Taxing the rich is not the way to narrow the gap between rich and poor in New Zealand, Finance Minister Bill English says.
A new OECD report shows the gap is growing faster than in any other developed country and the top 10 per cent now have incomes 10 times that of the poorest 10 percent.
The report, released on Tuesday, says many countries have cut their top tax rates for high earners.
But Mr English says the government has got the tax balance right and closed loopholes.
"No one in New Zealand is proposing significant changes to that - a focus on opportunity, educational achievement and economic growth is the best thing we can do to reduce inequality," he told Radio New Zealand on Wednesday.
Outgoing Labour leader Phil Goff says the gap has widened since National came to power three years ago but admits it began to increase under Labour in the 1980s.
He says the last Labour government under Helen Clark tried to reverse the trend but when National took over it reversed the changes that had been made.
"We've seen more unemployment, many more people on benefits, tax cuts that have given sometimes thousands of dollars a week to the very wealthy while people on low and middle incomes missed out," he said.
The OECD report, called Divided We Stand, works on an inequality index where zero means everybody has the same income and one means the richest person has all the income.
New Zealand scored 0.33, up six percentage points from 1985 when it scored 0.27.
That's the biggest jump of any OECD country.
It's considerably less than the huge margin in the worst countries, Brazil, Russia, China and India, where the wealthy earn 50 times more than the poorest. But New Zealand won the dubious honour of the gap widening the fastest.
NZN