Graham Kennedy: Taxation (International Investment and Remedial Matters) Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Graham Kennedy: Taxation (International Investment and Remedial Matters) Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 01 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:1787. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green) 
: 
 Just to pick up from the sublime appellation of our colleague Shane Jones earlier let me greet all 121 comrades-in-arms in the fine art of capitalist taxation tuning. This bill— 
Hon Member 
: I think it’s 120 colleagues you have got. 
Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM 
: It is 120 plus me. [ 
Interruption 
] Well I am not the comrade. This bill the Taxation (International Investment and Remedial Matters) Bill having ground its way through to the third reading has really been damned with faint praise. It is clear that it is going to get general lukewarm support from all parties. I think what it does do is reflect a Government whose ideological conviction largely competes with its rigidity of approach and cautious disposition. That becomes manifest in this bill along with a whole raft of all the economic and fiscal legislation that it has produced both in the 49th and 50th Parliaments.  
The Green Party from the beginning made it clear that it was prepared to support the bill along with other parties but I think largely on the general understanding shared by all that it is not going to change very much. Let me just use my limited time here before we indicate that we will finally vote in this third reading of the bill to identify I think probably a syllogism of three propositions that the National Party works on and offer the alternative three that the Green Party works on. This Government with its ideological view has the following three propositions: one that globalisation is good; two that the economic and tax regime has therefore to be more competitive and can be therefore more competitive and that anyone who disagrees comes from North Korea; and third that the tax rates must be lowered for the New Zealand economy to become more competitive and anyone who disagrees comes from North Korea.  
In contrast the Green Party believes that globalisation can and often does cause more harm than good to the public interest—not to the corporate interest necessarily but to the public interest—secondly that New Zealand can indeed become naturally more competitive through fine-tuning of taxation legislation but not necessarily through the obtuse instrumentation of this kind that we see before us in the current bill; and thirdly that following from that New Zealand tax rates of this kind must distinguish between certain foreign investment inflows and others rather than treating them all as one and that not all will be competitive as we heard from the Inland Revenue Department briefing.  
New Zealand’s economic success is really dependent less on this kind of microeconomic fine-tuning based on ideological conviction which misperceives the reality of where we are in the global economy and more on a broader structural restructuring of our economy pertaining to the value of the dollar pertaining to the current account deficit pertaining to the use of our natural resources in an ecologically sustainable way and also pertaining more to our tax framework rather than to the microeconomic management that is pronounced in this bill. Having damned it with faint praise I reassure the Government that we shall vote for it. Thank you.