Tabuteau Fletcher: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTabuteau Fletcher: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 28 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5400. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]FLETCHER TABUTEAU (NZ First): Thank you for the privilege of speaking tonight and tēnā koutou to the Committee this evening. Can I just take this opportunity to reply to some of the words from the Minister of Revenue tonight. I actually say good luck with what you are trying to achieve with the tax system and good luck with the outcomes you hope to achieve because if what you are hoping for actually works then New Zealand First will probably agree that actually that will be great for small New Zealand businesses because we are talking about the lowering of the cost of compliance. But what the Minister and what this Government in particular probably will not concede is that although on the one hand they seek to lower compliance costs in terms of tax conformity or performance on the other hand we are about to debate a piece of legislation in regards to health and safety reform where the cost of compliance to New Zealand’s small businesses will be horrendous.Already the discussion is taking place where small businesses are coming to us and saying: “How can we cope with these costs of these safety regulations?”. The irony of that is that actually if this Government had left the legislation alone but had simply funded adequately the oversight of the safety legislation as it stood previously we would have had an adequate health and safety system. Instead we are changing the law in a large and extreme manner actually and then we are funding oversight—$8 million a year for the next 3 years—to actually ensure that we are complying with health and safety. It seems a bit backwards. So although I commend the Minister for what he seeks to achieve on the one hand this Government giveth and on the other it taketh away.The Minister ofFinance spoke in quite some detail about trade. He spoke about the benefits of trade. New Zealand First as a party needs to repeat as often as possible that we are a party that supports trade. We believe in the benefits of trade and we understand why trade is important. Those members over there deliberately claim ignorance. I am not calling them ignorant; I am saying they deliberately claim ignorance. They deliberately claim it because it makes their conversation or their debate easier. The reality is trade is good but in those same trade agreements we have the likes of certification. More important I presented a member’s bill to this Parliament to try to remove the investor-State dispute settlement provisions from our trade agreements. That is not anti-trade; that is pro - New Zealand.So what this Government says to us is that in order to have trade we must remove our sovereignty. We must disempower this very Government that members sit there representing tonight. The investor-State dispute settlement provisions allow large international corporates to sue this Government not in New Zealand law and not in international law but in secret tribunals. This is what this Government is advocating. It just makes no sense. Those tribunals are not transparent they have no right of appeal and they make decisions that we cannot investigate and we cannot understand how they came to those decisions because they are made in secret. So New Zealand First stood up in this Chamber just last week and said: “We cannot accept that in our trade agreements. Let’s use a transparent legal system. Let’s have judges. Let’s have transparency. Let’s have an appellate system where we can actually appeal the decisions and conversely for once the Governments could actually hold the international corporates to account.”On Budget day I said to this Government that it was wearing rose-coloured lenses. The assumptions that this Government made when it wrote this Budget were bordering on the ridiculous—bordering on the ridiculous. The appropriations were made given a set of rose-tinted assumptions and the Government said: “This scenario is very unlikely. Everything will be rosy and our Budget will be accurate if only a few things come to pass.” Well nothing that this Government used to create the appropriations was actually accounted for in that Budget.