Bishop ChrisCHRIS BISHOP (National): It is a pleasure to take a brief call on this very important bill—in the third reading of this great bill. I want to start my remarks to the House—which are actually my first substantive comments in the House on a bill this year; I spoke previously in the debate on the Prime Minister's statement last week but this is the first bill that I have had the chance to speak on in this year of Parliament—by just briefly rebutting some of what Mr Nash said.Mr Nash started his remarks by talking about the fact that the Finance and Expenditure Committee has considered eight or nine tax bills this term and that is true. We have had a heavy workload and one that I have to say Government members on the Finance and Expenditure Committee relish Mr Nash. We relish the chance to consider these important bills and I think it would be fair to say there is a bit of hyperbole from Mr Nash. Look he is not a man traditionally given to hyperbole. He is usually a very sober and sage individual who makes good remarks but that was hyperbole because some of the bills that we have been considering on the Finance and Expenditure Committee are to do with Business Transformation.Actually everyone in the Parliament I think recognises that modernising the inland revenue systems—the computer systems and the IT systems that underpin our tax system—is really important. We have a debate around the cost and we scrutinise those things at the Finance and Expenditure Committee all the time but actually everyone recognises that that is important and that it requires legislative change. So it is a little bit rich I think to complain about the number of tax bills when some of them have been to do with Business Transformation.The second thing—and this is particularly apposite when it comes to this bill—is that we have been implementing the responses to the Shewan inquiry into foreign trusts and disclosure rules. It was the Labour Party and members opposite who spent a lot of 2016 talking about how we needed an inquiry and when there has been an inquiry and we are now implementing the legislation in response to that inquiry Mr Nash then gets up and complains about that. So I think it is a little rich to complain about the number of bills.Then he said that the tax process in New Zealand is a farce. But actually we have a good process in New Zealand. We have a generic tax policy process where things are consulted on and advanced and where the practitioners and the tax lawyers and those people out there including some friends of mine—poor them—are able to participate in that process. And then we get the legislation and then we get it coming before the select committee. So we have a very good process in New Zealand. I acknowledge what Mr Nash was saying about the volume of legislation. Probably it is a little bit higher in this term of Parliament than in the past but that is a function as I said of a few things that I have already made mention of. I want to briefly mention one thing in my speech and that is the debate that we had at the Finance and Expenditure Committee around Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 190. There was a lot of concern raised at the select committee and also within the public comment around this bill around the scope of what is known as the Henry VIII" powers that are being given to the Government by this bill.Fletcher Tabuteau: You were staunch on that mate.CHRIS BISHOP: Fair to say—Fletcher Tabuteau says you know: "You were strong on that point." I do have to say that we put the officials at the select committee under some scrutiny because it is a big thing for Parliament to delegate essentially the power to change the law by fiat. It is a big thing for the Parliament to do that—to delegate that authority to the executive. Some of the excuses or some of the reasons given for that—and I think I can speak for the entirety of the Finance and Expenditure Committee on this—we did not find justifiable: that Parliament should delegate to the executive the power to change the law during the period of time that the IRD was moving from one type of computer system to another type of computer system. So we put some of those changes under some pretty heavy scrutiny and we made some changes as a result of that. So we limited the regulation power to administration issues arising from the transition between the old and the new systems. We made sure that those transitional regulations could not increase taxpayer liability. We excluded certain provisions of the Tax Administration Act. The original drafting of that SOP was extremely broad giving the executive enormous powers through the Tax Administration Act—or power to change the Tax Administration Act—and we made sure that those regulations could not remove or diminish the rights of a taxpayer. That fettering of the very large discretion given to the executive I think has made the bill a better bill.Just finally this bill does implement the tax package announced by the Government through Budget 2016—the small to medium sized enterprise (SME) tax package. Mr Nash was going on about the provisional tax being the bane of his life when he was operating that small business in the bay. It is true to say that all members of the House probably over the years have had gripes from the SME sector in particular about the payment of provisional tax. I think we should all welcome the fact that as a result of Business Transformation and the advancement in technology and also as a result of the legislative changes given effect to by this bill life will be considerably easier. That is something to be applauded and welcomed and is implemented by this legislation. Thank you."