3. Question No. 3—FinanceHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National) to the Minister of FinanceQuestion No. 3—Finance3. Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National) to the Minister of Finance: Is it still the Government's forecast to collect $20 billion more tax in the 2022 year than they did in 2018?Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): The Government has not changed Treasury's revenue forecasts since they were published in the Budget in 2019 but I do thank the member for reminding the House that the economy is forecast to keep growing solidly over the next five years.Hon Paul Goldsmith: After accounting for growth and inflation how much is he planning to increase tax revenues by 2022?Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: I don't have that calculation with me but what I do know is that the forecast increase across the five-year period from 2018 to 2022 is about 24.8 percent which contrasts with the five years from 2014 to 2018 under the previous Government when that revenue went up by 30 percent.Hon Paul Goldsmith: Does he have any plans to provide tax relief to individual New Zealanders this term?Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: That is not the intention of the Government. We made very clear at the last election what we weren't going to do around tax rates. What we have done is ensure that the revenue we're getting is going into fixing up the messes that we inherited in health and in education. The question for the member has to be: how does he make it add up? You can't keep reducing revenue and promising more Mr Goldsmith.SPEAKER: Order! Order! I'm just going to ask the Minister of Finance to straighten his tie which appears to be in his pocket. Thank you.Hon Paul Goldsmith: Does he believe more tax provides a solution to every problem?Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: What we need in New Zealand is to lift productivity—there's no doubt about that. That's a challenge that the last Government utterly failed on for nine years. We now have programmes like the R & D tax credit like the big lift in infrastructure spending like the big lift in skills training which actually will help our country develop. Taxation is what we collectively pull together to pay for the public services like our health system like our education system that the last Government let decline.Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern: Can the member confirm that this Government when we came into office did focus on targeted tax relief to those who needed it most—through for instance the Families Package?Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: Well that's absolutely right. We reversed the unfocused tax cuts of the previous Government that would have delivered over $1000 a year to members of Parliament here and put that into the pockets of low and middle income families.Hon Paul Goldsmith: What big lift in infrastructure spending was he referring to just then given the fact that his Government has cancelled a whole lot of projects that were ready to go and replaced them with projects that are not ready to go?Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: What I'm referring to is the fact that before the election the previous Government was forecasting infrastructure spend of around $30 billion over five years. That's lifted to over $40 billion under this Government let alone the $17.7 billion that's going into transport as well. This is a Government that's actually got a focus on increasing infrastructure spending over the long term rather than what happened under the previous Government when it declined and went into peaks and troughs that mean that we don't have the capacity in the economy that we should.Hon Paul Goldsmith: Does he believe it's right that by 2022 someone on the average wage will be on the top tax bracket?Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: The member is referring to the issue of bracket creep. It is an issue that all Governments have to take a look at. But what I know is that every dollar we're getting in is going towards addressing the social issues that the last Government refused to face up to. We're not prepared to put up with sewage in the walls of hospitals or children going hungry. On this side of the House we're using the tax money we get to fix the mess we were left with.