Foss Craig: Taxation (International Taxation Life Insurance and Remedial Matters) Bill — First Reading 
Foss Craig: Taxation (International Taxation Life Insurance and Remedial Matters) Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:648;Page:17392] 
CRAIG FOSS (National—Tukituki) 
: 
 As my colleague Dr Lockwood Smith said previously National will be voting for this bill to head to the Finance and Expenditure Committee—with some trepidation. But on the whole it is a very good positive move in the right direction notwithstanding some of the interesting interpretations the Minister of Finance made of his lack of action over the last 9 years trying to pretend they did not exist. 
But one thing was missing from the speeches earlier of both the Minister of Revenue and the Minister of Finance that I fully expected to be part of this bill. There are about 130-odd pages of explanatory note and 450-odd pages of detail but there is no summation of the fiscal numbers here. This goes from changes to charities changes to the controlled foreign company rules the active and passive income rules the petroleum mining rules etc. but putting all that aside for a moment there are some huge implications here. The Minister of Finance particularly made note and tried to convince us that tax revenue would actually go down as a result of this bill. Perhaps it will; perhaps it will not. We would like to see the numbers. 
I have had a quick discussion with the Minister of Revenue’s officials and I believe that those numbers will be forthcoming tomorrow. So that will be beneficial particularly with such a wide-ranging bill because we will need to pick it apart as it goes through the Finance and Expenditure Committee. I understand from the various discussion papers that this bill is formed from that there have been individual summations for costings etc. but it would have been good to hear that in the Minister’s introductory speech. I look forward to hearing about that tomorrow. 
I look forward to this bill going to the Finance and Expenditure Committee and I am certainly looking forward to the expertise around the table from the officials. I have read parts of the bill quite a few times and I freely and openly admit that I still cannot work out parts of it but I enjoyed the Minister’s earlier speech and the stuff about the various changes to “term insurance” and “life insurance”. I need to sit down and read some of those technical changes and digest them over a nice Hawke’s Bay red wine. 
There is a good point about this bill: it seems to follow a good and solid process. There has been a discussion document and representation from various expert groups prior to its getting to this stage. We are talking about it here and it will ease into the select committee process as we go through the end of this parliamentary session unlike the changes to KiwiSaver part 1 and part 2 the fair dividend rate changes and goodness gracious the Climate Change (Emissions Trading and Renewable Preference) Bill that has roared through the Finance and Expenditure Committee without good fair and transparent submissions consultation etc. We are reaping the reward for that because we are bound to see some more Supplementary Order Papers on those measures. In fact this bill deep down includes amendments to some of the fair dividend rate changes and even the KiwiSaver changes and if the Government had taken a bit more time on those consulted a bit more widely and not looked at the electoral clock but instead looked at a good and solid procedural clock then perhaps the bill would be a few pages thinner. 
The bill forms a bit of a suite of bills and I am surprised that the other two Ministers did not mention that because there is some good solid cross-party support for most of the other bills—the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Bill (No 3) the Financial Advisers Bill and the Financial Service Providers (Registration and Dispute Resolution) Bill. 
Debate interrupted.