Andrew Nicholl

And if you look back at the UK, so this year, the government's expected to take in almost $10 billion, which is about $20 billion New Zealand dollars, just from capital gains tax.

Now,

Their housing economy is not something we should chase after at the moment, but surely there's a middle ground.

You keep using this word complicated, like it's so sophisticated that no one's ever going to be able to figure out.

I do think that the current system where we keep flipping between like two years and 10 years and five years, that's so much more complicated than it has to be.

It should just be a blanket amount.

But my last point is that the current system, it rewards holding assets and it punishes people going to work.

It punishes labour.

And I'll tell you why I think like this.

So the IRD did the High Wealth Individuals Research Project in April 2023.

And they took a look at 311 of the wealthiest families in New Zealand.

Median wealth, by the way, was $106 million.

Like these people are rich.

And most of the economic income each year, and when I say most, I'm talking about 80%, it came from capital growth.

Now, the effective tax rate for these people was under 9%.

It was 8.9%.

The medium wage earner gets paid a salary, which is fully taxed, and the effective tax rate is kind of 20%.

So how is that a reasonable way of collecting revenue?

No, no, no.

I see what you did there.