Bayly Andrew; Rurawhe AdrianANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): Well that's a nice segue way into Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 251 in my name. So for people who are not aware of the SOP what it seeks to do is to change the commencement date of this GST arrangement from 1 December 2019 to 1 April 2020. It was interesting just listening to the Minister of Revenue and the first thing I want to say is that we all I think across the House want to support our retailers and we know the importance of having a level playing field. In fact this piece of legislation as the Rt Hon David Carter mentioned actually was initiated by the Hon Judith Collins. So this is now our intent and our piece of legislation. It's just good to see it coming through to the House under the current Minister and we acknowledge him for that. It's traditionally referred to as what's called the Amazon tax. We do want to make sure that New Zealand retailers are not disadvantaged by people buying on the internet. When GST came into being no one sort of had the concept around buying and purchasing goods over the internet and of course we've gone through many phases and as the Minister knows GST now accounts for 23 percent of all our tax revenue. Traditionally up to now we've had these rules that any goods up above a $400 threshold would be subject to duty or tax and GST. But what this bill is seeking to change is to make sure that these lower value items—i.e. less than $400—are actually subject to GST and we have no debate with that. The issue is there's been a huge growth in e-commerce as a result of all this. So what this bill does is deal with it and we are very supportive and receptive as I've said before. The issue we've got is that we had lengthy discussions at the Finance and Expenditure Committee. We had many many submitters. We had a number of the overseas international offshore suppliers which is the official term for the people that run or operate these trading platforms—people like Alibaba eBay and all those sorts and Amazon is of course another one—and those people came and made very strong representations. Like it or not New Zealand is a very small part of the world economy—I think 0.2 percent or something from memory. We are very very small and they made a valid point. They have been asked to make changes in Australia and they're dealing with the IT programs and reprogramming issues that were happening in Australia. Of course what that was doing—good to see the Associate Minister of Finance David Parker stepping up to the chair—what is happening is they were literally saying Look we cannot meet this time frame." When we pushed the officials on it they were steadfast that it should be brought in on 1 October. In fact with last-minute intervention I believe from the Minister it was pushed out to 1 December with no notice to the committee. It was effectively a fait accompli at which point we gave the officials a grilling as to why there was a sudden change of heart. I think it was totally driven by the Minister. I welcome that if that was indeed his intervention. But the issue with this as I said is we want to look after retailers in New Zealand. We want to make sure there is a level playing field for these low-value items and remember items greater than $400 are subject to GST. But what this does is it puts in a new regime and the issue is the practicality of getting very large entities international offshore suppliers to turn their attention to New Zealand. There is a genuine risk and this was highlighted that in fact the time it would take to do a program—and if you're talking about a trading platform like TradeMe it is not an insignificant issue to reprogram it. Merely what this SOP in my name does is give some more time to that and it makes it from 1 April 2020. As the Minister said a $20 million to $30 million additional loss of revenue in the scale of things of taking in all that amount of money is a very very small amount of money but it protects the sovereignty and integrity of the tax system. [Bell rung] Can I carry on? CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): No."