McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Madam Chair. Very thoughtful of you Madam Chair—thank you. Just as a reminder to the committee the Cricket World Cup starts in about 10 minutes so I'll be out of here. I'm going to take a brief call on Part 1 of the Excise and Excise-equivalent Duties Table (Budget Measures—Motor Spirits) Amendment Bill and I'm going to spend my time talking about the insatiable appetite that Governments have to nick money off recreational users. The tragedy of this sort of stuff is of course that if you go out and mow your lawns on a Saturday morning it's going to cost you more. I think we tend to forget that. In the drive to drive more cars and more trucks and things on the road we forget the recreational users. Not only people mowing their lawns but those people that go fishing on the weekend are subject to this tax as well. One of the questions I would be really interested in the Minister perhaps addressing is whether in fact there's room for those fishermen to get that money back at some stage because when you think about it whilst they drive their car on the road to tow the boat they're paying tax on the car they're also paying that same tax on the petrol that's in the boat and they have also registered the trailer of course.The other issue that was raised a little earlier is a much more serious issue than perhaps either of those although I'm sure the issues with respect to recreational fisher people is very important to them and the fact that every time we put these rates up they get affected pretty badly by it. But I really wanted to go back to the issue that was raised earlier by one of my colleagues and that's the road-user charges. Again we look at these bills and we think excise tax on road fuel effectively affects passenger transport. The biggest impact it has of course is on goods and services transport and it's massive. So this country relies heavily on road transport to get its exports to port and also to get its food and supplies around the country. Those road-user charges are a significant cost on our community. They're a significant cost on the rural and provincial communities as well because of course those people have to drive a lot further. So these taxes have a much bigger impact on people who live further from the city than perhaps they do on people who live in cities. So the cost to people in rural and provincial New Zealand of the increases in these taxes and particularly the tax listed in clause 3 of Part 1 of this bill is significant to those communities. It's also significant to the farming community because farmers spend a lot of money on transporting stock around the country particularly at this time of the year of course with the dairy cows on the move. But it is a cost on all of our community and I think that the challenge that we have with the provision of services of this kind will always relate to the way we fund them.I was around in the days of the debate on the hypothecated funding of land transport and I think that was probably in the term of the last Labour Government actually when that was brought in. Of course in those days that was hypothecated basically to fix roads. That's changed dramatically now and we have a Government that's using these taxes for all sorts of other reasons and effectively taxing a sector of the community to prop up—well not to prop up but to provide—public transport in some areas of New Zealand. Many of us live in parts of New Zealand that have no access to public transport and consequently have no opportunity to use or get the benefits of the tax that we pay in the form of these excise taxes. So it's quite a significant inequality I think in the way we apply these taxes and as my colleague Mr Simpson talked about driving those strange electric things they are subsidised by all of us and I think that's grossly unfair as well.So there's some interesting anomalies creeping into the way we've historically taxed or put excise tax on fuel to effectively fund these issues and there's going to have to be other ways found to fund these things in the future. I guess if they all turn into Scott Simpsons and all drive those very expensive electric cars then we're going to have to probably I guess—short of us having to use the fuel to power the power stations to power the cars we're going to be in trouble.I don't want to take any more time in this debate but I think we do need to consider—and I feel sorry for—those recreational users who either mow their lawns on a Saturday or go fishing or whatever. They are the ones that suffer the most as a result of this type of tax. So it certainly has an impact. Thank you Madam Chair for letting me take a call on that bill.