New Zealand politics - Page 2

Rodney Hide MP
Finance Spokesman
http://www.act.org.nz
Office: +64 4 4706630; Mobile: +64 25 772 385
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 22 FEBRUARY 2000
For more information contact:
Trish Sherson: Office: +64 4 4706644; Mobile: +64 25 570 803
tricia.sherson@parliament.govt.nz
SPEECH
New Zealand On $100 Million A Day
Rodney Hide MP
January 1999

Aristotle observed that man is a social animal. And that’s certainly true. We spend so
much of our lives, most of our lives, very little of our lives doing anything other than
doing things for other people and having them do things for us. That’s how we live.
And when you think about it for a moment there are three ways and only three ways to
get another human being to do something for you.

The first, and I believe it’s the most powerful, is love. We do things for our wives, for
our husbands, for our children – and likewise they do things for us – simply because
they love us. And we can ask them to do things for us. And they will do them no
questions asked. We have close friends that will do things for us if we just ask them.
Love is an amazingly powerful force for people doing things for other people.

The incredible thing about love is that it quickly attenuates. It doesn’t reach down the
end of the street. So if your neighbour at the farthest end of the street asks you to do
something that your wife or your husband or your children might ask you to do, saying,
“Please, do it for love”, you’re unlikely to be moved that way. So love is powerful but
it’s just for a few people in our lives – our family and our closest friends.

The other great motivator – the other way of getting people to do things for us – is
through trade. “You do this for me and I will give you this. You give me that and I will
give you this”. And that ladies and gentlemen is the most powerful mechanism for
social organisation right around the world. It’s what we do in our work. Look around
this room and realise that everything here was produced by trade, by the capitalist
spirit, by markets, by business, by the search for profits. That’s the power of trade.
And it’s terribly respectful because it recognises that the other person doesn’t have to
do it. And so it gives them something in return and if they choose to do it, and the price
is right, they will.

There is a third way of getting people to do things for you: force, the gun. You put a
gun to a person’s head and you say “Do this, or I’m going to pull the trigger”. That is
the third way of getting people to do things for you.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am an MP, a Member of Parliament, I’m a politician. Today I
stand before you and I represent the gun. I represent the force in our society to get
things out of people.

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The gun and force have delivered nothing good in the world. This past century has
been a terribly destructive century. Millions have been killed because of the gun,
because of politicians and because of Government. And that’s what I stand before you
to represent and you people, you folks, you represent the traders. The people who
produce, not through the gun, but by getting out, making a living and trading.
The socialist of all descriptions are interesting because they hate trade. They hate the
thought that you can go to someone and do a deal. They hate that. They hate that
people can make money. They think it is somehow exploitative. And they believe that
everything should be done for love. They want all of society organised like we organise
our families.

And what happens when they try that? They quickly discover everywhere it has been
tried, all through the ages, that love doesn’t stretch far enough, that it doesn’t reach
down the street. And so we end up the totalitarian dictators with the gun at the
peoples’ head and saying if you’re not going to do it for love, you’re going to do it for
this reason because if you don’t do it I’ll pull the trigger.

I think it’s fair to say talking to people here and listening to the conversations that you
think that Government wastes money. I think it is fair to say that people sitting in the
audience think that we have too much Government, too much bureaucracy. By the
time I finish here today, you’re going to know it. Because I’m going to take you on an
insider’s journey into politics. What the politicians don’t tell you about how it works and
I’m going to take you right back to the very day that I turned up in Parliament and some
of the things that I’ve learnt about what they’re doing with your money.

ACT campaigned for three years to get into Parliament with as a new “less tax, less
government” party and we achieved 6.2% of the vote and got eight seats. I’d worked
very, very hard, but I was like the dog chasing the car, having arrived in Parliament
following the election I didn't know what to do. No MP gets a job description, you don’t
have a boss and I flew to Wellington and I went in and got an office and I was sitting in
my office wondering, “What does an MP do”? There are MPs that have been there for
twenty years and still ask that question.

And there was a telephone there so I rang all my friends in Wellington. He wasn’t
home.

On my desk was a computer, so I turned it on. This to me symbolised so much. And
the computer starts. I’ve never heard a computer like this before. It goes, ga-ching,
ga-ching, ga-ching, ga-ching. It was like it was just not connecting with the network or
something. And I went out – like all Politicians do – to get a cup of coffee. And have a
rest. And I came back with my cup of coffee, and it’s still going, ga-ching, ga-ching, gaching,
ga-ching, ga-ching. And then after several minutes of this, I got “Windows”.

Amazing. And then I pushed the little icon for “Word”. Ga-ching, ga-ching, ga-ching,
ga-ching, ga-ching, and again, I finished my cup of coffee, and then it appeared
“Word”.

I started to type and it couldn’t keep up. “Hey, this isn’t good enough”, I thought. This
isn’t going to work, you know, I’m in Parliament, I’ve got to have the gear. So I got the
parliamentary directory. There’s a thousand people that work in Parliament in New
Zealand. I should say on the payroll in Parliament. A thousand people on the payroll
and I found there is a man in charge of computers called John Preval and I rung him
up. I said “Hello John, it’s Rodney Hide”. He said, “What can I do for you”. I said, “It’s
about my computer”. He said, “Hang on, I’ll be there in a minute”. And the door

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everyone just yawned – “Oh yeh, who cares?” But they heard about that $29,170 on
cabs and they said, “this is an outrage”. Because that is an amount that we can feel,
that is an amount that represents something and then you have to ask yourself, “how
could you spend $29,000 on a cab?”

That’s enough to go from Auckland to London and in Jonathan’s case, still have the
odd trip into town for dinner.

Five billion dollars that’s what the Government had just announced. Does anyone
know what a billion dollars looks like? Well, I will tell you. Imagine you have a bundle
of a hundred-dollar notes, it’s a centimetre thick. There’s ten thousand dollars in it.
You slap it down on the table, bang, put another bundle on top, there’s twenty
thousand, another bundle on top, that’s thirty thousand, that’s Jonathan’s taxi bill; it’s
only three centimetres high. Another bundle, forty, fifty, sixty thousand. How high does
a billion reach? It’s a kilometre. It’s a kilometre. We were worried about three
centimetres and the Government had just announced spending of five kilometres high
of hundred dollar notes. That’s how much a billion dollars represents. And so behind
that campaign to clean up the MPs and fund them properly and to reveal their
accounts, was a very serious message that these guys have got to get real with your
money which seems a reasonable ask I would have thought.

The next big thing that happened and highlights about Government was the plans to
build the new executive wing. I moved into a new office tower and it is very nice and I
got wind of the fact that they were planning a new executive wing. And, I asked
around, it was going to cost one hundred million dollars, and I have to say I was new to
politics and a hundred million still sounded like a lot of money to me. So I inquired a bit
more and then discovered that we didn’t need this building. So the ACT caucus, eight
MPs met, and convinced ourselves that we didn’t need it and we would organise a
campaign against it.

Richard Prebble dubbed it the Parliamentary Palace, which did more to kill it than
anything else we did. Over 200,000 New Zealanders in three weeks signed a petition
opposing the Palace. That’s 10% of the voting public, against the Palace – mad
Socialists signed it, right wingers signed it, everyone signed it. People like us signed it
too. Sane, reasonable, intelligent people like us – signed that petition. That petition
came into Parliament and we forced a parliamentary inquiry. I forced it into the public
and so the select committee had to sit there and we heard from every interest group
under the sun, from the CTU, that is the Union, the hard core union, to the Business
Roundtable which is the sort of hard core business representative interest group lobby
in New Zealand, and they’re all against the Palace. Submission after submission after
submission said this Palace is nuts. There was only one submission that we got by the
way that was in favour of it and that was from a little union in the construction industry
based in Wellington. And they had some very cogent arguments that the committee
picked up on. We had three days of public hearings and we went back into committee.
Back in the Committee room, the MPs were all in favour of the Palace. “Well,” I said,
“that’s all right. Let’s vote on it. I’m against, who is for?” “Oh, I’m not going to vote,”
they said. I said, “Why not?” “Well, you will just tell everyone how we voted. You are
just going to go into our electorate and leaflet everyone and say, you know, that this
MP and that MP, and we all voted for the Palace.” And I said, “that’s right. Let’s vote.”
Oh, no one wanted to vote. We need to talk about it some more. We met for three

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further weeks to discuss it. Who is in property development in the audience? OK,
who’s done a hundred million-dollar development, that’s big, one hundred million is big.
I said let’s have a look at the financials. Don McKinnon who is the senior National
party politician on the fiscally-conservative side, he said, “You know it’s not a lot of
money Rodney, what are you beefing about?” It’s a hundred million. I now know what
he was getting at. Politicians in New Zealand spend one hundred million dollars each
and every day – three hundred and sixty five days of the year. A hundred million to a
politician is not a lot of money. But it’s a million New Zealanders paying one hundred
dollars. And a hundred dollars is a lot. And a million people is certainly a lot, and a
hundred million dollars is a lot.

We discovered that there were no financials done. There was no comparison of costs.
I kicked up about this and the financials were duly prepared. I have seen numbers,
ladies and gentlemen, that have been cooked. These weren’t cooked; they were
poached, they were fried, they were scrambled – the benefits were double-counted,
costs were netted out. It was just garbage. Turned out that we would have built this
one hundred million-dollar building for nothing – which is pretty impressive even by
New Zealand Government standards. We had the Minister in front of us and I started
to question him and his officials about these numbers. I got three minutes into it ladies
and gentlemen and the chairman of the select committee said, “Look, we don’t want to
get bogged down in the minutiae do we”, and shut me up. Talking about spending one
hundred million dollars to a politician is getting bogged down in the minutiae. Can you
believe that?

I was brought up a Protestant, I’m not religious now, but my parents were Methodist,
Presbyterian and Anglican, sounds like I had three parents, no, we moved around in
the country. And it has left me with this terrible thing about having fun. I don’t know
what Methodism was like outside of North Canterbury, but in North Canterbury having
fun was sinful and the next thing was spending money. And to this day I still struggle
spending money. I was brought up that you just earned money, I don’t what you did
with it, you just put it in your sock, like my father did, and you just let inflation take care
of it. And so I have this terrible problem about spending money and here I am a
politician spending millions and millions and millions.

I go home most nights with a knot in my stomach just from watching millions and
millions being spent, you can imagine how it feels. And you walk out of Parliament or
you come home to Auckland or you go on the road and you go to the Taranaki or to
Gisborne, or you go anywhere, and you see how hard people work and you see what
ten or twenty or thirty dollars a week means to them and you view and realise the
contempt with which Government and politicians spend that money and it makes me
personally ill. Because it is not our money to spend. It’s your money. And I think you
should spend other people’s money much more carefully than you spend your own. Of
course, we do the reverse.

By the way, politicians enjoy it. Just like the IRD enjoy watching you shiver and shake,
politicians enjoy spending money and I know this for a fact because I was sitting in a
committee once and a politician slumped down beside me and to give him his due, he
was from the left wing party and so I guess by wasting money he was following their
policy line, but he just said “You won’t believe what has just happened in the meeting
we just had”. I said “What’s that?” He said “We just agreed to spend another two
million dollars, imagine that,” and he started laughing and I said “What on?” And he
said, “Buggered if I know. But two million, can you imagine it?” I said, “I might tell
audiences that”, and he shut up.

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Five months previously he had been an ordinary bloke, toiling away. Got elected to
Parliament, suddenly had access to the back pocket of all the people in this room. And
he had just raided it and spent some dough and it felt good. It felt great. Felt that he
was doing God’s work and improving the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. Because they
work hard, do lots of good work.

But back to this Palace. So we struggled around with it and they didn’t want to vote.
And we got all the plans out and everyone was trying to look for a way forward and I
was obstinate. And what I have decided to do in politics is that I don’t fight all the
battles that one can fight, I just pick one or two, and I just be obstinate on those one or
two. They had all the plans out and you will know that Parliament has this beautiful old
stone building, built in the depression, and then beside that, that ugly Beehive built in
sixties, and someone said, “Isn’t it a shame that the Beehive is right where it is,
because if it wasn’t there we could finish Parliament”. So I said “Well, why don’t we
shift the Beehive.” I said it as a joke. The next week we came back and the officials
had prepared plans for shifting the Beehive. The Beehive weighs 20,000 tons, it’s solid
concrete, it would have been the third largest building in the world ever to have been
shifted. All you need to know about the economics of shifting large buildings is that the
other two were all in the former USSR. I am sitting there with a typical political
dilemma. What do I do now? Everyone is jumping about, saying, “Yeah, we’ll shift the
Beehive, what do you think Rodney?”

I decided on a cunning plan. I said, “That’s a good idea, let’s look at it.” We would
write the report saying, “We would shift the Beehive subject to getting the costs
checked out” and that would get the committee moving, everyone would laugh like you
did about shifting the Beehive and it would kill it, and would kill the Palace with it,
because we recommended against the Palace. So all that happened, the report was
prepared, and New Zealanders, you will remember this, they just roared with horror,
laughter, disgust, that here they had prepared a 200,000 signed petition, they had gone
to the select committee and beaten up the politicians, and the politicians had gone
away and thought about it saying, “The people of New Zealand don’t want to waste
money on a Palace, so we will spend twice that and we will shift the Beehive”.
At that point voters started to think that their government was out of touch. And I
thought – that’s great, that’s it dead!

Three weeks later I get a phone call from the Holmes Show saying, “The Prime
Minister has just announced that as part of the millennium project, the Government is
going to shift the Beehive”. I couldn’t believe it. I went on the Holmes Show with the
Prime Minister. And he was losing. I didn’t have to say much. I just kept saying “put it
on wheels Prime Minister, put it on wheels Prime Minister?” And I just shook my head
like this guy is nuts. I didn’t say anything, I just shook my head – what is wrong with
this guy? And then Prime Minister Bolger, got on the attack and he said “But Rodney
Hide, Rodney Hide, you were part of the committee that recommended this”. And I
was just sitting there and the camera just went on me, and I felt like saying “It was only
a joke Prime Minister – I never thought anyone would be stupid enough to ever take it
seriously.” But I faded at the critical moment and I said something a bit softer than that.
And of course, the public were outraged and that was killed.

But think about it, hundred million. We spend a hundred times that in New Zealand on
welfare a year. A hundred times that, on welfare in a year and what do we buy?
Misery, broken homes, kids not being looked after. Do we see a petition being
generated about that – no.

But these examples illustrate the politician’s propensity to spend money without regard
to the people who earned it. To the people that it actually belongs to, to the people that

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we represent and who give us this money, presumably for good purpose, not for bad
purpose. And that’s what’s happened around Governments around the world.

About this time in Parliament I realised I was suffering some sort of cultural shock.
When you do any job, it has a culture and you quickly learn it and you get comfortable
with it. I used to drive trucks a lot as a living and when you are a truck driver, you meet
other truck drivers and you talk about horse power, and tonnage, and the quickest
routes, and who can carry the most the fastest, and you have that smell of diesel about
you. I then went in and taught at university, and the same thing. You talk about
lecturing and about students learning and about research. And that has a culture too.
If you’re in business, it has a culture of profit and loss, of talking about customers, of
talking about what works and here I was in Parliament, and this culture just didn’t fit. It
didn’t make sense, I was out of tune with it. I felt like a person behind enemy lines.
The language was all different. The social mores were all different. Everything was
different about it to what anything I had ever experienced in my life.

And I have discovered what it is. It is because Parliament and politics and
Governments and politicians, we don’t produce anything actually. We don’t produce
anything. And it is very hard to have a culture like that you are familiar with if you’re not
producing something, because that’s what you talk about, that’s your reason for getting
up in the morning, to go there and get in that truck and shift some freight, or teach
some kids, or make some money. Politics? The only thing we do is spend and that is
the culture, it is a spending culture. There’s not a problem out there that a politician
can’t fix by throwing more of your money at it. He knows actually, and she knows, that
it won’t fix it, but it looks good. There you go, throw some money, that will fix it.
Where’s the next one? And people love you when you throw money at them even
though it is their money. Sort of with about 50% siphoned off on the way through. So
it’s a spending culture.

There is another thing about politics that I discovered. I call politics “decision making
without property rights” because no politician or Government Official owns anything.
They don’t have any assets, and they don’t have any liabilities, as we understand the
phrase. So, no one fixes problems. No one says yeah, that’s a problem let’s fix it.
People in this room, you all have assets and liabilities. If your business or your
property is in trouble you have got to put your hand up and fix it, because it is your
responsibility, you know it, and if you don’t fix it, it is going to cost you. In politics we’re
not like that. Ho, here’s a problem, oh good, shove it to that guy, flick, and he gets it
and oh, oh, I don’t want this problem, so flick. And then finally what we do is we just
shuffle problems into the future for someone else to deal with and then we think that’s a
solution. And you can see problems being shunted around in sound bites on TV.

It is nothing like the capitalist process where there is an owner, where there is an
asset, where future income streams are being capitalised in the value of that asset and
you have to respond to the costs and benefits of that stream and do something about
them. Nothing like that exists in politics. It is all fluff and no substance and that’s why,
that’s why, we look through the veil of politics and feel so deeply frustrated and so
irritated because we know there are real problems in education and health and in
welfare and with Government spending and with bureaucrats out of control, but no-one
in Government will put their hand up and say, “yes, I am responsible for that, watch me,
I’ll fix it”. Never. They shift the problem on to someone else.

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And of course, the root cause of all of this is tax. Tax, it is the lifeblood of the political
process. It’s our ability to get money out of peoples’ pay packets, out of their weekly
budgets, out of the petrol that they buy, out of everything that they do, that feeds us
and allows us to survive. And the tax laws are hugely complex, no one can follow
them. I recently had the New Zealand Inland Revenue Commissioner Graham Holland
before a select committee. And I said, “Commissioner, do you understand the tax laws
of New Zealand”. He just looked at me. Then the committee chairman beat me up and
said, “Oh, you can’t abuse the Commissioner of Inland Revenue like that”. “I wasn’t
abusing him, I was just interested, does he understand the law that here we are
passing”. He doesn’t. The Commissioner of Inland Revenue doesn’t understand all
the tax laws. The dairy owner has to. The plumber has to. Every property developer
has to. But no one can, no-one can sit in this room and feel comfortable that they’ve
obeyed the tax laws of New Zealand because you don’t understand them and take it
from me folks, I sit on the Committee and in the Parliament that passes these things,
and we don’t understand them. We do not understand the tax laws that pass in New
Zealand, it is the same in Australia, the same in Canada, it’s the same in the United
States.

We had to employ a QC on the select committee to advise us about what the IRD were
telling us about the law because we couldn’t understand it. He got confused. They
ended up concluding that the law, this was on international tax, they concluded that it
wasn't perfect, it had a lot of mistakes in it, but we would pass it anyway and fix it up
next year. Can you imagine running your business like that. And we’re running the
country. We not only spend money ladies and gentlemen, we make laws just to put
you in the right box.

Tell you one law we passed, it was under urgency. Urgency is a big deal. It goes into
urgency, important things to be done. You sit there all hours and everyone fights and
scraps – I love it. And came up under urgency and people may have missed this. But
we passed in 1997, under urgency, the Medical Auxiliary (Podiatrists) Amendment Bill.
Now podiatrists are foot doctors, you know they blow your corns off and cut your
toenails. And we had a very serious problem confronting New Zealand. Because, we
have a Podiatrists’ Board just to check that the people that are doing podiatry are
kosher, and they have a set of exams and a certificate that you get and in 1984 the
Government changes the rules and said, because we had immigrant podiatrists, and
they just used to come in and they would satisfy the board and they would get a
certificate too. But the Government in 1984 changed the rules and said, that they
could no longer just come in willy nilly, but they have to sit the New Zealand exam for
podiatry in order to be duly qualified. That was great, that passed in 1984. However,
no one told the Podiatrists’ Board. And of course, you remember the 1984-1996
period, podiatrists were just sweeping into New Zealand from overseas and the
Podiatrists’ Board was giving them their certificates if they said they said that they had
been taught at Harvard or somewhere. But this was illegal. And so what we had to do
was pass under urgency, retrospective legislation that would enable eleven immigrant
podiatrists to practice here in New Zealand like they had been doing for several years.
I don’t know about you folks but I find it sort of scary that we have a Podiatrists’ Board.
I find it sort of scary that you need a licence to cut someone’s toenails for a fee. I find it
sort of scary that Parliament had to pass a law to make it legal for eleven immigrant
podiatrists to practice here. What I find really scary was that our Parliament spent one
hour and forty minutes debating it.

At the time, our schools are in crisis, kids are going there spending years and years of
school not getting educated, our health system is a mess, 120,000 people queued up

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in agony — paid tax all their life, can’t get treated. Pension schemes busted with a
bang, it’s bankrupt. We had the downturn that was winding down the economy,
provincial New Zealand was bleeding, but don’t worry, we’re in Parliament under
urgency debating for one hour and forty minutes the Medical Auxiliary (Podiatrists)
Amendment Bill to make sure eleven podiatrists weren’t here acting illegally. If you
ever wonder why politicians are so boring, you try talking for ten minutes about
podiatry. And about the effect illegal immigrants practising podiatry has on the social
fabric of New Zealand. I watched it done.

So we pass laws, we pass laws, we pass tax laws and the tax laws that we have in
New Zealand, we don’t understand them, thousands and thousands of pages of these,
we’re supposed comply, God knows how you can. And think about the power that they
shift across to the tax department. The awesome powers and the comparison is to the
Police.

In New Zealand, the IRD can bust into your business, into your dairy, into your
plumbing shop, into your farm, they can bust into it, any hour of the day and they don’t
need a warrant. The Police can’t do that. The Police might be chasing Son of Sam
and they’ve got to get a warrant. They might be chasing the worst rapist in history and
they’ve got to get a warrant, and they are trained. But these IRD officers with very little
training, who are up against, you know, really scary people like plumbers and
paperhangers, people that work for a living. They have powers to enter your business
at the drop of a hat and do a search. Your Parliament gave that department those
powers. They have powers to require you to answer every question that they put to
you. If you are scumbag murderer or rapist, you can say, “I’m not answering that
question”, but if you are a dairy owner you had better, and it’s the IRD you have to,
because if you don’t they can hit you with a fine for $25,000.

Are we starting to talk like our values are upside down. That we have rights to protect
the criminal class but the productive class, the working class, the people that create all
the wealth have no rights when confronted with the tax department after its pound of
flesh and pint of blood.

They have the ability to assert that you owe a debt and it is your job to prove that you
don’t. Nowhere else in our legal processes do we have that. We believe that we
have a free society, a capitalist society, a democracy where you’re innocent until you
are proven guilty. That’s true if you’re a murderer, that’s true if you’re a rapist, that’s
true if you’re a burglar, that’s true if you’re a thug, but if you’re a taxpayer, it’s not true.
You are guilty until you prove that you are innocent. So the department can allege a
million-dollar debt and you have to prove that you don’t owe it. How can you prove that
you don’t owe it, when you don’t even know what it’s about? And they’re not required
by law to tell you what it’s about. They can just assert it. Not only can they assert a
debt against you, but even before it goes to Court you have to cough up half. Can you
imagine that? You’re paying for your lawyers, you’re paying for your accountants,
you’ve got this big debt, you have to pay half even before your case is heard. This is
an outrage. And these tax laws are having a huge consequence. There are two
problems with tax. It’s too much, and the laws are too vicious.

The IRD made a mistake a few years back. They brought in some overseas
economists to study the economic impact of tax in New Zealand. They discovered,
contrary to what the IRD thought would happen, that tax is way too high. The IRD
believe their propaganda and believe that tax is great and it’s the price we pay for
civilisation. These economists searching in New Zealand said that if we’d had the tax
take of 20% or 25%, which is still too high, but which is what we had post-war through

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the fifties and sixties, if we had that tax take in New Zealand today, rather than 35%,
that New Zealand would be 50% wealthier. Can you imagine that? Fifty percent
wealthier. It’s not just what they have taken off us that we lose, it is all the lost
opportunities, it’s all the investments, it’s all the businesses, it’s all the jobs that would
have been, if the tax rate hadn’t been so high. Imagine how much richer you would
have been if we hadn’t have had tax for all those years?

You think the department and the politicians would get that report and say, “Oh, this is
great news! We know how to get the economy moving. We know how to create jobs”.
No. They suppressed it. They wouldn’t release it. It took me over twelve months
hounding the department with official information requests as an MP to get my hands
on those documents. This research was paid for with our money. And still they
wouldn’t cough it up, and so tax is having a tremendous impact on our economy, on
our businesses, on our jobs at an economic level but at a personal level too, because
how can you operate in business confidently, concentrating on your customer,
concentrating on your costs when you’ve got this band of thugs, state-sanctioned
thugs, ready to pounce? How can you operate with confidence and with joy as you go
about your job?

I want to end with just one story. There is a guy in New Zealand, he lived on the Kapiti
coast. Ian Lee Mutton was his name. He was a good guy. Father, husband, two little
kiddies, and he was a good sportsman, and he worked and he liked a wee drink and
having fun. And his business was, and he worked hard at it, was putting in air
conditioning units in new office towers. And he had a dream, he dreamt that rather
than working for other people he could go out into business on his own. And he did
that. And he was good at the work, but he was a lousy businessman. He quoted too
low, some of his people didn’t pay, and the costs got out of control. But he persevered
and he learnt. He got to the end of one year 1992, and he owed $6,000 terminal tax.
No big deal, knew he owed it, was going to pay it.

He then had an accident off a ladder at work and broke his ankle and couldn’t work.
He had been assessed for this tax, and the demands kept coming. His ACC, such as it
is for self-employed didn’t come, even though he had been paying it all these years.
So he and his family were suffering no end. Here he was hobbling around on crutches.
He went repeatedly to the IRD with his wife saying, “Look, I can’t pay this”. They
wouldn’t listen to him. He had to pay, they’re the rules. He says, “I’m not working”,
doesn’t matter. He gets back to work, someone smashes his utility up and he has to
spend more money so he can keep working. He pays his tax that year, he pays his tax
the next year, he pays in his next year more tax than he has ever paid in his life as a
percentage. And he gets to the end of that year, and he owes more than he did at the
start. Because the penalties and the interest are just overwhelming him. His
accountant and his business manager go in to see the IRD begging them to give this
guy some relief. He’s working hard, here’s all his accounts, give him some relief. They
wouldn’t.

His marriage split up, his wife couldn’t take the pressure. He was behaving strangely,
the pressure was huge on him. That bills were just being generated by that horrible
computer that the IRD has and they would be arriving at his house in envelopes and in
the finish, he couldn’t even open them, he just threw them in the bin. In his final year,
he went on booze a bit. He didn’t pay any tax, so it mounted, and the debt got to
$45,000. He then snapped out of it, he stopped the drinking, he got back with his wife,
he realised that he had to make his business go bankrupt, stop his dreams, stop his
aspirations. And he got a job working in Queenstown, putting in air conditioning units
working for someone else. All he had in the world at that point was a utility worth
$5,000 and $1,100 worth of tools.

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On the day that he was to leave to Queenstown to take up his new job, the IRD turned
up. They wanted the ute, and the tools, to offset the debt. They were going to take the
very means that he had to make a living. He drove the utility up to the Otaki Gorge and
killed himself. He penned before he died a message to the IRD, saying that “you are
responsible for this, that you have taken everything that I ever had, that I now leave this
world like I came into it, with nothing, but that I beat you, because you no longer going
to get any more out of me,” and he signed, the last thing he did on earth, was to sign
that note, “one happy man”.

The IRD got that note, they turned up at the widow’s house wanting the ute and the
tools. She then, ladies and gentlemen, goes outside and stands on the porch and sees
her twelve-year-old son hanging dead from the tree. He couldn’t take his father’s
death. The IRD have never apologised, never said they have done wrong.

These laws, ladies and gentlemen, they are not just costing us jobs, they’re not just
putting us in fear, but they’re costing good people their lives. That’s what our tax laws
are doing in this country.

And do you know, the basic amount of money that the IRD were chasing Ian Lee
Mutton for wouldn’t pay for one MP’s taxi for a year. Are our values upside down or
not?

I want to leave you with this message. I’m a politician, I’m in Parliament, we have the
guns. We have the flash cars and we have the flags. It’s great driving in a car with
flags. But we have no moral authority. Because we produce nothing. We generate
nothing. We are parasitical on the taxpayers of New Zealand. We are parasitical on
Ian Lee Mutton and we are parasitical on each and every person in this room. The
moral authority, ladies and gentlemen, rests with each and everyone of you, because,
you are the producers, you are the workers, you are the creators, not Government, not
politicians, not bureaucrats, you are. And we will make progress in knocking back the
state when each of you, and I think every one in this room have already done this, but
you need to get your neighbours to do it, and your friends to do it, and your family to do
it, say, “We are not asking government for anything” – because when you ask
Government for things, that’s when you lose your moral authority, that’s when they get
it, and they’re only going to take more than they ever give. Don’t ask the Government
for anything. That’s the key to getting taxes down, and the key to getting taxes down is
say, “This is my money, I earnt it, don’t you spend it”, and ladies and gentlemen, I truly
believe we are going to have a revolution around the western world and it’s going to
start in New Zealand. Because we’ve had enough. It is going to start in New Zealand
and spread to Australia and Australia is going to start cutting its taxes. And when
people see what that is doing to our economy and to our people, America and Canada
will follow. Europe will follow. Because the world is a competitive place and if one
country starts dramatically cutting its taxes, all countries will have to follow. And let’s
hope and pray and work towards that day. Because ladies and gentlemen, when we
have that day, we will have more love, we will have more trade, and we will have less
gun. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is something worth working towards.

ENDS