Nash StuartSTUART NASH (Labour—Napier): I would like to talk to clause 24 in Part 2 of the Taxation (Budget Measures: Family Incomes Package) Bill. This is the amendment to the Customs and Excise (Tobacco Products—Budget Measures) Amendment Act 2016 which has obviously just been brought in.What it does is it repeals section 8 of this very small Act but the thing that surprises me is that I am not too sure why it is relevant to this specific taxation bill and that is what I am struggling with. I mean I am not a particularly smart man. I am from the regions of course and so I know that Minister Paul Goldsmith being from Epsom is a lot smarter than all of us and so he will probably be able to stand up and let me know.What the Customs and Excise (Tobacco Products—Budget Measures) Amendment Act does is it actually sets the rates around which tobacco will increase by on various dates. Basically what it does is it increases the rates by 10 percent on 1 January 2017 2018 2019 and 2020 and if we have a look at section 8—the bit that is being repealed—it actually does get quite complicated. What it does is it talks about applications of Orders in Council with regard to the Income Tax Act as well as some other Acts. If we reference the Income Tax Act—this is section MF 7—it is about Orders in Council and what can be achieved by Orders in Council around moving the level of excise duty on tobacco.But the interesting thing—and this is why I am a little bit bemuddled here a bit confused here—is that the definition in section MF 7 Orders in Council" of the Income Tax Act which this bill is repealing talks about movements in the Consumers Price Index which is fine. We get that and that is quite important when you are indexing certain products because the Consumers Price Index is in fact the index that is used to determine what is happening to prices right across the region. In fact a lot of benefits—including peaches I think—are actually indexed to the Consumers Price Index. But the interesting thing here is in fact that when we talk about the Consumers Price Index in the bill we are currently debating it specifically excludes cigarettes and tobacco products. But when we look at the definition of the Consumers Price Index in the Income Tax Act all it talks about is "correspond to the movement in the New Zealand Consumer Price Index that has not yet been taken into account by an increase:".The reason why that is of interest—it is technical; I am the first to admit that—is that in the Income Tax Act itself which is I think one of the largest pieces of legislation currently on the books there are absolutely no exceptions when it talks about the Consumers Price Index. Yet in this piece of legislation there is an exception. I am not too sure why we have done that and I have argued that perhaps there are a number of exceptions if you really want to go—not you Mr Chair; if Parliament or the Government really wants to get finicky or to make social change or to determine behaviour because we all admit in this House that we will do anything to ensure that people do not take up smoking or that they can give up smoking. Perhaps that is the reason why it has been included in the definition of the Consumers Price Index as per this bill but I do not know why we are deleting section 8 of the Customs and Excise (Tobacco Products—Budget Measures) Amendment Act.I am wondering whether it is one of those things the Government has just decided to sneak in that has no actual relevance to the bill that we are debating which often happens. It does not mean this is the right place to do this and it does not mean it should be passed under urgency—of that there is no doubt—but I just cannot understand the logic around excluding tobacco from one measure of the Consumers Price Index in one piece of legislation but then not having any reference to that at all in other pieces of legislation that I would argue in fact carry greater precedence in terms of the amount of time they were consulted.As someone who has sat on the Finance and Expenditure Committee for 5 years I think we all agree that there is nothing worse than legislation on our books that uses different definitions for the same term. In fact in the Law and Order Committee which the Chair and I are on at the moment we are debating a different definition used in a bill we are considering versus an Act that went through Parliament I think earlier on this year. So to have a definition of the Consumers Price Index that is different from a definition in the Income Tax Act—I am not too sure why."