Stanford Erica; Rurawhe AdrianERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. I rise to speak in opposition to this frankly atrocious and outrageous tourist tax. I will start by just speaking to Ms Sage's point that tourists don't pay their fair share. Tourists in this country pay $1.7 billion in tax each year—each year. Like I said they paid last year they paid this year and they will pay next year. They pay their fair share. It is this Government's choice not to use that tax in a prudent way to fund conservation infrastructure and tourism initiatives. That is their choice. There is plenty of money. Tourists pay their fair share every single day. I'd be furious frankly if I was a tourist operator tonight. Kelvin Davis has done nothing for tourism as I mentioned earlier. If I was a jetboat operator or a tour guide operator I would feel angry because he's done nothing in the last 18 months for the sector. He cut $7 million. He hasn't given them any additional funding and then he brings this bill. He brings a bill that his own officials say is going to bring 20000 fewer visitors to our shores and cost $70 million in lost revenue. He's going to take $40 million for his tourist initiatives and divvy it up as he decides back to the sector—to a sector that already doesn't trust him. They don't even get their say. These poor tourist operators—these mum and dad small businesses out there trying to make their way—don't even get to have a say because he hasn't been out to consult them. Now with this rushed process—in the dead of night as Minister Mr Scott Simpson said—they don't get to have their say through the consultation process. It doesn't sound great. As he has often done—I have heard it before from him—Mr Davis says Well actually National just obviously don't want to do anything." But that's not the case at all. We just want to do it smarter. That I think is the point. Just because we oppose the bill doesn't mean we want to do nothing. In fact what we'd like to see this Minister do is use some of the $1.7 billion that he gets or even the Provincial Growth Fund. We've got another Minister racing around the country splashing cash out willy-nilly—can't spend it fast enough—and with absolutely no probity on his own pet projects. We've got plenty of money to spend but this Government is hell-bent on taxing everything that moves including our international visitors and putting our tourism at risk. Now I want to go back to talking about Australians because I didn't get to it in my first speech. What I wanted to say was that 40 percent of the visitors that come to our shores are from Australia. If we were to apply this levy to them they would bring in an additional $36 million. Now the Minister came out tonight and he defended exempting Australians and he made the excuse that "Oh actually we don't want to put this at risk because they don't spend as much as everybody else and it's a greater proportion." You know he made all these excuses. But the reality is not that. The reality is not that at all. Firstly in the bill he has the regulation-making powers if he so decides to prescribe different amounts or methods of calculation in the levy in respect of different categories or classes of person. If he wanted to he could charge Australians less. By his own rationale he could actually as the bill points out charge them less so that they pay their fair share as Minister Sage wants everyone to pay their fair share. So it's clearly in there. There's nothing stopping him. The reason that he can't charge Australians the visitor levy is he's got no mechanism to do it. That's what he won't tell you. He can't levy the tax on the electronic travel authority (ETA) because Australians won't be able to use the ETA. So that's actually the real reason. He has every other ability under this bill to charge them a smaller amount. So his excuses tonight don't make sense.What Minister Davis is saying though—and I found it quite interesting—is "We don't want to put this very important market at risk—this 40 percent." But he's quite prepared to put the other 60 percent at risk for some reason—that doesn't matter. But these people have choices. New Zealand is an expensive place to come to and already we are losing. I read the other day that German Dutch and many other European tourists are being put off by the high cost of coming here. This is just another thing that will make them pick somewhere else. Now one of the other things I wanted to do in my contribution is to talk about the process. We've heard a bit tonight from the Hon Todd McClay about the unnecessary speed of this bill. Mr Davis had 18 months to bring this bill to the House and—let's be honest and let's be fair—there's not a huge amount to it. We can tell clearly that not a lot of thought's gone into it. So what was stopping the Minister bringing this bill to the House months and months ago or indeed last year? It's not a huge bill. It doesn't do anything particularly apart from the fact that it just gives Minister Davis all of these fancy regulation-making powers that we've got no idea what he's going to do. Even the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment officials have said that more consultation was needed and a select committee process should take place. But no Minister Kelvin Davis knows best.International visitors already pay their fair share. Now if this Government was serious about tourism and they were serious about conservation infrastructure they would have already funded it over the last 18 months from the $1.7 billion they get every year. But they chose to fritter that away. They chose to use it on wasteful spray-and-walk-away working groups and many other failed policies. Instead our tourism industry is going to be put at risk and we're going to probably see 20000 visitors fewer each year because of their inability to look past anything other than tax. For those reasons we will be opposing this bill. Thank you. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): I call Marja Lubeck—five minutes."