Genter Julie Anne: Taxation (Residential Land Withholding Tax GST on Online Services and Student Loans) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGenter Julie Anne: Taxation (Residential Land Withholding Tax GST on Online Services and Student Loans) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 12 April 2016. Volume:713;Page:10383. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): I rise to speak on Part 1 of the bill. I note that this part of the bill is the most problematic for the Green Party. This is what I raised during my second reading speech. On the one hand we support the changes that mean that student loan borrowers who are working overseas for approved charitable organisations and for approved aid activities as volunteers are entitled to be treated as if they were physically present in New Zealand and as such they are not charged interest on their student loans for a maximum of 2 years. We thought that that makes sense and it is good that we are making it easier for borrowers who are working for charitable organisations to have that recognised so that they receive the benefit that they are entitled to—an interest holiday if you will. But overall the Green Party has great concerns about the student loan scheme generally.I suppose it goes to the overall priority about whether or not it is important to prioritise the opportunity for education for people without loading them up with a whole lot of debt. For the Green Party it would be a priority for us in order to create a knowledge-based economy a clean green economy all of that to ensure that we are investing in our people and giving them opportunities. We are not really giving them opportunities when at the same time we are offering them an education but loading them up with debt. But I would say that—as many of my colleagues have referred to in Part 1 of this bill—in terms of the aspects the changes to the student loan scheme on the one hand although overall we would question whether or not it should be a priority for the Government to ensure that students are paying for their education as opposed to the wider society which is going to benefit from that the principle of information sharing for the purposes of ensuring that say taxes are paid when they should be is really important.So I can understand this principle of information sharing and we thought it was a good thing in the bill that in clause 26 there is this full disclosure of information to the Australian Taxation Office and that a whole lot of information is provided so that people who have taken on student loans under the scheme—even though the Green Party does not fully agree with that scheme we want to ensure that the borrowers are paying it back. It might be $600 million or $800 million that is owing in student loans according to the regulatory impact statement which estimated it was something in the order of $600 million to $800 million for people living overseas who have not been paying back their student loans.One of the ways that we resolve this is through information sharing and understanding exactly who the borrower is what their name is their date of birth—all this information. That seems perfectly reasonable. But in the context of things the amount that is owing is quite small relative to the amount that we might be missing out on tax that is not being paid by multinationals for example that are avoiding paying tax in New Zealand. The amount that we are missing out on there—between $500 million to $1 billion possibly more—is considerable.So we have the resources of the Government being put to chasing down people with student loans rather than focusing on much greater amounts of money that we are missing out on on tax from multinational corporations that are not paying their fair share here. At the same time we are going through this process to do this information sharing with Australia and to gather all of this information about the borrowers and yet when it comes to foreign trusts in New Zealand we do not request any of that information.We do not make it possible for our partners in the world—other countries that are partners in double tax agreements. Even they cannot request information about very very wealthy people who might be using New Zealand foreign trusts to avoid paying tax in their home country. Virtually the only country that could request that sort of information is Australia and that is only because it complained to the New Zealand Government in 2006 because it knew that wealthy Australians were using New Zealand as a tax haven to avoid paying tax. Since we do not have that sort of agreement with other countries they are not able to request this information.Strangely when we proposed in the House last week to the Prime Minister that it might be good to have a register with more information about the settlors of these trusts so that other countries could request information from us and ensure that New Zealand foreign trusts were not being used to dodge tax—