Nash StuartSTUART NASH (Labour—Napier): Thank you very much Mr Deputy Speaker.Hon Ruth Dyson: Excellent call.STUART NASH: I do not know whether there was much choice there Ruth.I always find it interesting when members of the Government stand up and say: We are the party of small business; we support small business." We think they are going to launch into a wonderful 10-minute speech about how good they are for small business. Even that gentleman opposite the member for Wairarapa can speak for only 2½ minutes on small business. Mr Scott you are better than that. I know you are. I know you understand the intricacies of business. But maybe I am wrong.The interesting thing about this is that all the historical data shows that Labour is better for business. It really does. A friend of mine ran a number of businesses. He said to me: "You know what? The interesting thing is that I know I should be National because I earn so much money"—we did not get into my campaign—"but Labour is so much better for my business." So he goes in there and votes Labour. We all know this.As Clayton Cosgrove highlighted Labour came out with a tax package a tax policy for small business that made it look up and go: "There is a light at the end of the tunnel and it starts with Labour." To be fair Mr Woodhouse—I think it was Mr Woodhouse; or it might have been Judith Collins. Who is the Minister of Revenue now? I am not too sure. He did take it and said: "Well we do need to do better." But it is one of these things is it not? They are very good at the managerial. Labour comes up with the policy and they take it and they start implementing it or they come up with a strategy to announce it. Labour's tax package for small business was actually I think a lot more user-friendly. It was around PAYE: you earn the money you pay the tax. That is fair. We get that.As Mr Scott did allude to and as we all know—anyone who has had a small business—provisional tax was like a noose around your neck sometimes. As you mentioned you have a bad year and goodness me you are hit with this tax bill. It means you cannot do anything else. You have a good year and you are not paying much tax. It just did not make sense and it was not fair. Tax pooling smoothed it out a little bit but basically provisional tax is not the way forward especially in this day and age of packages like Xero that make small business accounting a hell of a lot easier.The thing is the party for business has been there for 8 years and only now are we looking at a tax package that is going to help small businesses whereas Labour was going to implement our business tax package within the first 100 days—in fact we probably still will because the way things are going I doubt we will get to the third reading of this bill before the election. But 8 years? The MPs must have had constituents come to them and say: "Can you do something about provisional tax?". Ninety-seven percent of New Zealand businesses are classed as small to medium sized enterprises—that is they employ 19 people or fewer. Ninety-nine percent of New Zealand businesses employ 50 people or fewer. This is a major problem for business and it has taken us 8 years to get here. I personally do not think that is good enough. That is not good enough from the party that purports to represent business because it does not. It just does not.The other thing that has taken too long here is the foreign trust debacle. This has been well played out in the media but it is worth just going over it a little bit again. We all know in politics whether it is local national or even global that perception is the reality. Whether we were a tax haven or not it did not really matter. The reason I say that is that the Australian Financial Review The Guardian and all these reputable international newspapers reported New Zealand being a tax haven. So that became the reality.Let us be very generous here—I am going to make an assumption which is completely false but let us make an assumption here that the Government did not know about this. Well you would think that when New Zealand's global brand was under attack from reputable newspapers in the financial hubs around the world we would have done something about this immediately. Yet I believe that what the Government did in this case is what it does with a number of issues. It buries its head in the sand and hopes it will go away. Why are we only having the second reading of this bill now when it was such a major issue? Those of us who have worked overseas know what our brand stands for. We know what being a Kiwi means. It means acting with integrity. It means being trustworthy. It means working hard. Every young Kiwi who goes to London ends up with a job if they want one because we have a reputation for being good people.What this trust debacle did is it just began to chip away at that reputation of Kiwis being businessmen and women of integrity. So the Government launched a report—probably a wise thing to do. Well not a report an inquiry. It had to be done and what this inquiry said was that the rules are not good enough. What the inquiry said is that there needs to be a much higher level of transparency so that not only New Zealanders but the global environment the global business sector can have confidence that when they invest in New Zealand when they deal with New Zealand businesses when they are having dealings with New Zealand businessmen and women they know that they are dealing with people of integrity. The last thing we need is to be known overseas as a dodgy company or a dodgy place to do business.Part of the problem with this bill is that there is going to be more information but that is not going to be made available to the public. Of course there is a risk with this. If all the information is made available to the public then someone who has a foreign trust set up in New Zealand for whatever reason—and it might be because of the safety of their family etc.—could be compromised. But the thing with transparency is that it is about letting New Zealanders know what is going on in our country. I would have thought that if we have not got somewhere where New Zealanders can take a look at this and understand—or even a report somewhere that New Zealanders can access and understand that we are in fact acting with integrity that the Government has our back so to speak—then we have not met the requirements of where we need to be.I do not know whether there are dodgy guys drug dealers murderers and money-launderers investing in our foreign trusts. It was hard to tell; there was so much information out there. But if there was then that is really bad and if there was we need to close that down completely so people do know they can invest and deal with New Zealanders in confidence. That is why I am a little bit concerned that we have not gone as far as we need to.Barry Coates talked about evasion and avoidance. Well there is a big difference: evasion is illegal; avoidance is not. But if we look at our tax base at the moment there are estimates from $500 million which is very conservative through to $7 billion—which I think is probably too high but it is a figure that is out there—of avoidance. This is largely big companies structuring their affairs so they do not have to pay their fair share of tax. Initially when this came out the Minister said: "There is not a problem here—nothing to see move on." The Prime Minister actually then came out and said: "Well we do have a problem. This is not illegal but it's immoral."I suspect this is why we have a new revenue spokesperson at the moment—because the old revenue spokesperson just could not get his head around these issues. And they are complex; there is no doubt about this. I mean the number of tax bills before the Finance and Expenditure Committee (FEC) in the last 24 months and the number of tax bills coming before the FEC is huge. The reason for that is that these are complex and it does require quite a degree of consultation but just because it is hard to do does not mean we do not do it. I just find disappointingly that what this Government seems to think is: "Well it is hard—let's bury our heads in the sand." But we just cannot do that and I think what the people of New Zealand are looking for is leadership.I think that Mr Key failed to provide leadership in this area as did Mr English by association—he was his finance Minister for 8 years. If Mr English had been concerned about the level of base erosion and profit shifting or legal avoidance then he as the Minister of Finance could have done something about it but he just did not show leadership. What it took was Labour and admittedly the Greens to come out and New Zealand First because we all went hard on this issue and say there is something wrong here. I just think that when it comes to this sort of behaviour New Zealanders demand leadership and they demand action. Waiting so long for this sort of legislation is just not good enough. Thank you very much. Amendments recommended by the Finance and Expenditure Committee by majority agreed to.Bill read a second time."