Clark David: Taxation (Land Information and Offshore Persons Information) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClark David: Taxation (Land Information and Offshore Persons Information) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 09 September 2015. Volume:708;Page:6449. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): It is with some amusement and distress at the same time that I rise to take a call having only recently learnt of this manual capture of Inland Revenue Department information that is now required as a consequence of this legislation. I want to suggest an alternative title for the Taxation (Land Information and Offshore Persons Information) Bill. I understand my colleagues have suggested alternative commencement dates perhaps at a time when it will not all have to be recorded with a quill pen on paper but we can adopt some kind of modern system like—I do not know—maybe a computer to record the information. I just want to suggest that maybe we should label this bill for what it is. It is a farce when we have a bill here that talks about doing something but finds ways of creating loopholes to ensure that that very thing does not happen. Then on top of that we learn that the whole thing was so rushed.Let us cast our minds back before the election when the Government was under fire for not doing anything about the housing stuff. It ran right through into the new year. This Government has been under fire for its lack of response to the housing crisis in Auckland and the effects that that is having on our economy. And then this year ahead of the Budget the Government must have been doing its polling. It must have realised that this issue was really coming to a head in public opinion and all of a sudden—all of a sudden—it announced a new tax on housing speculation to try to somehow make it look like it was doing something useful. Of course we have seen the advice from Treasury that says that the way it was designed it will collect only about $5 million in revenue when if it did not have all the loopholes that have been thrown in it would have collected $30 million to $40 million and had a bigger deterrent effect. We know that is not effective legislation.Then we have got this complementary legislation here which is going through right now that is about collecting the register of persons of foreign speculators and we know that it is designed to exclude most people. It is designed in a way that makes it full of loopholes so it will not be useful information that is collected. We have rehearsed the debates in the previous stages of this bill and in the Part 1 and Part 2 debates about how we will probably find ourselves as a Parliament in the next Government having to repair the work done on this legislation tonight to fix those loopholes that we find in the legislation. And we know that passing a bill through this Parliament costs more than a million dollars with all the officials’ time and all of the salaries of the MPs and so on and we know that we will be back here correcting this Government’s mistakes.This bill should be called a farce because that is what it is—that is what it is. We have seen this time and time again from this Government particularly when it comes to IT systems. The Inland Revenue Department computer system of course is the grand champion of the scheme. In 2012 on St Valentine’s Day the Prime Minister made a promise that he would sort out the Inland Revenue Department’s computer system. Well we are still waiting—we are still waiting—for real action on that. The Prime Minister said in the speech where he talked about needing to address this issue: “Governments should not have to find themselves in a position where they are held hostage to a lack of technology.” And that is where we find ourselves here tonight 3 years on with a different computer system not up to date and officials being required to handwrite the records from when this bill is enacted in October through to December. And we learn from the Official Information Act material that has been supplied that December is an optimistic date. They might be handwriting next year the records that are recorded in this register! And it might be the case indeed that the Government comes back to correct the bill to make amendments to actually try to sort this out so that it can push it further out.Hon David Cunliffe: The corrections issue.Dr DAVID CLARK: It has done it before—a corrections issue. It has pushed it out before.This is what happened with the Inland Revenue Department when the Government changed the child support legislation. It discovered that the computer systems were not up to scratch and it had to come back and change the legislation use more parliamentary resource to go back and backtrack so that it could find and make legislation that actually worked. This is what we may well find with this legislation. We may find that Parliament spends a million or whatever dollars all over again to put through new legislation that repairs this faulty legislation that does not actually collect a register of foreign buyers properly and uses a manual paper-based system for the initial months on an optimistic scenario for collecting the details for a foreign buyers register. I think the case is fairly clear for adding the word “farce” into this title. I wish the Government would have a sense of humour or irony or something and actually consider this serious suggestion from the Opposition benches. I look forward to the Minister in the chair the Hon Nicky Wagner taking a call and saying why on earth this should not be called a farce because I think the case is pretty clear.