered last Thursday. Last Thursday after the Minister of Finance had delivered his Budget speech I got in a taxi to go all the way to Auckland airport. The taxi-driver was lamenting why he should bother working 10 hours a day to make ends meet. He does not feel positive about his future and his family’s future. He wants Michael Cullen to explain why he was boasting about having a $4 billion surplus. The Government does not earn money. Guess where the Government’s revenue comes from? Let us look at this information. Forty-four percent of Government revenue comes from salary and wage earners—like the taxi-driver I was talking about—company tax makes up 11 percent GST 24 percent and other taxes 14 percent. Ninety-three percent of Government revenue comes from taxes. How dare the Minister of Finance stand in this House and boast about making a surplus when taxi-drivers and other hard-working New Zealanders are being overtaxed to produce that $4 billion surplus! [ 
Interruption 
] The Minister of Immigration has had her say. If she would just listen she might learn a few things. 
The Minister of Finance shamelessly held up the carrot of tax relief next year in his own words“maybe for low-income earners”. Why next year? Why not this year? Are we too cynical in suggesting that election year is coming closer? It is not the Minister of Finance’s surplus; it is the surplus of hard-working New Zealanders who are being taxed too much. The taxi-driver got progressively even more upset when he also found out that 36 percent of the tax collected goes to social welfare. He was not too sure how long he wanted to carry on working instead of simply giving up and going on the dole. That is what is so criminal about this Labour Budget. The Government is taxing hard-working New Zealanders and keeping the surplus for an election year bribe. 
In 1999 Labour promised no new taxes. Since then we have had three extraordinary urgency parliamentary sessions to pass additional taxes on cigarettes alcohol and petrol. It gets even better. All the people outside Auckland blamed Aucklanders for the petrol tax but Aucklanders still have not seen any relief in terms of the traffic jams there. Young people recently were blamed as being the reason for the Labour Government imposing an excise tax on alcohol but I have yet to see young people staggering down Courtenay Place with bottles of cream sherry in their hands. I sat in on some of the Primary Production Committee’s sessions when it heard submissions on the Wine Bill. One submitter after another was asking the Labour members to explain why the wine industry was not consulted on the latest tax grab when the Hon Jim Anderton had written to the industry and promised consultation. Can we trust Labour Ministers whenever they say they will not raise taxes? In effect the Labour Government seems to have got into a habit of binge-taxing hard-working New Zealanders because it actually believes that it can spend taxpayers’ money better than taxpayers can. 
Let us look at one of the many examples of Labour’s binge-spending of taxpayers’ money. This particular project that I am going to share with the public is known as “What’s in a name?”. Apparently the Government through New Zealand Way Ltd paid $1 million for the domain name www.newzealand.com. So I asked some questions of the Minister. It appears that this $1 million debacle came about without even the exercise of a simple cost and benefit feasibility study having been done prior to that purchase on behalf of the New Zealand taxpayers. Worse still we are not even clear whether there was full and accurate understanding of what was actually being purchased and in what circumstances. 
Initially the Government could not understand why the domain name www.newzealand.com had to be purchased at all because it believed that the name “New Zealand” was a trademark that belonged to the New Zealand Government. As a result of this fiasco the Government took the US company Virtual Countries to the World Intellectual Property Organization claiming that its use of the domain name www.newzealand.com was a trademark violation. The Minister of Tourism now admits that this disgraceful blunder cost the taxpayers $3500—all because the Government has yet to join the technological revolution. What happened to the Labour policy of economic transformation? Funnily the Government does not even understand there is a major difference between a trademark and a domain name. A domain name is simply a web-based address while a trademark is a name a symbol or a device used to identify a product that has been legally registered as such and the use of which is therefore restricted to the owner or manufacturer. That is despite the fact that last year Labour passed legislation regulating trademarks and patents. So the Government does not understand what a trademark is or the difference between a trademark and a domain name. 
Perhaps as a result of this embarrassing international faux pas the Government went on to spend $1 million on purchasing this disputed domain name. I ask this question: before the Minister spent $1 million did he bother to seek some advice? Do members know what happened? The Minister asked for some advice. Guess what the advice was? It was that the Internet is a valuable marketing and communication tool. Imagine! One would be hard-pushed to find anyone disputing that claim but with this domain having a $1 million price tag I thought that one could expect a few probing questions from the Minister on behalf of the New Zealand public. 
David Benson-Pope 
: Turn the dialysis machine off. 
PANSY WONG 
: The senior Government whip is piping up again. The Opposition does ask questions unlike that Labour lot. We are getting very concerned. I learnt the latest: all Labour members apart from five seem to hold some sort of position—yet they have not even learnt to ask a few probing questions. Those lazy Labour members of Parliament leave all the tough questions to be asked by the Opposition. 
Before the Minister of Finance stands in this House ever again to boast of a surplus he should read his own tax statements. He does not earn those surpluses; he overtaxes hard-working New Zealanders.