Leary IngridINGRID LEARY (Labour—Taieri): Thank you Mr Chair. I'd like to raise an issue—Amendments to Child Support Act 1991" clauses 88 and 89 and also Schedule 2—and this relates to a new power: the ability to grant and/or overturn a temporary exemption in a period that would otherwise be barred. I will provide some context to the Minister but I'm going to ask about retrospectivity which is a really serious thing to be doing in a taxation bill. So I'm wanting to understand some of the processes around that: how this will be administered by the Inland Revenue Department —how they will have the information that they need.What will happen if a child's situation changes? Because the Act speaks to the change of circumstances of a liable parent but it is silent on changed circumstances of children. What happens in the case of chronic illness where it may be patchy periods of inability to pay? Because the Act speaks to 13-week periods as "blocks" but we know that often inability to pay is not quite as clean and neat as that. And also it is silent to the situation of the victims of sexual offenders which the original Act very specifically said was not subject to these exemptions. Does that mean that sexual offenders and the victims of sexual offenders who receive payment are now suddenly caught unintentionally?So just to contextualise this what this section does is speak to the Child Support Amendment Act 2021 which gave a four-year time frame in which to assess child support and it was designed to provide more certainty so parents knew that child support would be needed from them or payable to them for four years. It was designed to reduce administration and it was also considered the right amount of time to balance equity considerations. So one or two years may be too much of a burden on compliance; more than four years probably an overreach in terms of the assumptions around what the family situation was and what was happening to the liable parent. If we look at the situations where this could apply it can apply to people in prison for example. I know this from my electorate in Taieri. I have the Milton correctional institution where a number of these types of family situations do affect my constituents and they are often subject to liabilities and to rules that they really have very little agency over. So that would certainly apply there.But it could also be to people who are in hospital for 13 weeks or more perhaps in a rehabilitation treatment centre for addiction services—perhaps somebody with an injury where they haven't been able to work for 13 weeks. And again I do raise that situation: what if they find they can go back to work and it proves to be untenable and then they are required to take time out again? What is going to happen in that situation? But also there will be some young people caught—young fathers in particular under the age of 16. My sister teaches at the teen parent unit in Auckland at a very good school and a lot of the young women at that school have babies—as young as 12—and some of the fathers are very very young. So these exemptions can apply to those young people where it's just not really plausible for them to be able to take on some of these financial liabilities.So the questions that I have around that amendment are: if somebody is serving say a prison sentence for example longer than four years can the commissioner apply that exemption and can they also then perhaps reverse the exemption? The date in mind is 26 October 2021—so it goes all the way back to 26 October 2021. Now in the event they were going to apply the exemption that would seem fair in the interests of natural justice—that there are situations where there's a bit of discretion; the exemption could be applied. Somebody may have for example spent a longer time in prison or felt that they could get back into work had a short stay and then maybe been able to work again.But what really concerns me is the commissioner's ability to cancel that exemption retrospectively. And this is where it gets really tricky because we know that in tax law or indeed any law it's really important to be able to have certainty. We're speaking about people's liabilities here and to apply a retrospective liability by removing an exemption is worrying because for a start it is retrospective—and so we all know the perils about that—but equally it goes back to a fairly considerable amount of time 2021. What if this was to apply say in 2026—the commissioner takes it right back to that 2021 period? That is a very big leap backwards in retrospective application of the law and it seems to be at the behest of the Commissioner of Inland Revenue. So I don't see checks and balances as to the powers that the commissioner may be able to use to apply that retrospectivity.Again the questions that I had at the beginning: what about if the situation of the child changes? For example what if the child turns 18 or perhaps is taken overseas by a parent—they might be a younger child but they've been taken offshore and perhaps there is something in the agreement between the parents where a change of location in geography and jurisdiction means that that agreement no longer applies—what is that going to do to this ability for the commissioner to play around with the exemptions?Probably the most important question I have really is that the sexual offenders and the victims of sexual offenders were originally carved out of the original amendments to the Child Support Act. There was an assumption that there would not be able to be an exemption in relation to those cases. Now there seems to be this carve out and this ability to act retrospectively and to apply discretion but there is no mention at all of the victims of sexual offenders. My concern is that one of the unintended consequences of this will be that they lose their rights—they lose their right to be exempt or to have the law exempt from applying an exemption in their case. And that would be something perhaps the select committee didn't get to consider. I haven't been able to see any submissions on that but I wonder if the Minister has turned his mind to that and can he give us an opinion about whether he thinks that those victims should remain exempt from this legislative power? And has he taken any advice on any of these matters?I would really really like the Minister to give us his views about retrospectivity when it comes to tax law and when it is and isn't acceptable and certainly whether he can see the problem that we have with a retrospectivity that isn't just time bound—it doesn't say one or two years; 26 October 2021 goes in the statue. So if this is going to apply for the next decade the next eight years the next five years those are long periods of time to be applying retrospective law particularly when there is a power to amend or cancel a temporary exemption. I'm thinking here about the people affected by it. It's different when it's going to be one that's prolonged or it's given—I understand that was the intention of this—but what about when those rights are taken away from people who might not even know that they carry this liability in law? I'm keen to get your answers Minister."