Seymour David: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSeymour David: General Debate[Sitting date: 29 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5442. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): I thank the member Brett Hudson for the long list of dad jokes. If only he had the bod to go with it. I am proud to stand in a New Zealand that is strong and free—the third-freest economy in the world. We are a country that believes in and is committed to free trade. We are a company that should be much more open to direct foreign investment.Dr Megan Woods: Company? We are a company?DAVID SEYMOUR: We are such a country—I correct myself. As a result of our being a country with free markets we area country largely with free minds—diverse tolerant and harmonious. I wonder what Jacinda Ardern really thinks about her party’s recent shaking of the race tree in the past few weeks. We are a country of strong civil liberties and we are doing so well in the global economy against that backdrop of sound public policy. But having benefited from that policy we should be committed also to relentlessly and continuously improving our public policy environment.When we turn to the agenda of the current Government we see a mixed bag. The Government wants to introduce tax holidays for companies that are doing a certain amount of research and development measured by labour and that are companies of a certain size and domiciled in a certain place. Frankly by the time you attempt to administer and comply with that policy it would be cheaper to take a helicopter filled with money equivalent to the administration and compliance costs and to drop it over some area that may be filled beneficially with research and development because that would be more efficient than what the Government is proposing. What the Government should be doing is saying “We will devote $120 million a year of new spending.”—of which there is over a billion dollars each year—and saying “We will commit to dropping the company tax rate because we recognise that New Zealand has comparatively high taxes on capital in the OECD even after you consider the imputation credits that New Zealand has.” That is what the Government should be doing. It would be simple it would be effective and it would send a message that we wish to attract investment in foreign capital to New Zealand.The Government is caving somewhat to the foreign-buyer pressure aforementioned by the Labour Party and is introducing a new brightline test for taxes and an effective foreign-buyer register. What the Government should be doing rather than caving to those basest instincts of the Opposition is reforming land use regulation which is demonstrably the cause of overly expensive housing across the OECD. We should be taking away the bubble and taking away the constraints that have led to so much concern about foreign ownership rather than introducing an additional layer of regulation that will be nearly impossible to enforce.So the theme continues. The Government is having a referendum on changing the flag. I have to say that I have still not seen a candidate flag that I can really get excited about and I suspect that unless somebody else doesvery soon—or at least a large portion of New Zealanders do—there will be no change. What the Government should be doing is having a referendum on an issue that is also requiring of cross-party support that will be with us for a long period of time and that no one party will be able to lead on and that is making superannuation sustainable for future generations of New Zealanders. When current university students retire we will no longer have five workers per retiree but only two workers per retiree.There is one last thing that the Government should be doing politically legally and ethically and that is legislating on assisted dying. It is politically the right thing to do because when you are in a democracy and 70 percent of people want something you should do it. It is legally the right thing to do because the High Court has said that Parliament must act on assisted dying legislation and it is ethically the right thing to do because as the Canadian Supreme Court has said it is a cruel choice to leave somebody in egregious suffering from an irredeemable condition; to either wait until they die naturally and painfully or to attempt to take their own lives in solitude. I leave the House with that thought. Thank you.