Taxation (COVID-19 Support Payments and Working for Families Tax Credits) Bill

I move, That the Taxation (COVID19 Support Payments and Working for Families Tax Credits) Bill be now read a third time.

Mr Speaker, members of the House, can I thank members for working on this under urgency. It’s not a long bill—six pages long, including a one-page index. It’s been well traversed in the stages that we have just been through. There are two main aspects to it. The first is increasing the family tax credit by almost $15 per week for the eldest child in the family, and around $13 per week for subsequent children—also, some Consumers Price Index - indexed increases for the Best Start payment and an increase to the minimum family tax credit threshold that have also been explained.

The other main part of the bill relates to amending the legislative framework governing the resurgence support payments. This change ensures that future activation of the scheme is not dependent on a change to alert levels, as is currently stipulated in the framework. And this change is necessary because of the shift from the alert level framework to the COVID-19 Protection Framework.

In addition to thanking members of the House for working on this under urgency, can I thank officials for their work on this bill and commend it to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Well, it’s been a long night, and actually a couple of long days debating COVID bills under urgency. I think I just want to first of all acknowledge the Minister in the chair tonight for standing up and being actively engaged in the debate. I think it’s very, very important, particularly as this bill is being passed under urgency.

I am very concerned that Labour members in the main—and there are a number of them sat in the House tonight that made absolutely no contribution to a bill that’s not going to a select committee; there were very, very few contributions. And I think not only does it disrespect this Parliament that a bill that is going to be rammed through under urgency in the case of one day—or, in fact, a matter of a few hours—only by exception did any Labour backbenchers stand up and make a contribution to this debate, and I think that’s appalling, especially when you understand the importance of this bill. We have got thousands of business owners who are just wanting clarity, they want to understand what the process is, they want to understand what the new rules are, and yet the members did not feel beholden to stand up and support the Minister in this bill. Of course this bill was going to be passed by the Government, because it has an absolute majority, but the assumption that you do not have to defend it, you do not have to engage in that debate, I think is appalling, I think it’s really disappointing, I think it will reflect badly on the party, and I just make that comment.

And I do acknowledge that the Speaker of the House has made certain comments about the passage of these bills.

💬 SPEAKER: Order! Order! The member may not bring me into the debate.

OK. So with that, of course, this bill’s going to pass through tonight with no select committee process, no input from any parties independent of this Parliament. I think the main aspect that the Government is trying behind this bill is it’s dealing with the issue of poverty and increasing the Working for Families components, and there are a whole stack of components that will be improved and will be adjusted. And that will occur. That is a process that always occurs. It always gets triggered when the Consumers Price Index accumulative impact is greater than 5 percent. There is nothing special in this part of the bill, even though that was what the Government members chose to focus on.

The only real difference was the $5 per child increase. I think the argument we’ve heard tonight is that this inflation index adjustment of certain benefits is going to be a game-changer in terms of lifting children out of poverty. And we had this disconnect between the Minister, who in his original speech claimed that 6,000 children would be lifted out of poverty, and then subsequently all the members of the House chose in their very short contributions—the maximum being 1 minute 30—to focus on a figure of 3,000. They couldn’t even get the story around the impact of the improvement to reducing poverty. But the reality is I find the argument spurious that as a result of doing a historical readjustment—or doing an adjustment taking into account historical increases in inflation, a $5 per child increase is going to lead to any substantive change to child poverty in New Zealand I think defies logic.

I think, as the Hon Louise Upston said during her contribution during the debate, the Prime Minister claimed when she first became Prime Minister that she would reduce child poverty by 100,000. The real number’s that about 1,500 children have been lifted out of poverty even with all the benefit increases that have occurred over time. I think the Government members have significantly over-egged that.

But the main part of this bill, as the Speaker will know, is about putting in place new COVID arrangements. This is an enabling piece of legislation and it will bring about changes. As I’ve repeatedly said in the House, we are moving to a new traffic light system—actually, in seven days’ time and one hour and five minutes. In seven days’ time, the new traffic system will be in place and the enabling piece of legislation that has been rammed through tonight, I just have to question why has it taken so long since the initial announcement on 22 October—over a month ago when the Government announced it was moving to the change, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance made it clear we were moving to a new arrangement. Why has it taken to the second to last day of the sitting of this House, because tomorrow is the last day before these rules will have to come into force and the detail about what the rules will mean will have to be announced and put into place? Why the delay?

That was a perennial question through all the debate tonight and this afternoon: why was this left to the last and why have we had to do this under urgency? I think for the many thousands of people out there hurting across all of New Zealand—many of them facing the prospect of losing their businesses, many of them have geared themselves up, mortgaged themselves to the hilt, many of them will be of older age and will be thinking, “How am I ever going to be able to repay this debt to the bank?”, and possibly and probably facing the prospect of having to work well into their late 60s and early 70s to be able to even get to a stage where they have enough financial horsepower to have even a half-decent level of retirement.

I find that callous. I find it callous that the Government cannot give that certainty, cannot give that clarity at this late stage. Even in the rules in this bill it is unclear. There are rules—the criteria are going to be determined by the Commissioner of Inland Revenue. It was a question we asked of the Minister. We didn’t actually get a response on it. Why should the commissioner be determining the criteria? We thought it was important that the Government and the executive determine that but the bill clearly states that the commissioner should be involved in that.

There’s a whole stack of other things that really we couldn’t understand. There was this reference to people in the new arrangements. Up to now, the resurgence payment has been focused on businesses, as has the wage subsidy. Payments have been paid to businesses. For some reason, this legislation talks about making payment to people. It also used new terminology of “grant”. It was unclear what that meant. It was a question we put to the Minister tonight. Does that suppose that we’re going to move to a different payment system to business owners or to people or organisations? And what is the nature of the grant? Obviously, a grant, you can’t get back. Well, we assume you can’t seek repayment from people that you’re going to make the payments to, but, again, the language is unclear. There were just so many questions like that, which I think if we’d had had the time to have a select committee, we could have worked our way through that and actually people would have had the knowledge that it had had proper scrutiny.

We’ve literally passed this bill—I think we started it about 4 o’clock from rough memory. We’re now closing in on it at about 11 o’clock. That is not long, given that we had a dinner break in amongst that. I think it’s a shameful process. I’m disappointed on behalf of the Parliament and what it means for many people out in New Zealand who will be facing a bleak Christmas because in January they’ve got to pay provisional tax, in February they’ve got to pay terminal tax. Many of them will be thinking, “Where do I get that money? And am I assured that I’m going to have continued support for my business?” In seven days’ time, basically, many parts of New Zealand will be at red, but that does not mean that they can fully operate. They’ll be operating under restricted conditions. We need and should and could have provided much more certainty, and this bill does not deliver that.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’d like to be able to, first of all, thank the Minister, the Hon David Parker, for futureproofing the ability for there to be support for businesses during the COVID protection framework when it comes in, in seven days’ time. I acknowledge the Inland Revenue officials and the drafters for their work on this bill. The member that just sat down on the other side of the House, Andrew Bayly, said, “Why did it take a month for this bill to come to the Table?” The member, obviously not being a Minister before, doesn’t realise that there are policy reports, Cabinet papers, regulatory impact statements, and then you have to do drafting instructions, and then you have to draft, and then you have to review before it even gets tabled. So the fact that Inland Revenue managed to be able to do that amount of work within about a month’s time is actually impressive.

I said it once in the first reading and said it twice in the second reading, and now I’ll say it three times in case the volume of some of the speakers on the other side of the House was so loud that members didn’t hear me before: the purpose of these rules—and if the members on the other side of the House want to oppose this bill, which quite clearly they’ve done right throughout the stages—it means they do not support businesses receiving support from the Government, if necessary, when we move into the COVID protection framework in two weeks’ time. It also means that members oppose, as set out in the regulatory impact statement, the disproportionate benefit that this bill delivers to Māori, Pacific, women, families, and children. So, on that note, I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s taken a smidgeon over seven hours to hear something more than “Thanks to the officials” and “I move that the question be now put.” from a Labour backbench MP, and I’m not surprised that it’s come from Barbara Edmonds. I have a high regard for her and I have had experience of the quality of her work, and, actually, this would have fallen well below the quality that I would have expected from her—she would have done better—and she’s right on one level about the process of Cabinet papers and policy documents and regulatory impact statements. But there’s not a lot difficult about this bill.

In Part 1, we have a cut-and-paste from the existing Act with virtually one change, and that is the removal of the word “resurgence” and the letter “R”. Then, in just about all other respects, with the exception of the comments that Mr Bayly made about the extension of who might be eligible for support payments, this is already in the law. We passed it in February. It actually is an overwrite, which in my experience, with due deference to the excellent policy people at Inland Revenue, wasn’t unusual. If you could say something in 10 words or 10,000 words, I’d expect 10,000 words from the revenue people.

But this was an opportunity, actually, to make a much more straightforward change, and Part 1 was easy. Part 2 wasn’t that difficult, either, because the calculators were already out when the amendments to the Income Tax Act changing the calculation of family tax credits and family credit abatements were made. So we’re actually spending hours and hours and hours filling the gaps that should have been filled by the select committee, with the consultation with the Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand advisory group, in the following of a decent generic tax policy process, and none of that happened.

But, actually, what we’ve really been debating was not what’s in the bill but what’s not in the bill, and what’s not in the bill, or in the debate as it was in February, was a meaningful understanding of the level of business support that’s going to be provided once it’s passed. The National Party doesn’t support this because it’s a bad idea; we don’t support this because it’s a bad process. In fact, it’s a terrible process.

Even in Part 2, despite the lauding of the generosity of the Government and the self-congratulations for lifting people out of poverty, almost all of the increases to those family tax credits and supports would have happened on 1 April next year anyway as a consequence of the automatic uplift provided by the existing legislation, and the best calculations are that the greatest benefit is about $5 a week. I’m not going to sniff at that, but let’s not have the Minister of Revenue riding into Jerusalem with palms being laid at the donkey’s feet. It doesn’t deserve that level of plaudits.

💬 Hon Member: That’s very biblical.

Yes, I am in a biblical mood today.

So we do, with some regret, on behalf of the businesses who are dying to know, and some of them are literally dying to know, ask what level of support they are going to be able to get under the traffic light framework. We gave the Minister an opportunity to provide that clarity, and that opportunity was not only not taken but, actually, we had greater confusion, at least in my mind, about whether or not any support might be provided from Friday next week to any business anywhere in the country.

Now, it may be that the Government, as is their wont, is going to do a big reveal. We’ll have an announcement over the weekend of an announcement on Monday of an announcement the following Friday. But he didn’t say that. He was much more coy about that. He clarified that we’ve got a framework which will provide a support at some stage in the future if some triggering event occurs or a situation is met. But we’re not clear whether or not that is a situation that will exist on 3 December, and businesses, which rely on certainty, can take bad news. They can take the ability to have to be in lockdown for a set period of time, but what they can’t survive is a tunnel so long with a light so dim that they don’t know when they’ll ever get out of it. That’s how they’re feeling right now, and nothing we’re doing today is going to alleviate that burden or reduce that stress on them, their workers, and their families.

We had a very interesting exchange. I enjoyed my exchange—a thoughtful exchange—with Green member Jan Logie about the risks and benefits of certain policy positions. I hope that we’re actually able to do more of that, because my view is that we’ve spent 18 months talking about one thing and one thing only, the impact of one thing and one thing only, and the costs and benefits of COVID. But we traversed all of the non-direct COVID impacts on our health, our mental health, our education, our relationships, and our children’s experiences as school-leavers and graduates that have actually been decimated by the decisions this Government has made.

I’m not saying they were the wrong things to do—particularly last year—but let’s not pretend that the only cost is money and the only benefit is lives saved and harm reduced because of the COVID virus. There is much, much more happening. We need to be more open and have a broader conversation about cost and benefit now and into the future, including the debt burden that we’re going to leave and the mental health issues that are emerging, and at least between two parties on this side of the House—one has got one foot in Government—we had some kind of acknowledgment that there was much more to our COVID response than just COVID.

But, overall, it’s deeply disappointing that we finish this process none the wiser than we were at the start. I predict the trumpets will bray the tantaras on Monday about some kind of announcement about some kind of support at some time in the future with some triggering event, but we should have known it during the debate on this bill.

That previous speaker reminds me of Donald Trump’s standing saying: “COVID, COVID, COVID, I’m sick of it, can’t we talk about something else?” Well, the reality of it is that I think when we are doing an archaeological dig of our society in some time, they’ll say this time that COVID changed everything, that the world will never be the same again. So we can’t get over it. We have to ensure that those changes—and they’re very unpredictable; it was only this time last year we were predicting unemployment figures in double figures. We were predicting all sorts of catastrophes in our economy. Well, they didn’t come about. It has been an unpredictable outcome, I suppose, where we are now.

The one thing that’s incredibly important is that, whatever happens—and we’re not quite sure what’s going to happens—we bring the least advantaged with us. The mere fact that we’re talking about $20 a week for families, and that will make a difference, shows just how many families have to exist on very little. Twenty dollars a week; most of us will have spent that on a meal tonight, just to put that into perspective. It’s incredibly important we bring people with us. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. This bill allows us to at least ensure hard up families do get considered in the future. I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to take a call at the third reading of this bill, the Taxation (COVID-19 Support Payments and Working for Families Tax Credits) Bill, and I do just need to pick up on the previous speaker, Greg O’Connor, and it’s a point I’ve made previously, about my discomfort with the discussion of the $20 a week per family, when that is including the inflation adjustment that would have happened anyway and is not a result of Government decision-making—and that that is, in real terms of what people can do with that money, neutral because it’s just adjusting to inflation. It doesn’t enable—so three-quarters of that amount of money, almost, is actually just enabling people to keep up, not do anything extra. And this policy, what the regulatory impact statement tells us, is that the average gain will be $8 a week. If I look at my local Pak ’N Save and I only look at the veggie section and I’m thinking what I’m going to be able to get in a week, if I’m being really healthy and trying to do the best for my family, I might be able to get a cauliflower and a couple of kilograms of kumara.

Now, that’s not to sniffed at—that puts some substance into the belly—but, if I’ve got a whole family, in terms of feeding, and we’re struggling to pay our rent and buy the new shoes because the kids are growing really quickly and they’ve got holes in their clothes because they had a game down the park, then it really doesn’t go very far, and we know that, at the moment, we’ve got 160,000 kids in this country who are in severe poverty. This policy—this $5; actually, $8 for 223,000 people—is going to make a little difference, but it’s not going to provide stability; it’s not going to address the negative harms of poverty for all of those kids. It’s just going to make an incremental difference, and, to be honest, that’s bit gutting. We heard earlier from the Minister when he said that the Government could not support our Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) to remove the increases to the abatement rate that would actually just mean that we were—the intent of our SOP was to make sure that we were actually just doing something good rather than doing something good and doing that at the expense of middle-income earners, who are, actually, still also quite often struggling to be able to keep up with all the bills. And he said that he couldn’t do that, because that was going to be $90 million that the Government could have spent on other things.

I just want to note: child poverty is one of the headline issues for this Government, but $90 million in this context was deemed too much, yet the Government has been able to find billions of dollars a fortnight for Auckland’s lockdown. And the Greens aren’t challenging that decision, but we are putting it in comparison to looking after our kids—because we put this money into supporting our businesses through lockdown, because we recognised the flow-on effects if we don’t. Well, there are flow-on effects if the parents or caregivers in the family are not able to support their kids, and those flow-on effects are not short term; they can be lifelong, because poverty deprives children of opportunity, and we know that that gradient is incredibly difficult to reverse. So the Greens question the Government’s priorities.

And we’ve heard that this is, again—like, we really struggle with the measly-ness of this policy in the face of the struggle of our families that has been exacerbated through COVID. We know our social safety system was inadequate to begin with, and we’ve seen that heightened through COVID, and more families are going into more debt now. And that will reduce their actual spendable income—in terms of it being spent on repaying that debt—just to be able to cover the basics. That’s how our system has been set up, and we’ve got choices about that. We can change that and give families control of their incomes and choices in how they support themselves and their children. All of the national and international research shows us that they make good decisions when they are put in that position to make those choices themselves, rather than being told what is right for them and their family.

I think, when we’ve heard from the Prime Minister that the desire is for New Zealand to be the best country in the world to bring up our kids, then I just want to point to some recent Child Poverty Action Group research that showed that New Zealand’s rate of poverty for children is 30 to 40 percent greater than Australia’s—we don’t usually look up to Australia and want to aspire to what they are doing—and that, even with these changes, a low-income family in Australia with four children aged five to 19 will be receiving $2,600 more in tax credits than that same family in New Zealand. But if that family in New Zealand receives a benefit, the gap is even wider—of around $7,170 a year difference. And that’s been a decision that that Government has made, recognising that if they invest in their families, then their society is better off. The Greens have really struggled with the paltriness of this, but the fact that it’s at the expense of—and the regulatory impact statement tells us—91,000 families who are being expected to pay for this, at an average loss of $6 a week.

Middle income families are paying for this paltry $5 a week per child increase—that I know will make a difference, but not the difference that is needed in the time that we are living in, and for the future. The problem, as well, is the fact that these 91,000 people who will be losing out, it’s because of the change to—when they start earning more, the Government’s pulling back more. Which is the increase in the abatement from 25 percent when you reach a certain earning threshold, the Government will take 25 percent at the moment, and this Government saying, “Well, actually, we’re going to take 27 percent of that money that you’re starting to earn.” The problem with that is that that actually disincentivises families, particularly two-parent families, from having both people in work. And we know who is more likely, then, to end up in work and who’s more likely to end up at home. It’s women. So again, this isn’t consistent with the values that we’ve heard expressed from this Government, the work that they’ve actually been doing around the empowerment of women, much of which I’ve been really supportive of.

So the Government also declined our SOP around the in-work tax credit, and the rationale for that, and that we see in the regulatory impact statement—apart from not wanting to spend the money—is that it’s an incentive to get people to work. But, actually, the courts have told us it’s discrimination against children whose parents are unable to work. The families whose kids need the most support and will benefit the most are blocked from getting it, because the Government has a theory that, actually, that would mean that people would be less likely to go out to work. But, actually, that tax abatement rate, which creates a really high, effective marginal tax rate, that’s a pretty big disincentive for going to work. And really, we would argue—in the Greens—that if you want to encourage people into work, address that effective marginal tax rate and ensure people have the basics to be able to make the best choice for their families.

We trust people, in the Greens. And that’s borne out by all of the evidence that if you give people the money to make the right choices, then they will. Our kids will benefit from it and we will all benefit from it for generations and generations to come. So the Greens are supporting this for the 220,000 who’ll be eight bucks a week better off, and the Auckland businesses—but, to be honest, it’s a bit begrudging, because we don’t think this is really the way to do it.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. There’s an old Chinese quote, “May you live in interesting times.” We certainly do, at 20 past 11, passing a bill under urgency, the second in as many days. In fact, really in one parliamentary day; technically, it’s still Tuesday in the Wonderland of parliamentary paradise, passing this legislation.

It’s a pretty short bill, as the Minister said. He said it’s only six pages, but it says so much about the juncture at which New Zealand finds itself on multiple levels. The fact that we’re up this late at night passing the bill—that’s one thing. The fact that it is a bill that is about transferring Government cash is another. And the fact that it is a bill that if it’s necessary at all it’s necessary because there’s been so much Government cash transferred through this COVID period that the cost of living for New Zealanders up and down this country, at the petrol pump, at the check-out, when they pay their rent and try to build new homes, has been skyrocketing under the binge of borrowing, printing, and spending money that this Government has taken on: 4.9 percent inflation in the last year, only 2.4 percent increase in wages.

That’s why this Government is desperately passing a bill that will increase the amount of cash transferred to select New Zealanders. That’s why it wants to adjust the various amounts transferred and the thresholds for qualifying for a transfer and the abatement rates for receiving transfers under Working for Families. This Government is doing its best to make sure that at least the people it hopes will vote for it are insulated at least partly from the enormous changes that are occurring to the cost of living in New Zealand. I have no doubt that the Government will have picked up from listening to those few New Zealanders it does listen to, and perhaps from its market research, that the things that people are overwhelmingly concerned about now are the cost of living, the cost of life, and the cost of COVID, and that cost comes from the fact that this Government has run such an inept response to COVID 19.

It’s been shielded by cheap credit, but that cheap credit has led to enormous amounts of inflation in nearly everything New Zealanders buy, and the chickens are coming home to roost. That’s why the Reserve Bank has started to put up interest rates. So here’s how this goes in the next year or so. Prices are going to keep on rising. Now, we had one of the Labour members stand up, and I can guarantee you that that member is not an economist, because they’re a Labour MP and just by simple logic, that means they’re not an economist, because no current Labour MPs are qualified in economics. And the fact is—Mr Speaker’s waving his fingers. Don’t worry, Mr Speaker. I’ll check my fingers after the Labour Party’s been around. I don’t want to lose anything. They certainly like to tax and take people’s money, amongst other things, don’t they? And so we can guarantee that there is no Labour MP who is trained in economics, because even if the Speaker was, he wouldn’t be identified as a Labour MP. He’d be presiding in his usual even-handed and dispassionate way over the proceedings—

💬 SPEAKER: Order! Order! The member, even though I probably invited him, will leave me out of the debate.

Well, there you go, ha, ha! Thank you, Mr Speaker, for that intervention.

💬 SPEAKER: Does that member want to stay?

Well, Mr Speaker, it seems you’re now participating in the debate quite considerably. But we know that the member—as I was saying before the Speaker started debating with me, there was a Labour Party MP who we know is not an economist, by just source of elimination, who said, “Don’t worry, this is going to look through inflation.” I suspect that that Labour MP was looking through the magazine rack at New World and accidentally saw a copy of The Economist and that’s what they picked up on the way through!

Well, I can tell you: when a Government spends an extra $50 billion on COVID, and then the Reserve Bank prints an extra $60 billion or, you know, about 12 percent of GDP—oh, actually, no, about 15 percent of GDP stimulus in 18 months—that has an effect on prices that’s a bit more than something you can look through. But I can understand if the Labour Party is confused about the things that can be looked through, because, members may recall, at one point the Labour Party said they were going to be an open and transparent Government. Now, you can’t look through that. Maybe they’re saying that you can look through this inflation in the same way that the Government was going to be transparent, but I don’t think that that was the case with the Government, and it won’t be with this inflation. You print all that money, inflation is here to stay for quite a long time. And what that means is that people are going to continually find that the prices they pay go up.

And as the Reserve Bank tries to achieve what’s left of its mandate, having been given very irresponsibly, in my view, a dual mandate by this Government, the Reserve Bank is going to start raising interest rates. They’re saying another seven 25 percent basis-point increases. Let me tell you what that means. That means that by the middle of 2023, by election year, we’re going to be facing a 2.5 percent official cash rate and mortgage rates will be pretty standard at 5 percent. Now, for people that were getting used to mortgage rates in the low 2 percents, well, you know, for someone whose got a $1 million mortgage—and some people do in Auckland, under this Government—that’s another 600 bucks a week that they’re paying. That is going to be really, really hurtful.

And that explains why this Government is passing a bill, in the dead of night, under urgency, to try and shuffle as much cash as it can in order to try and get people that it thinks might vote for it onside in the face of these cost of living increases that it has created with its expenditure. That’s the real truth. The problem is that it’s just not sustainable. It creates a spiral of wage and prices as the Government tries to stimulate the economy—the more it does, the worse it makes it.

So what should it be doing? What sort of legislation should we be debating tonight? We should be asking how we stop dividing New Zealanders, commodifying them into identities; how we stop dividing wealth, taking money off one group of people and giving it to another, as the Government so wants to do and is doing with this bill; how we unite New Zealanders behind good ideas to create more wealth. Stop whacking farmers. Stop whacking landlords. Stop whacking small business. Stop putting more regulations on to people. Stop making it harder for people from overseas to spend money. All of those things are things that this Government has done lately. And instead of facilitating real production of real goods and services, things that are valuable that New Zealanders can sell to each other and the world, it’s done things like spent $50 million on a bike bridge that it didn’t build. You know?

I mean, this Government spent $600,000 on a 30-second advertisement, and I kid you not, Mr Speaker, there were no actors, there was no filming in this advertisement, it just zooms in on a series of pictures, and then makes a noise like a camera clicking, and it cost $330,000, and they spent another couple-of-hundred grand putting it on the news. What this ad says is “save energy”. So at a time of record energy prices, this Government is spending even more taxpayer money on ads to tell people to save energy. The great irony is that when the Government spends money on something that’s not actually useful, it puts cash into the economy but not useful goods or services, and that is inflationary, and one of the things people are dealing with is actually inflation of, ironically, among other things, the cost of energy. So that ad, in its own small way, will make people save energy because they won’t be able to afford as much of it, but I don’t think the ad itself will be very persuasive.

Then there’s the fact that Kāinga Ora—I mean, that’s only 600 grand and, you know, whatever, I guess that’s not much for this Government—is going to spend $2 billion bidding against private developers to buy land they would’ve bought and developed anyway, bidding up the price of housing even further in an effort to bring down the price of housing.

Just about everything this Government does now is inflationary and stops production. As a result, they are having to put in place legislation to hand out what cash they can get their hands on to people they hope will vote for them as they are overtaken by a tsunami of inflation of their own making in the two years to come. Well, the ACT Party’s going to be standing in this House, providing real solutions, to create real productivity, so that New Zealanders can really have the things they want, not this hopeless midnight hand-out smouldering. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

There’s been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about urgency from the other side of the House, but can I remind this House that during National’s time in Government, urgency was used no less than 53 times. The principle of not using urgency in ordinary times is absolutely correct, but these are not ordinary times, as Mr Seymour has said. Delta is swift and nimble, and we need to be able to respond.

As the Otago University law professor Andrew Geddis, who has already been named in the House tonight, says, the perfect can be the enemy of the good. I’m sure our business community would rather have us pass this legislation than be stymied by a select committee process that can’t be in on time. I invite anybody who is watching this debate who wants to know the reasons why the process requires urgency to look at the excellent speech from my colleague Barbara Edmonds in the second reading.

This legislation, as pointed out by the Minister, has two key components. One is to support families, especially those who are earning below $40,000 a year, to take them with us. They have been very hard hit by COVID. Everybody has, but they have especially. Secondly, it is to allow the framework to support business as we change from the current framework to the traffic light system. It’s pretty simple. There’s no need for all the drama. I commend this bill to the House.

Well, the last speaker in the debate, Ingrid Leary, said that these are not ordinary times. But that was a very ordinary speech on a very ordinary bill from a very ordinary Government. Because, you see, all we have seen for the last two years is any problem that this Government needs to borrow money to throw at is the fault of COVID. No fault on their side at all. It’s always the fault of COVID.

When we come to the House and we say that 28,000 businesses have closed, the finance Minister is very quick to say “Yeah, but that’s not so much compared to last year.” To the people that own those 28,000 businesses, the Government standing up with an answer that they think is smart in this House every day actually does them a great disservice because it’s not the members of this House that have sacrificed. We keep getting our salaries. The Government, under the Prime Minister, says “Let’s take a little bit last year from Ministers and let’s do it from MPs.”, but we were still all OK. It’s mums and dads that get out of bed every day, that run small businesses in this country, that borrow against their houses, that pay their staff before they pay anybody else, who are taking that money that they work hard for to raise their kids and put them through education so they have a brighter future. Those are the ones that are going to pay back the $97.5 billion that this Government has borrowed over the last two years and spent on many things, most of them nothing at all to do with COVID, but said it’s all about COVID.

We heard one of the other speakers over there, who I guarantee in two years’ time when he stands up in his electorate in Wellington will have a very, very different tune. He won’t be talking about Donald Trump then. He will be saying to them, I guarantee you, there’s a road here that they need in this electorate worth $50 million but we can’t have it because this Government borrowed $97.5 billion for COVID and took $50 billion on a study for a cycling bridge in Auckland that they didn’t even build. By the way, if they had built it, for the last 100 days today the people of Auckland couldn’t have used their push bikes on it, even if they had wanted to, because they have been locked down. They’re the ones that are doing it hard.

This is not a good piece of legislation. Members opposite are trying to say that the Opposition is not supportive of business. Actually, we are the ones that have been advocating for and making the case for small businesses up and down the country in lockdown and getting the Government to make the changes. We heard the Minister in the committee of the whole House stage say that actually they saw there was a problem with one of the payments, and if your business was younger than six months you didn’t get the payment, and they made the change of one month. We were here in lockdown arguing for that when they did it. I’m glad they did but they should have done it earlier. This is a Government under COVID that only shows urgency when they’re forced to and often when it’s too late.

The announcement today from the Prime Minister of the opening of the border is more than disappointing. It is misleading in as far as its usefulness for people that want to get home. The Government still cannot tell us tomorrow on television, the Prime Minister will not be able to answer, why it is that a young Kiwi that wants to come home and see a family, that’s been overseas for more than a year because they can’t get back to New Zealand, they live in Australia, they’re double vaccinated, they’ve taken every test they can to show they haven’t got COVID, it’s safe for them to come back on 15 January, but not on 24 December to see mum and dad for Christmas. The reason the Prime Minister won’t answer that, there is not a reason.

The Government says that actually they’re transitioning to the traffic light system. There’s hardly a person in the country, including the Prime Minister, that knows what it’s having to actually do. Do you know what the Government has to do? Stop making up rules day after day after day when members of the public or the media find a problem. Get a plan, explain it clearly, make sure it works, and then get out of the way of hard-working Kiwis. They want to work hard. They want to earn more. They want to run their businesses. They do not want small Government handouts that will amount to $175 for a family when their rents have gone up by more than $100, their petrol’s gone up, their food’s gone up, everything they can imagine has gone up, and now they call themselves the working poor because they have to choose between paying the rent or feeding the kids often. They don’t want handouts from this Government. They want a Government that supports them. This isn’t one.

That was a very ordinary speech. This is a very ordinary bill. This is a very ordinary Government. Hard-working New Zealanders, businesses large and small, deserve much, much better than us standing here just before midnight rushing something through because this Government couldn’t get around to doing their job properly earlier.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. In one week’s time, this country will transition into the COVID-19 Protection Framework, and for Aucklanders that is incredibly welcome, but it does mean that some technical changes need to be made to current legislation to enable continued support to take place. Can I start by acknowledging the Minister of Revenue for his work but also the Government for the support packages that they have put in place to Auckland businesses. The businesses that I speak to speak very highly of the Resurgence Support Payments that have been in place and the $1.4 billion that has backed local businesses throughout this very, very difficult period.

But there are two particular elements to this bill—the changes to the family tax credits that will allow increases from 1 April next year. If we don’t make this change now, then that is not able to happen. This is why this particular bill needs to happen, along with continuing the COVID support payment system. It needs to match up with the protection framework that we move into in one week’s time. I commend this bill to the House.

I rise to bring this bill of urgency home. As I do, I would actually like to acknowledge Mr Bayly on the other side of the House. Throughout the entire time of urgency, I have to say Mr Bayly, you have shown a lot of energy from the beginning—a lot of energy. But I’d have to say by the end you have been rather flat.

Now, I think that we need to make it absolutely clear that this is a necessary piece of urgency as we prepare to go to the new framework, where the entire country will be able to move into this new framework, where we’ll enable the opportunity for businesses who need resurgence support to have that delivered. This is why I will commend this bill to the House and thank everyone here who has been supporting it. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. And we are coming to the conclusion of this. I won’t try to match my dear friend Andrew Bayly’s energy, but I will be equally enthusiastic—enthusiastic about the fact that we are sick to death of a Labour Party who fails to plan, because that is why we are here at 20 to 12. In 20 minutes, Auckland will have been in lockdown for 100 days. So we are here debating, under urgency, legislation that is supposedly about Taxation (COVID-19 Support Payments and Working for Families Tax Credits), but if you’re a business—whether you’re in Auckland or you’re a business in Taupō that’s been severely affected by the fact that Auckland’s been in lockdown for nearly 100 days—you are none the wiser in terms of what support you will get, when you will get it, how much it will be, and how it will be delivered. So I actually find it’s quite insulting.

I started my first business at 19, and I want to pay tribute to every business owner out there, because I can’t really even begin to imagine how hard it’s been. So I find it really insulting to be passing, under urgency, legislation that doesn’t give them any clarity—no certainty, no information, no detail about what support might be available in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

So the Government gets excited about the traffic light system, and the only colour they like is red. So they tell us that Auckland’s going to start in red. And for how long and what support will be available? What financial support will be available for businesses when Auckland goes into red? And what about the rest of the country? Are we going into orange? No one’s going into green.

💬 Stuart Smith: No, no.

Stuart, you’re not going into green—we know that for a fact. So in terms of this business support package, I think this is yet another example of a Government that is overpromising and under-delivering. Sounds good, sounds exciting, here’s the business support, but actually no detail.

And then we move into the Working for Families tax credits. We heard speakers on the other side talk about the fact that this is being delivered now and it’s under urgency because COVID’s affected middle-income New Zealand families and low-income families. Well, actually, this was happening anyway. This has got nothing to do with COVID. Labour members must stop using COVID as an excuse for everything. If you’re going to Consumers Price Index (CPI) adjust Working for Families and Best Start payments that were going to happen anyway, don’t then say, oh, you’re doing it because everyone’s had a tough time under COVID. No. Be honest. Be upfront. Tell the population—

💬 SPEAKER: Order! Order! Sorry, I apologise for interrupting the member. If members are going to have conversations which need their masks off, please leave the Chamber.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. So we tolerate time and time again, day after day, everything being blamed on COVID. So when you stand in this House and pass legislation under urgency, let’s be honest with the public, the Working for Families tax credits is simply a CPI adjustment with a couple of bucks a week extra thrown in. The Best Start payment, 61c—61c over and above the CPI adjustment—yippee, excitement! So at least be upfront with the public and don’t put everything on COVID. Don’t, as my colleague the Hon Michael Woodhouse suggested, profess to be this absolute saviour and this very, very generous Government that is just giving out cash willy-nilly. Well, actually $5 a week—our view is if you were going to do anything, you should have let those people who are in work keep more of what they earned in the first place.

And the third thing was this is meant to be delivering on Jacinda Ardern’s big promise to lift 100,000 children out of poverty. So again, the big promise: no delivery. Oh, so we’ll just tuck it into—we’ll say it a few times in this bill that we’re debating in Parliament under urgency and it’ll sound like we’re doing something. Well, guess what, the members opposite, when they gave their first reading speeches, couldn’t even get the numbers right. So here’s the numbers for you: 2017, Jacinda Ardern promised to lift 100,000 children out of poverty. On the measures she used then to where we are now, there are 1,500 more children in poverty—1,500 more. So you’re not even going in the right direction yet. And to suggest—and there’s not that many days in the House that Jan Logie and I agree, but we agreed on many things tonight. That $5 a week, do not oversell this to the New Zealand public. They are not stupid, and it’s insulting to suggest that 350,000 families will be better off as a result of this bill. Five bucks. How much has their rent gone up? Hundred bucks a week.

So I’m very happy to conclude the arguments on behalf that the National Party has put forward tonight under urgency, under duress, and we are opposing the Taxation (COVID19 Support Payments and Working for Families Tax Credits) Bill.

It’s a pleasure to rise and to end this debate. I think we all actually deserve to go home at this point. What I wanted to say, finally, is that I see this bill, the Taxation (COVID-19 Support Payments and Working for Families Tax Credits) Bill, as one I support because it comes out of a united Government that actually has managed to have a very coherent philosophy. And that philosophy is one that has got a sound moral basis. This package—this piece of legislation—will support businesses as we move into a framework where, in fact, they are open, and that’s a good thing. We’re beginning the end of something that has been very traumatic for the country. But, at the other side of this bill, is a piece of work which is about bringing children out of poverty, and I remind the Opposition that those children were in poverty when this Government took over. Thank you. I support the bill.

The Government has informed me that they do not intend to proceed with further legislation. Urgency is therefore concluded. The House is adjourned until 2 p.m. tomorrow.

The House adjourned at 11.48 p.m. (Wednesday)