Seymour David: Telecommunications (Development Levy) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSeymour David: Telecommunications (Development Levy) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 21 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3772. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Well I had enormous hopes for the previous member’s speech. I hoped to see a principled detailed economically literate public policy - based rebuttal of the bill. Sadly—sadly—my hopes were misplaced. But I thought that in the interests of informing the House I should show the member how somebody might have given such a rebuttal and might have critiqued the bill. The first question to ask about any public policy intervention or revenue-raising initiative is: where is the market failure? Why is the game theory outcome not Pareto optimal? You might look for an answer like that in the regulatory impact statement.It is a sad commentary on the standard of regulatory impact statements in New Zealand I am afraid to say that they are not very strong. It seems the problem definition is mostly about why the current policy is not as big as we would like it to be. It even quotes political party websites in the regulatory impact statement. That is not the kind of problem definition and identification of market failure that one would like to see in a regulatory impact statement.One might well argue that there is no public policy basis or intervention logic behind this bill. The Opposition could have done that but sadly it did not. It might have raised the question of technological change. If I could indulge the House with a small personal anecdote 15 years ago my flash uncle wired his entire house with ethernet and we thought that was pretty cool and he thought that was pretty cool. Then along came something called Wi-Fi and then we did not think he was so cool and neither did he. You might think that is a small personal anecdote but I recently heard that larger organisations are capable of such mistakes. Indeed the entire Tasman District Council recently—as recently as 15 years ago that is—made a regulation that every house in its region should be wired with ethernet. That lasted for about 3 years and it was swallowed by the same fate. Anybody who wants to fund a rural broadband initiative through any kind of revenue source should be very wary that technological change is happening a lot faster than Government programmes and legislation even legislation as fast as tonight.Hypothetically if you did agree that there was a case for the public funding of telecommunications infrastructure you might ask some questions like: to whom is the benefit and what is the most appropriate source of revenue to fund that benefit? It seems the principle is that it is current telecommunications users. Well what we find in the regulatory impact statement is that one of the best rationales you can find is that we need to do this for people who do not have access to telecommunications services. So we are charging the people who are using the services on behalf of people who are not using them. That sounds to me like a public-good argument or a redistribution argument and if you adopt the principle that you want to raise revenues in the ways that are least distortionate of behaviour then you should use low-rate broad-base taxes such as indirect taxes like GST.None the less that was not the quality of argument that we heard even from some of the most able members on the other side of the House. So I conclude with another thought which is that even the best public policy relies upon political support to be sustainable. What this bill is really about is ensuring that the body politic of New Zealand is able to keep supporting the public policies under which it lives. That is why there is a naked unashamed redistributionist element in this bill and perhaps in another time and another place and another electoral result I might speak out about it a little bit more strongly. But seeing as those who can actually are unable to apparently for cognitive reasons I will not either and will be supporting this bill. Thank you Mr Deputy Speaker.