Prime Willow-JeanWILLOW-JEAN PRIME (Labour): Madam Speaker—[Interruption] Sorry Madam Speaker just a little bit of confusion there. I do want to start my contribution by congratulating you on your new position. While I will miss you as our whip I hope that I enjoy you as our Assistant Speaker. I'm sure you will be equally scary sometimes in that role. I am just a little bit intimidated standing here for the first time in front of you to take this call tonight. Now if I can start there are three lots of people that I want to talk about who are particularly affected by the proposed changes in this bill. The first group of people are our KiwiSavers the second group of people are our student loan borrowers and the third group of people are Māori authorities. So I want to just take some time to talk about the proposed changes in terms of those three groups of people and to explain them because they are significant changes which are really aimed at improving the administration of the KiwiSaver scheme facilitating the faster transfer of funds approving the administrative efficiency and to enhance members' experience with the KiwiSaver scheme.I think the KiwiSaver scheme is a brilliant scheme but I have looked at these proposed changes in this bill and I think that all of them would enhance the scheme that is already a good scheme. It would enhance and improve the scheme and people's experiences with it. One particular proposed change is to calculate interest on contributions from the employee's pay day. So as far as they're concerned they're docked on pay day. However historically it hasn't been the case that they have actually earned interest from that point in time. The reason for that was because the inland revenue systems at the time could not calculate interest from the employee's pay day without imposing costs on employers. However the introduction of pay-day filing is now going to overcome that particular obstacle. So I believe rightly so that employees are going to be able to earn interest from the moment it is actually taken from their pay.Secondly there is a proposal to reduce the KiwiSaver provisional period and holding period from three months to two months. This is important because historically and previously IRD has not been able to transfer those contributions to scheme providers until the end of the provisional period—and I think that's a bit unfair on the KiwiSaver. So that reduction from three months to two months is a good one. Also reducing the time frame for the transfer of members' information and funds between providers; so currently the time frame between default providers is only 10 days but for non-default providers it's 35 days. The bill proposes that it will be consistent whether they are default providers or non-default providers and it will be 10 days for all providers. I particularly like this proposal and it is giving employees more ways to be able to change their contributions. Previously they have only been able to do that by contacting their employers but now they will be able to do that with these scheme providers and with the inland revenue Department. I think we want to encourage people to use KiwiSaver; we want to make it as easy as possible—I think that in terms of being able to change the rates of contribution easily either the employer IRD or the scheme provider just makes sense to me.Now the second group of people that are affected by this bill that I want to talk about are those student loan borrowers. The first thing may not be such good news for the student loan borrowers but language is important. The first proposal is to rename what they call a repayment holiday" to a "temporary repayment suspension." I think "holiday" does in fact send the wrong message to borrowers. The point of this proposal is to clarify and to better signal to borrowers that this isn't a holiday but it is in fact a suspension and that their repayment obligations will remain at the end of their repayment suspension. So that really is about using better language to better signal what the intent of that provision is: not a holiday but a suspension. There are a couple of proposed changes in there in terms of the ability of IRD to write off student loans taken out before the year 2000 in cases of fraud. Currently within the legislation they are unable to do that. So again this is a very practical proposal that will give them the ability to write off these loans which are fraudulent they can't identify who the correct borrower is and so it just sits there incorrectly in the system.Allowing employers to be notified of an employee's loan balance when their student loan is close to being fully repaid—I think that this is really in favour of the student loan borrower. Because what this proposal will actually do is it will ensure that there isn't an over-deduction and for anybody who has had this happen to them it takes quite a bit of time to get the repayment back to you. So this will allow employers to see that the student loans are close to being paid off and therefore can make the adjustment from their final pay and it will all be settled there. So I think that's another good suggestion.The final proposal that I wanted to talk about in terms of student loans is the treating of overseas-based borrowers who have serious illnesses or disabilities as if they were physically based in New Zealand. I think that this is the right thing for us to do. Just to explain that the reason is that currently if they have a serious illness or a disability and they are based overseas they are still being charged contributions and they are being charged interest. But what this change would in fact do is treat them as a New Zealand-based citizen and therefore their repayments would be determined on their income—and in this case it would be seriously reduced or none—and also it wouldn't be subject to interest on their student loans. So I think that this is the right thing to do and I think it makes it a lot fairer for those who are suffering from serious illness or disabilities who are living overseas who are currently having to pay based on their incomes and are being charged interest.The final proposal that I wanted to talk about was Māori authority tax credits. I had to read this one a couple of times. I believe that I have got a better understanding of it now but I do want to read the key point because it is quite technical. There's been an unintended consequence of legislative change in the rewrite of the rules relating to Māori authority tax credits which has meant that the current law allows these credits to be attached retrospectively to any distribution from a Māori authority when in fact the policy intent was that these credits can only be attached retrospectively to non-cash distributions occurring under the transfer pricing rules—so "any" versus "non-cash" distributions occurring under the transfer pricing rules. So the bill proposes an amendment to maintain what its treatment was. Just a key point there is that the IRD is not aware of any taxpayer who has retrospectively attached those credits.Those are the sections of the bill that I wanted to focus on this evening. Thank you very much."