Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Well thank you very much Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT in support of the COVID-19 Response (Taxation and Other Regulatory Urgent Measures) Bill and I think it's a bill worth supporting for some of the clauses that provide relief to businesses struggling with cash flow at this time. I have to say that while the urgency of the situation is obvious to everybody it needs to be clear to everybody that we are legislating at the speed of light. Normally a bill like this would be drafted over several months in consultation with different interest groups by the Government and through the full machinery of Government it would go through a Cabinet process over several weeks it would be introduced to Parliament it would sit there for several days so that everybody could study it and then it would be debated for the first time and debated a second time and a third time with public consultation and committees in between—a process that usually takes a year. Today we've had this bill put on the Table and we have to make a decision and vote on it almost straight away and we should always be wary of that particularly when we get into issues as complex and as notorious for creating unintended consequences as taxation law. Why support it? Well because the temporary loss carry-back scheme allowing businesses that had paid company tax in a prior year to access that tax—effectively bringing tax paid on last year's profits back to this year as a refund—will be vital to a lot of businesses. It's worth noting that a lot of smaller businesses don't often record a lot of profit. They actually cycle income in and out of their owner which could just be one person—and often one person who has put their house up to secure loans to that business—and they won't benefit from this which is why I was pleased to see something called a small-business cash-flow scheme. That sounds fantastic but what I'd say to the Minister of Revenue is that given the speed of the lawmaking there's going to have to be some really good communication about how this works because we've seen it with the case of the business loan guarantee. It's taken three or four weeks before it's emerged what some of the details are and how much is really guaranteed and where in the order of creditors the Government and the Crown versus the borrower actually falls. What borrowers have found in that case is that they actually may have to personally guarantee 100 percent. The Government only guarantees 80 percent after all other avenues such as personal guarantees have been exhausted and that's a communications issue because it's really taken three weeks for most people to understand it. So this small-business cash-flow scheme sounds great; I just hope that the Government does enough communication so that people can understand it and access it. Similarly tax policy treatment of pension and benefit equivalent payments—a very sensible thing for a Government to do. A lot of New Zealanders—I know people and I have constituents stranded overseas through no fault of their own and they don't want to be treated differently from the point of view of taxation due to those circumstances beyond their control. I'll just comment briefly on the credit contracts Act legislation being brought into force earlier. As a member of the Finance and Expenditure Committee I was heavily involved in that bill being made and I have to say my judgment was that the Government made a call that was wrong to ignore all the advice it had previously received that capping rates of interest would not actually achieve what it wanted because there were so many workarounds. All it would do is make loans more administratively burdensome and not actually reduce the interest charged and that's been the experience of the UK. I don't really understand why. Some unkind people might say that for political expediency the Government abandoned that advice and introduced it but I don't think it's a very good bill and I'm not sure that it's going to have the effects intended. But it was going to happen anyway so we support it in this instance. So it's a bill that is going to have some help—a few hits a few misses—but on the whole it is worthwhile supporting and so I commend it to the House. Thank you Mr Speaker.