Mathers Mojo: Taxation (Residential Land Withholding Tax GST on Online Services and Student Loans) Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMathers Mojo: Taxation (Residential Land Withholding Tax GST on Online Services and Student Loans) Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 08 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8652. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MOJO MATHERS (Green): The Green Party will support this bill to a select committee. There are elements of the bill that we strongly support but there are also elements that we have concern about and we hope that the details of these will thrashed out at the select committee. But first just to comment on the overall bill we do feel that it packages three very distinct elements that would be best separated out into three different bills to allow parties to vote accordingly on the different bills.The point that I really want to focus on today is the GST on online goods and services. As an overall principle yes we strongly support it. As said earlier it is absolutely growing by 10 percent every year. More and more people are doing their shopping online and many are looking to do their shopping from overseas shops and use overseas services as well. However one of the unintended consequences of this bill could be that some services overseas will decide that it is not worth the hassle and place geo-blocking on to their services.That is fine if there is a genuine comparable service in New Zealand but for some services there is not that comparability of access. One really obvious example is the provision of online television and movies. The big four providers in New Zealand—Sky TV Television New Zealand MediaWorks and Spark—none of them provide accessible online services. None of them provide captioning services none of them provide audio description. On the other hand Netflix a big overseas provider does provide captioning services and all its movies are captioned. So of course for the deaf community we like to use Netflix; there is just no choice in that matter. That is the only service that we can actually use. So it is very good that Netflix has said it will continue to provide that service in New Zealand even after this bill has passed even after GST is charged but the reality is that is for Netflix New Zealand services which has quite a limited range of movies. If you go to Netflix US there is a far greater range of movies provided. So what do we want to do if we want to watch a movie with captions? We use the domain name system (DNS) and get around DNS blocking and try to access these movies online because that is the only way that we are going to be able to watch these movies with captions.This is not to try to avoid paying GST; this is to try to have access to a service on the same basis as every other New Zealander. So I really hope that when the bill goes to the select committee we will kind of unpick some of these unintended consequences. Although we want to support New Zealand businesses although we want to ensure that there is a level playing field the reality is that some of the services and goods that are provided in New Zealand just do not meet the standard for accessibility and this is a really important thing.We will be looking at what the experience overseas has been with introducing bills in the EU Norway South Africa and so on to see how they managed to ensure accessible services. Some of these countries have accessible services in their own country when it comes to movies and online TV but here in New Zealand we do not because we do not regulate that. The really important thing is to try to ensure that where New Zealanders have legitimate reasons for getting around geo-blocking they are not being unfairly penalised and it is not automatically assumed that they are trying to get round geo-blocking to avoid paying GST. That is not the case. Anyway we look forward to that discussion at the select committee. Thank you.