Curran Clare: Taxation (Bright-line Test for Residential Land) Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCurran Clare: Taxation (Bright-line Test for Residential Land) Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 08 September 2015. Volume:708;Page:6341. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): I suppose that the quality of the debate from across the House tonight is an indication of the half-hearted drop-in-the-bucket lacklustre piece of legislation that we have got before us in the House tonight because of the inability of the National Party speakers to actually get up and make a coherent logical reasoned measured argument in its favour. Instead they have resorted to hyperbole and idiotic illogical arguments to pad out their thin speaking notes. They cannot even muster a strong argument around it.Labour is supporting this bill going to the select committee because we believe that this is a significant issue and because we want to have the debate at a select committee in a measured logical reasoned way and enable the discussion with submitters about what would improve this piece of legislation so that when it comes back to the House it will actually be a much better bill than the piece of legislation put before us tonight.You could drive a truck through this bill with the loopholes that it contains. It is an example of the many pieces of legislation that this Government puts up when the Government needs to be seen to be doing something and here is a half-hearted lacklustre approach to it that says: “We do not really want to make too much difference to it but we want to be able to say that we are doing something about this particular issue.” That is what we have got with this legislation unfortunately. But what we do hope is that when it gets to select committee we can tease out some of the issues particularly the issues that I am about to touch on.The two main issues are around the $5 million revenue estimate. What we are saying is that this has been rushed and it is ill-conceived and it actually is not going to deliver a great deal back. We want to tease out what the Inland Revenue Department has estimated which is that the new brightline test is going to raise just $5 million a year in additional tax revenue. What the Inland Revenue Department said about this bill was that it really expressed some real concerns. When you take into account that the Treasury figure for total tax revenue last year was $61.5 billion then $5 million is really just a drop in the bucket. You cannot argue with that—not you Mr Assistant Speaker but the members across the House cannot argue with that.In the regulatory impact statement the officials said that that revenue estimate of an additional $5 million a year was based on a number of behavioural assumptions that are inherently difficult to quantify such as the number of sales that could be delayed in order to exceed the 2-year holding period. I know that other members have canvassed those issues. That is one of the most significant problems with the bill and when the Inland Revenue Department is saying that then it really does need to be looked at further.The other issue I just want to touch on is really the lack of depth of investigation that has gone into the development of this bill. The Prime Minister himself said that he actually suggested this new brightline tax 4 or 5 years ago but they had only recently come round to the idea and the Minister of Revenue said that it has been only a month in the works. When you put a piece of legislation like this to the House you would have thought that there had been a great deal of work that had gone into it. There clearly is a difference in opinion about what the depth of that work has been and clearly there needs to be some more work done. Hopefully that can be done at the select committee stage which is going to be pretty important.Labour as I said does support this bill going to the select committee. We support measures that will cut property speculation and that is where the logical and measured debate needs to be—around what the best measures can be—and not around the hyperbole that is being delivered by the members opposite in the House.