Dean Jacqui; Penk Chris; Parker DavidPart 1 Amendments to Tax Administration Act 1994CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): Members the House in committee for the Taxation (COVID-19 Support Payments and Working for Families Tax Credits) Bill. We come first to the debate on Part 1 which is the debate on clauses 3 to 7 Amendments to Tax Administration Act 1994". The question is that Part 1 stand part.CHRIS PENK (National—Kaipara ki Mahurangi): Oh thank you very much Madam Chair. What an unexpected pleasure to be National's first speaker on this the first part—Andrew Bayly: And a good looking man too with a fine haircut.CHRIS PENK: Thank you very much. I'm not going to respond to any comments that are being made in the Chamber Madam Chair for fear of getting them into the Hansard.I have a couple of questions first of all and a little bit of it is my desire to be useful to the committee by asking the Minister to take an opportunity to explain clearly a couple of matters that might benefit from such clarification and that forms part of the public record of course. And a little bit of it is that I actually genuinely don't necessarily understand all the different parts. I would be embarrassed to admit that except that of course with such a newly introduced piece of legislation and one that has not been subject to much ventilation—as we've been saying in the last 24 hours in relation to another bit of legislation—I do genuinely think that I would benefit from understanding a bit better some of the way that the schemes intend to operate.So if I can take you and the rest of the committee first of all to clause 5 which is to replace sections 7AAB and 7AAC within the Tax Administration Act which is of course one of the pieces of legislation being amended I'd like to turn the committee's attention to subsection (1) which talks about the purpose of the section being "to authorise the making of payments under the COVID-19 support payments scheme" and so forth. It talks about a matter that is related to COVID-19 or a "circumstance or matter that is related to COVID-19" and then it's defined in brackets in bold "(a COVID-19 circumstance) or by a group of COVID-19 circumstances." Well the second bit is probably easy enough—that would be you know a plural more than one of a COVID19 circumstance—but I must confess I am still interested to know what a "COVID-19 circumstance" is. I presume that that's a matter that's defined in the parent legislation and hence in this amendment we are able simply to refer to that or cross refer to that. But I wonder apart from that relatively straightforward matter that I could probably look up myself whether there is scope for that to change over time—and for example for the Government by way of policy that's promulgated by Ministers and may be in a way that would be often the subject of secondary legislation whether we might have the opportunity for updated circumstances that change in the way of a global pandemic and the Government's response to it and the response of the people to the Government's response and so on.So my question in essence is whether there is scope for the understanding of what constitutes a "COVID-19 circumstance" to change over a period of time. I wonder if the Minister can give some thought to that—in particular whether the structure of the way the legislation is put together allows such a change such an evolution of our understanding of a COVID-19 circumstance and also if he can give some examples of what a COVID-19 circumstance might be particularly with reference to the current Delta outbreak but also with potentially subsequent future outbreaks maybe variants. And I'm not going to embarrass myself with exposing my lack of knowledge of the rest of the Greek alphabet. But while I could and anyone in fact with access to a Greek dictionary and of course who doesn't have one of those—we could all predict the names of the future variants. We don't know when they'll come. We don't know exactly what challenges they'll pose. We don't know in other words what exactly a COVID-19 circumstance would be going into the future to which such legislation would apply.So that's my first question or a set of questions if I may and I'll just sort of test with the Minister if he's in a position to be able to answer them before I resume my seat which I shall now in fact do.Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister of Revenue): Thank you to the member Chris Penk for the question. Clause 5 of the bill inserts a new section 7AAB that makes it clear that the new COVID support payment system has to be related to a COVID-19 circumstance. It's broadly defined but if COVID-19 was over as a pandemic the right to make resurgence payments would fall away too effectively."