Court Simon; Clark DavidSIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you Mr Chair. It's remarkable to be interrupted by something so intellectually powerful as Mr Goldsmith's sneeze but I want to come to the problem with this bill. Now it's correct that ACT is supporting the bill on the basis that we've been assured by officials at select committee that there will be cost savings and that it will be streamlined.Now when I look at the Companies Office I find 21 registers ranging from the personal property securities financial services providers and of course the Companies Register but then we have registers that not a lot of people will be familiar with: the registered unions. Now it's important that unions are registered; we need to know that they're using their members' funds wisely and not donating excessively to political parties.Dr Deborah Russell: Well the Taxpayers' Union won't be donating then will it?SIMON COURT: Of course the Taxpayers' Union doesn't necessarily donate to political—I wouldn't know; if they wanted to and you were allowed to fair enough. But we also have friendly societies the 21 registered friendly societies and retirement villages. Now clearly this is a very broad range of organisations which the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment in their role of managing the Companies Office has responsibility for making sure they're fulfilling their regulatory obligations.The ACT Party understands that it makes sense to consolidate the day-to-day operations and management of what essentially are similar functions for quite a disparate range of activities although I wonder if we could outsource the administration of registered unions maybe to Minister Michael Wood's office just specifically—just give him that delegated authority.But that's not the subject of this bill. Now what I'd like to ask is: when we're looking at regulations relating to levies Minister and we consider clause 405(3)(b) it says the costs of collecting the levy money." Now in business terms the costs of collection are known as overheads Minister—overheads. What we know about this Government is that the tax take has increased by about 40 percent under this Government but Kiwis who expect Government to deliver services haven't necessarily seen a 40 percent increase in the delivery of State services and wonderful things as a result. In fact what was interesting at the Building Nations conference yesterday Minister we learnt—and in fact the transport Minister might have been there—CHAIRPERSON (Greg O'Connor): Mr Court instead of narrowing down to the bill you are now expanding. So—SIMON COURT: I will narrow it down—I'll narrow it down.CHAIRPERSON (Greg O'Connor): The bill please.SIMON COURT: So in terms of the cost of collecting money and when we think about the role of the State—collecting money spending money—what we heard yesterday was that in one part of Government they're spending 30 percent more but 5 percent less infrastructure is being delivered.So the ACT Party has a concern: when it comes to the overheads—you know what the costs are to operate these registers—what on earth are we to make of this fact that there's no system set out here. There's no schedule that says on what basis are these costs to be derived what's the overhead currently how many staff are tasked with delivering these services and how are they accounting for their time. And that's potentially something you can ask the officials here in the Chamber with you Minister because at select committee when I was deputising for our permanent member Damien Smith who sits on the Finance and Expenditure Committee I asked the officials "Do you do time sheets? Do you allocate time spent on these different registers via a time sheet so that you can correctly account for the time?" And we didn't get a clear answer Minister.So what I'd like to know is: how are these costs of collection to be determined Minister? Would you please give us some insights into that.Hon Dr DAVID CLARK (Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs): Look the general principle here is that where the effort is going to administration of the overall register to keep it functioning to support all of the different registers contained therein the 16 that are active the others—the member cited 21 at the start of one of his contributions. That counts the inactive registers the legacy ones that are on the system. Where the effort goes to maintaining the system as a whole that's something that can be levied for; where it's a particular service that is being provided that is where a fee can get charged—that's the principle that's in operation."