Williams ArenaARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa): Thank you Madam Speaker. The Government opposes this bill and I ask the Green member previous Ricardo Menéndez March why—why does the Green member support this bill in the House? Look I think we all need to take a step back and consider three questions about what limited partnerships are and what they do and who uses them. So this first question of what a limited partnership is. My colleagues a limited partnership is a tax treatment. It's not an entity in itself. The reason why we have limited partnerships is to make the New Zealand landscape of structures available to heavy-duty corporate structuring in this country similar to jurisdictions overseas which use limited partnerships. We do have an entity called limited companies that are look-through for tax purposes which is essentially what a limited partnership is. It is also look-through for tax purposes. The reason why we use limited partnerships is to allow international investors to look at our entities and see what they're used to overseas in jurisdictions like Hong Kong and the United States. This is heavy-duty corporate structuring that your average mum and dad would never use because you need to register a limited partnership a general partner company and then any other investors who might want to line up to be investors in that limited partnership also need entities. So I ask the Green Party why do they stand on the side of big corporate investors? Why do they stand on the side of the kinds of investors who can afford heavy-duty corporate lawyers to create structures like this which are extremely expensive to administer—you need specialist tax lawyers to do it and specialist tax accountants like PricewaterhouseCoopers—when we have entities which do this in our system currently like look-through companies? That's what a limited partnership is. There's no issue here with naming because when a limited partnership requires a general partner in law that general partner needs to have a name which is specifically identifiable—something like say Company General Partner Ltd." So you can tell what a limited partnership's name is when you look up on the Companies Register what its general partner company is called and there is in fact no confusion about what a limited partnership might be called when you can look for its general partner and its company name on the Companies Register. So let's dwell a little bit more on who uses these limited partnerships. Look we have large corporate structures investors who are corporate investors by their very nature who use these companies. They are rare. There are not thousands of limited partnerships creating some kind of confusion within their communities about having different names. This is a bill that addresses a very small problem for a very small subset of our business community who are at the very top of that business community who perhaps might be called the 1 percent. So for everyone watching tonight there might be questions at home about why is this a priority for National in Opposition—why are we standing on the side of large corporate investors and what else is going on in select committees which might be better using this time? Perhaps it might be things like addressing the housing crisis which this very select committee which this bill would have been proposed to be heard by is actually using its time to do. That's why the Government has opposed this bill because it is a very small and minor change which only affects a very small number of people and it uses up time in this House and in the machinations of Government to be able to address some of those serious problems. The third question I want to dwell on just briefly is: whose problem does this legislation seek to solve? In a situation where there was confusion about a limited partnership's name that would only be in a situation where you had perhaps a number of limited partnerships that had a similar general partner within a company structure and there was some kind of confusion about which entity you were dealing with. Those are a very small number of cases where usually tax lawyers and tax accountants would be advising on those sorts of transactions because other companies that need a look-through model for tax will be using different entities. So in the very small number of occasions you've got to wonder well is there this problem with the documentation where names could be confused and that's just not what's going on out there in the market. That's not what business is experiencing now. It's not a problem that business is experiencing and it's not a problem that this House should solve and that's why we as Government members oppose it."