Bayly AndrewANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): Thank you Madam Speaker and I'd like to congratulate the Minister of Revenue for a beautifully read-out speech. He obviously has taken a lot of time to study this bill and present a comprehensive analysis of what is in the bill. I also want to join him in just congratulating the IRD for its work during the COVID-19 lockdown and administering a number of the schemes. The IRD ended up being a key organisation in terms of delivering some of the benefits to New Zealanders and businesses across New Zealand during a very difficult time. So I just want to publicly acknowledge that.As the Minister has pointed out this is another in a series of tax bills that regularly go through Parliament as we seek to continuously upgrade and improve New Zealand's tax system. And as I've said on many occasions before New Zealand's tax system is the envy of the world. It's simple it's clear it's easily administered but that doesn't necessarily mean we don't continuously need to make changes because smart people always look at different options and essentially that's what a large part of this bill is about. I just want to be clear that whilst the tax rates remain unchanged we will not be supporting this bill. The principal reason for that is that we do not support any proposition where taxes are increased whether they be in the form of a direct tax such as changing personal and company tax rates or in the form of indirect taxes. We are concerned that this Government has already demonstrated a history of making a whole lot of indirect tax changes and increases and probably the most pernicious of those is the Auckland fuel tax but also ring-fencing of losses Amazon tax GST on overseas roaming extended the brightline tax increased WorkSafe levies and cancelled tax relief. So that is one of the reasons we are opposing this bill. But the second reason is that one of the worst impacts on the amount of tax that people pay in New Zealand is actually the impact of inflation. The National Party has put forward a very good policy in my personal view—but I know many New Zealand businesses and people support it—whereby we wish to put in place a scheme that effectively deals with the issue of inflation. So as people's wages and salaries increase naturally as a result of inflation then they inevitably end up going into a higher tax bracket and our $660 million scheme that we've announced earlier this year is one way of dealing with it. Without addressing the issue of inflation effectively New Zealanders end up paying more tax. That's why we believe it is important and it should have been incorporated in a tax bill such as this to see that New Zealanders pay their fair share and no more. That is the principal reason why we won't be supporting that. But the other thing is it gives rise to the whole issue about where we're going with taxes. Yesterday we had the advantage of having the Minister of Finance before the Finance and Expenditure Committee and we were talking about tax. Most people will be aware that the debt has probably already gone from about $60 billion to about $110 billion over the last few months a staggering increase in debt and the amount of interest that will attract was an interesting figure. When I asked the Minister actually how much interest was going to be on that debt he wasn't that certain. But I'm going to be more certain because I know the figure. It's projected to be $3.5 billion. So to put that in context we've just had a firearms debate and the cost to run the police is about $3.5 billion. That will be the equivalent cost that we're going to be increasingly bearing in this country. And as the debt increases to $200 billion it will double; it will be nearly $7.5 billion—a massive amount. That gives rise to the issue of how New Zealand is going to pay for it. How are we going to pay for this staggering increase of debt? We're going to be running deficits at a Crown level a Government level for the next four years totalling just over $100 billion. It is unbelievable. And the big question is: how does the Government pay that money back? That is why we're very concerned about making sure New Zealand is in a position where it can pay that and not necessarily revert to higher taxes and certainly not to a capital gains tax.Anyway with that background I do acknowledge that this bill includes a whole raft of areas that I think will lead to some improvement and of course that is for the Finance and Expenditure Committee to work its way through. The Minister covered those pretty comprehensively. I'm just slightly conscious of the time as we're coming up to 6 o'clock but I think the issue around feasibility and other expenditure is a crucial one. Again this came as a result of a court case between Trustpower and the Commissioner of IRD. The key example for this was many entities and power companies are a classic example of this where they undertake a lot of work—they look at maybe they're going to set up a wind farm whatever it might be—incur a lot of expenditure and they need to be able to offset that expenditure because that was reasonably incurred in the ordinary course of their business. And at the moment we want to make some of that expenditure much more—well more available to be written off by those entities provided it is bona fide expenditure.Debate interrupted.The House adjourned at 6 p.m.