Stephen Knight

The other thing that I'd just mention is one of my favorite, like, former ministers of the New Zealand government is Peter Dunn.

He was the revenue minister.

He was the leader of United Future with a bow tie, right?

Do you remember him?

You've brought him up no less than once a week since the time I met you.

So yes, I remember Peter Dunn.

And it's not because I ever voted for him, right?

It's just that I thought that what he said made a lot of sense.

And when talking about a capital gains tax, I remember him saying that the job of taxation is to raise revenue for the government's programs.

It's not necessarily for the tax system to be perfectly fair.

The sole purpose of tax...

is to raise revenue for the government's programs.

And we currently do that through income tax because it's extraordinarily regular.

People's income doesn't tend to fluctuate up and down wildly every single year.

And so it's the same with GST.

People spend pretty consistently and we can have reasonably open rates.

It's very simple to tax income.

It's very simple to tax spending.

It is much more difficult to tax capital because you're not going to make a capital gain every year.

If you buy an investment property, and let's say you've done really well out of life and you've got five investment properties, you're not going to be selling one every year.