Hughes Gareth: Taxation (Annual Rates for 2015-16 Research and Development and Remedial Matters) Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHughes Gareth: Taxation (Annual Rates for 2015-16 Research and Development and Remedial Matters) Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 16 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:9047. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GARETH HUGHES (Green):Ngāmihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. I just want to touch on one of the last comments the last speaker Alastair Scott made which was “Who’s going to pay for the warm homes?”. Well I am proud that my party has worked with that party and that party to deliver hundreds of thousands of warmer homes. Who is going to pay for it? We agreed it was beneficial—in fact it had a 2:1 cost ratio. So we would like to insulate more of those cold damp and unhealthy homes. And if the Government is just going to stand there and say “Oh well what can we do about it? We can’t do anything about it. Who’s going to pay for it?”people are going to continue to struggle people are going to continue to get sick they are going to go to hospital—and sadly we do see a terribly high number of Kiwis dying as a result of our housing. That is something we want to work on.I rise to support the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2015-16 Research and Development and Remedial Matters) Bill. I do not think any party in this House is likely to put that on an election billboard—the title of this bill—but I do hope that innovation and research and development become an election issue because it is a key defining separation down the corridor of this Chamber.This bill contains a whole bunch of tweaks to GST and bodies corporate Working for Families minor remedial matters and we also see some changes around tax credits and black-hole deductible expenditure. What we see and what the IRD estimates is that the total tax impact of this bill is around $17 million a year. And this is what I mean by the dividing line separating the policies in this Parliament. On this side we see the big change—$17 million in tax. Last election the Greens took a policy of an additional billion dollars—billion with a “b”—in research and development. We want to see a more diversified economy. We want to see a richer economy. We want to see a New Zealand that does not just export those bland brown paper bags of milk powder overseas because there is a limit—and we are seeing it in our waterways.There is no limit to the intellectual property the services the software the products the ideas that we could be coming up with. But if we are going to be just tinkering around the edges with an additional $17 million per annum we are not going to get there. And I think it was quite telling the last member’s contribution. The wheels are well and truly falling off the Government when it cannot talk about its own legislation it cannot talk about its own track record and it would rather talk about Opposition policies. That shows it is rattled. That shows it has run out ideas and it would rather talk about the other side’s ideas. All we are seeing are tweaks.In fact this legislation is a bit of a U-turn because the Government opposed and got rid of tax credits for research and development. What do we see in the Government’s legislation? Tax credits for research and development. Although the Green Party supports it because it is a step in the right direction the Green Party has a vision and a fully costed-out plan to achieve a richer smarter more innovative economy. We would invest an additional billion dollars in research and development over the course of 3 years. We would get us moving in the right direction away from the bottom half of the OECD as a percentage of GDP research and development spend. We would see more Kiwis getting patents. What we see under the current Government is research and development in the bottom half of the OECD—we patent four times less than the developed world average. We have an innovation problem. In fact under the current Government the New Zealand economy according to the metrics has become more simplified. That means we are more susceptible to shocks as we are seeing in the dairy industry. We heard last week of a $17 billion hole in the Government’s accounts. A richer smarter economy is the Green’s plan.We would also not just throw additional amounts of money and pretend as if it matters because that is short-term politics. That is cynical politics. We want to see a transformational shift in the way the New Zealand economy operates because we want to see it operate for everyone. We want to make sure those kids are growing up in warm dry safe homes. We want to make sure they have a job in the future economy not just the past one. That is why we are opposed to Minister Bridges’ gamble for oil drilling which plainly is not working. No one is doing any drilling. Royalties are down $500 million jobs in Taranaki in the sector are down 20 to 30 percent. This Government is doing everything it can under the sun to support one particular industry. We want to support the future. That is innovation.