Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Labour): There are two main points I want to deal with in the short time I have available. The first is the comment from a number of speakers on the other side that this bill delivers for all New Zealanders"—that was a quote that I wrote down when one of them recently spoke and others have said something similar. There are 500000 people in New Zealand who currently get the independent earner tax credit—500000. That is in the Government's own impact analysis on this bill at page 17 so that is the Government's number not mine. Those people are generally on the minimum wage. They do not get the tax credit if they have a family because they would be getting Working for Families and you cannot get Working for Families and the independent earner tax credits.So there are 500000 people. These people are all ages. Some of them are young people working in the hospitality sector and quite a few of them are older. Some of them are parents whose kids have left home working as cleaners or doing other low-paid jobs in society. These are some of the poorest people in work in New Zealand. Those 500000 people—half a million people—they get $1 a week when wealthier people from these tax cuts get $20 a week. That is an illustration of why the Opposition says this is so poorly targeted. How could the Government be so heartless as to direct its tax cut package in a way that leaves those people out when they are some of the poorest in society?The Government knew it was in trouble on this and it misrepresented what it was doing in the Budget speech and in the documents. I think this is the influence of the chief spinner of the Government for many many years the Hon Steven Joyce. His hands as Minister of Finance are all over this. He said this in his Budget speech: "[We are removing] the Independent Earner Tax Credit of up to $10 a week … It is only claimed by about one third of eligible recipients during the tax year." Everyone thought: "Well that's poorly designed—about one-third." Then in the easy guide that the Government has produced for everyone Family Incomes Package at a Glance produced by Treasury—and by God there will be some questions about its transparency around this at the select committee—what it said was exactly the same thing: "Only 32 per cent of eligible recipients claim it during the year they are eligible." Well we thought only 32 percent—that is bad. It turns out in the bill that 80 percent of those 500000 people get it; most of them get it when they file their tax return after the end of the tax year. The whole thing was spin to hide the fact that 500000 people in New Zealand get only $1 a week out of these tax cuts when the wealthy get so much more.Then the other people—the Government tried to say they get Working for Families. Obviously they do not get Working for Families. Then it tried to say they get the accommodation supplement. No they do not. It passes through their hands to their landlords. It is the biggest example of middle-class upper-class welfare in New Zealand and that cost incentive has gone up under this Government from $190 million to $1.5 billion after this Budget comes in and none of it—none of it—stays in the pockets of the people who are paying the rent because they get it only if they have got high rent costs. They get only 40 percent of those high rent costs and they never get it if they have not got those high rent costs and a low income in a way that requires them to need it in order to pay their landlord and the landlords are getting $1.5 billion—just about all going to landlords; some goes to mortgages but mainly increasingly to landlords—every year.This is poorly targeted. Yes the Working for Families is good as Jacinda Ardern has said and has presented amendments on to try to split this out from the rest of this rubbish legislation. We are in support of that but we do know that the same Government previously took $500 million out of Working for Families. So rather than patting itself on the back it should apologise for ripping it out of Working for Families in the first place. I think it is absolutely disgraceful that the Minister of Finance came down here on Budget day and spun. He spun to the media and they took it; he spun to us and it took us over a day to get it because we are in urgency; and he spun to every New Zealander. He misrepresented the nature of this for low-income people saying that only 32 percent got the independent credit when 80 percent did."