Bishop ChrisCHRIS BISHOP (National): We have just had a contribution from the man who is popularly known around the place as the Professor"—Mr Tabuteau the revenue spokesperson for New Zealand First. You know usually Mr Tabuteau's speeches are reasonably factually accurate—I say "reasonably" because you always to have to put the caveat in that they are reasonable—but I have got to say that that one really took the cake. Within about 30 seconds of the start of his speech he made two completely factually inaccurate statements and I do want to correct the record.The first was that the Government has done nothing about tax thresholds since it came to office which of course ignores the 2010 tax package that cut taxes—it raised GST but cut taxes in a revenue-neutral fashion for the Government. So it is not correct to say that the Government has done nothing about thresholds. And of course we do have the most recent package that Minister Collins recently outlined through Budget 2017.The second factually inaccurate claim that he made at the start of his contribution was that real incomes have declined over the term of the National Government and nothing could be further from the truth. In fact if you read as I encourage him to do the Household Incomes Report issued yesterday—popularly known around the precinct as the "Bryan Perry report" or often just the "Perry compendium" named after its author Bryan Perry from the Ministry of Social Development—you will find that real incomes are rising and have been rising consistently for the last 9 years. In the last year household incomes rose by 3 percent in real terms and that has been pretty consistent for the last 3 or 4 years at least.Of course the median wage is rising. Budget 2017 projects the median wage to rise even further and of course real after-tax incomes have been well ahead of inflation over the last 8 years. It is not to say that we would not like them to go up further it is not to say that we do not have challenges as a country it is not to say that there are things that we can work on but to say that real incomes have declined under National is just simply not accurate. It is not accurate on any measure whether it is the household incomes measure or a Statistics New Zealand household labour force survey measure or indeed any official statistic that the Government points out.The interesting thing about Mr Tabuteau's contribution in the debate was his decrying of the Government for failure to move on tax cuts and failure to move on fiscal drag. It was curious because it is usually the party that he represents that turns up in the House and anything you can find to spend money on New Zealand First is in favour of it. Those members are all for big Government spending—basically name a policy area and New Zealand First members thinks it is being underfunded; that has been a constant tenor and theme of their contributions in the House over the last 3 years or so—but then we have the revenue spokesperson coming down and saying: "Well actually you know we need to cut taxes we need to account for fiscal drag we need to get the Government out of people's lives we need to support hard-working New Zealanders."Well I just simply to say to Mr Tabuteau: you cannot have it both ways. You cannot come down here and argue all the time in favour of very large spending increases at the same time as arguing for reductions in taxation. You simply cannot do both at the same time so he may want to go and reflect on that and we undoubtedly will add it to the bottom line of Mr Peters and his colleagues the many bottom lines—I think we are up to about 14 but we are counting; well we are counting somewhat anyway.In terms of the actual revenue estimates Minister Collins I think has done a very good job of outlining for the Committee what these estimates do and the Business Transformation programme. I have the privilege of chairing the Finance and Expenditure Committee with my good colleague Mr Robertson opposite who is the ranking member for the Labour Party on the committee. Honestly we do operate in a collegial way when it comes to tax bills and generally with the Business Transformation programme too. Actually both National and Labour—both the Government and the Opposition—want the Business Transformation programme to work. I have got to say that we are pretty rigorous about vigilating the commissioner and her team in order to make sure that the roll-out is going appropriately.As you will see through the Estimates there is a very large amount of money appropriated through these Estimates for Vote Revenue and a big chunk of that is for the Business Transformation programme. We have got to make sure we get it right and I have got to say that so far we are pretty confident on the Finance and Expenditure Committee that that roll-out is going reasonably smoothly. With any IT project—and fundamentally it is an IT project—there are going to be complications there are going to be teething issues around the edges but we are reasonably confident that it is going in the right direction. We are also pretty confident I have got to say about what it will deliver and Minister Collins has adverted to some of those points."