Stephen Knight

Otherwise, after five years, you're going to run out.

And the exact amount of capital gains that you've made depends on the market at the time.

And so if you're thinking about, okay,

We're going to move from a highly efficient way of raising revenue from the government, primarily through GST and income tax, to a much more complicated way.

Well, is that really the best idea as opposed to just raising the revenue in a very simple way through income tax?

and spending taxes.

I suppose my main point here is that the tax system is not necessarily there to be fair because life's not fair.

The reason we tax labour and not capital isn't fairness, it's practicality.

And we've got a very simple and genuinely useful tax system in my mind.

What have you got to say to that?

Andrew Nicol, you know, as well as I do, that that paper that you're referring to

was complete BS because it completely ignored the family home for the average Kiwi, which is where a lot of us have most of our wealth.

So it massively understates the amount of wealth generated by the median wage earner.

And it ignored the fact that it only...

looked at the period from, I think it was 2017 to 2022 or 2016 to 2021.

So it included this massive increase in asset prices from COVID, most of which have decreased in many parts of the country now.

So they're looking at a small period where the housing market boomed, but oh no, we're going to ignore the largest asset that the average Kiwi has.

So in my mind,

they rigged the dice, they loaded the dice right from the start, just so that David Parkett could come out and say, oh, look, there is a difference in tax rates.

The other thing is, you were very sneaky there, if I can say so myself, with the word economic income.