Copeland Gordon: Goods and Services Tax (Exclusion of Rates) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Copeland Gordon: Goods and Services Tax (Exclusion of Rates) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:619;Page:14643] 
GORDON COPELAND (United Future) 
: 
 I am very pleased to have the right of reply and I will address very quickly if I can some of the issues that have been raised by parties speaking to this bill. First of all I sincerely thank New Zealand First and the Greens for at least having the wisdom to say that this matter should go to a select committee. As Jeanette Fitzsimons has just said this issue has been controversial for 18 years and it is about time we gave members of the public of this country the opportunity to discuss it in a rational way. 
I am very very disappointed to see the politicking that has gone on in the House tonight. I will begin with the ACT party. The ACT party has a reputation for wanting to lower taxes on New Zealanders. It had an opportunity tonight to do exactly that and it ducked it and said it was nutty. I rest my case and I look forward to the 2005 election. I will look for a moment at the position of the National Party. The National Party’s position is that Don Brash was in favour of GST on rates in 1985 and he is still in favour of GST on rates in 2004. In other words he was wrong then and is wrong now and that makes it right. It reminds me of the grandmother who when watching thousands of people marching past said very proudly: “My grandson is the only one in step.” There is no other nation in the world that has this form of taxation on a property tax levied by a local government—a point I have already made. 
Let me move to Dr Michael Cullen’s comments. But first I will address two technical issues that are really completely wrong in terms of what has been said in the House tonight. As my colleague Paul Adams pointed out and as Don Brash himself said in a speech the other day we should be encouraging councils in New Zealand to go in for user charges. If councils use user charges they will still put GST on the parking tickets the swimming pool costs and the library costs etc—and I do not know anybody in New Zealand who is complaining about that. No one is. People are complaining about the fact that there is GST on the tax—that is all. As my colleague said there is no compliance-cost issue. Councils should simply bill the thing separately and there will be no problem. That is just a straw man that is put up and can be demolished. Secondly Dr Cullen and others said that GST as a tax on a tax also applies in respect of excise duty. So is the argument: two wrongs make a right? I do not think so. Secondly it can be distinguished from this point of view: GST is collected by Government from excise duty on petrol liquor and tobacco. However the process is completely different. 
When the Government for example decides to put 5c a litre on to petrol prices—which it is doing shortly—Treasury and the Inland Revenue Department tell the Government that it will actually collect 5.625c when it does that—5c in excise duty and 0.625c in GST. The Government receives that advice from Treasury when it makes that decision because both lots of money are going to the same pocket. The point with GST on rates is that these two streams of tax are going into quite different pockets and that is the distinction we need to make between the two. So it is ridiculous to assume that because GST on rates is removed it means we also have to take GST off taxes levied by central government. The whole point I made in my first speech was that nowhere else in the world—Dr Michael Cullen has not been able to give me one example—does a central government impose a tax on a tax levied by a subsidiary government—be it a local authority a state in Australia a state in the United States or a province in Canada. It just does not happen. We are out of step with the rest of the world. 
I believe that we have presented our case logically. I know that the 1.725 million ratepayers of this country want this unjust tax removed. It is unjust it is unfair it is unprincipled and it is wrong. We should take it off. In so far as the Labour Party the National Party and the ACT party are concerned today in terms of their attitude I say: go ahead and make our day because come next year’s election we will make sure—as is already being done through our billboard campaign—that every single ratepayer in this country understands that other parties for various reasons do not want to let that money go. Most of those parties have the attitude: “Well we don’t want to let the money go. We’ve got the money in our pockets so let’s keep it in our pockets.” or other spurious arguments. So people should note carefully tonight how those parties vote on this bill.