Wong Pansy: Taxation (Annual Rates Venture Capital and Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill — In Committee Procedure 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Wong Pansy: Taxation (Annual Rates Venture Capital and Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill — In Committee Procedure 
[Sitting date: 14 December 2004. Volume:622;Page:17806. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
PANSY WONG (National) 
: 
 Firstly I want to follow my colleague the Hon Bill English in urging the Minister to look at and support Supplementary Order Paper 284 in the name of Gordon Copeland of United Future. After all United Future has been very cooperative with this minority Labour Government. It has now brought in a Supplementary Order Paper to ensure that the taxation threshold will be indexed to inflation every year in order to relieve hard-working New Zealanders from paying too much tax. After all yesterday the Minister in the chair Dr Michael Cullen announced another record forecast surplus of $6.5 billion. There is no reason why New Zealanders should not get tax relief. But more than that Dr Cullen has also introduced a bill providing for a 5c per litre petrol tax increase that is subject to indexation. So I hope the Minister will take a call and explain to the public why it is that when the Government is gathering revenue it is acceptable to increase the rate annually according to the movement in the consumer price index but when it comes to providing relief for hard-working New Zealanders then the Government will not support that. 
I challenge United Future not to support this bill in its entirety if the Government does not agree to what is the single most important opportunity for United Future to demonstrate that it has come into Parliament to campaign vigorously for hard-working New Zealanders. All eyes will be on United Future. 
I also want the Minister in the chair to take a call to answer a question that I will pose to him. One of the provisions in this part allows people who have applied for the grant of a resource consent under the Resource Management Act and been refused consent or who withdraw the application to claim a tax deduction for the expenditure they have incurred. I want to know whether that particular provision has been introduced for the benefit of the State-owned enterprise Meridian Energy. When it called off Project Aqua the company wrote off over $1 million of costs relating to that very ambitious project so I want to know whether that provision was introduced to benefit that State-owned enterprise. 
I also want to point out that interestingly now we see a taxation provision that grants relief to people who apply unsuccessfully or withdraw their application under the Resource Management Act. It seems to me that the root of that problem is the difficulty people have in getting applications through under that Act. The Labour Government instead of looking to simplify the Act in order to enable people to have their applications decided swiftly and effectively is introducing relief by means of a taxation deduction if an application fails or the person withdraws it. That is another example of the Labour Party instead of treating the real cause of the problem tending to look at the symptoms. I think lots of people would not look forward to simply deducting expenditure incurred on an application for resource management consent. They would rather have their application approved or understand that the law will be applied consistently or will be simplified. 
I look forward to the Minister taking a call to tell us whether that provision has been introduced because of the failure of Project Aqua by the State-owned enterprise Meridian Energy.