Dyson RuthHon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): Can I begin my contribution by acknowledging the member Stuart Smith and his constituents in the Kaikōura quakes. I wish he would stop copying Canterbury—first you had the quakes and now you have had fires as well. It is a really hard time for you people and you have got a lot of support from Canterbury. So I support the concluding comments that you made.I also want to acknowledge other members of the house: Scott Simpson Andrew Bayly David Cunliffe and Carmel Sepuloni because they have been through terrible times in their electorates with floods. It is a hard thing as a representative member of Parliament to know what your constituents are going through so I am sure that our thoughts are with those four as well.We are heading into the election and there is a bit of a tinge of nastiness that is creeping into the House. I just say that I actually do not think that New Zealand parliamentarians should bother going down that path. We should be better than that and I am really disappointed with some of the contributions that I have heard today. We can debate on the basis of policy and facts we can debate on different value sets and different beliefs and as soon as we start sliding into the gutter people turn off. I hope they turn off the people who use that approach to debating politics and I hope their vote count is reduced on 23 September. We will face a very different choice in the leadership of our Government. We will have either a National-led Government or a Labour-led Government. We will have either a leader in Andrew Little or a follower in Bill English. We will have very different policies and very different priorities pursued depending on who wins the election and gets the privilege of leading the Government.At the moment National is teasing the public with vague promises—getting a little more concrete as we go along—of tax cuts. I have seen the tax cuts introduced by National in the past. I watched in 2009 when National cut the tax take for the highest-income New Zealanders—not the people who actually work really hard and do not get very much money but the people who possibly work really hard and get a huge amount of money. They paid less tax as a result of National's 2009 Budget. And National increased the rate of GST. Having had a firm promise from the then Prime Minister John Key that there would be no change in the rate of GST it was increased. Who pays the price of an increase in GST? It is a regressive tax so the lowest income earners pay a much higher price for an increase in GST. That is what National did and that is what it is likely to do at the same time.I remember that Budget for another thing: in that Budget National cut the home support hours for older New Zealanders. Tax cuts for the wealthiest an increase in GST and a cut in home support for older people. How is that for priorities? They are not priorities that I share. They are not the values that I share. I do not think that is where we should be putting taxpayers' money or our support.National cannot be trusted to support low and middle income earners. Its track record is just appalling. It has totally short-sighted policies—short-term gain—and refuses to look out to the future and invest now in what we need for a better future for all New Zealanders. These are things like investing in our housing stock—quality affordable housing—so that New Zealanders who are our children's and grandchildren's age will be able to do as we did: work hard save hard and buy a house. That is off the agenda for a huge number of New Zealanders now. Even Gareth Morgan—who might have a few spare dollars—said he was not confident that his grandchildren will be able to afford to buy a house.For 8 years—8 long years—under National we have had not one single contribution to the New Zealand Superannuation Fund the fund that was set up under a Labour-led Government so that we would have money put aside to help pay for superannuation in the future. What has National said? Oh we'll just put the age up." So the generation who have paid for their tertiary education who have not been able to afford a house—half of whom did not get an increase in their wages last year—will now have to work 2 years longer before they are entitled to superannuation.That is not a fair society. That is not a Government planning to make New Zealand more equitable—to give everybody an opportunity to contribute to their best. I want our priorities to be values based. I want a Prime Minister who is a strong leader. I am looking forward to a change in Government on 23 September."