Bayly AndrewANDREW BAYLY (National—Port Waikato): It's a pleasure to be talking on the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2022-23 Platform Economy and Remedial Matters) Bill (No 2) third reading. As my colleague has already noted and we've said repeatedly we will be opposing and we have opposed this bill for a number of reasons. The first of which is obviously that it enshrines the current tax rates and tax thresholds which means that New Zealanders are paying far more than they ought to in tax because—as a result of large amounts of wasteful spending from the Government—we've seen people getting pushed up into higher tax thresholds which means they pay higher tax rates on their income as a result of wasteful spending which has caused inflation; and don't we know what impact inflation is. Of course the Government has had to set about doing a whole lot of stuff changing benefits etc. to try and assist hard-working New Zealanders—well in fact they haven't had a benefit—but people on benefits to try and help them through this period where we have a cost of living crisis and it will go on because inflation will continue at similar rates for some period of time. That is the worrying thing for New Zealanders and that is why we oppose this bill: because the tax rates continue to ensure that New Zealand households pay more tax than they ought to.It's interesting when you look at the context—and I know that Nicola Willis spoke about this—that the $42 billion of extra spending and tax revenue that the Government gets every year in addition to what it was earning back in 2016-17 when they came into office is just a phenomenal amount of increase in spending. Of course that's been going into Government pet projects rather than going back into households and now business owners—so that they can fund their businesses; employ more people; grow the economy; increase our exports which of course have decreased by 10 percent over the last year or so—and this is why the economy is in such a bad shape because of these policies and tax is the core of it. So that's why we do not agree with this bill; that's why we proposed that for low to medium income New Zealand families that they should benefit from tax decreases which is roughly between about $800 and $1000 per family. On top of that the early education announcement we made just very recently—they've got $3500—that would deliver to mums and dads who have children about $5000 in a reduced tax cost or looking after their children while they're at work. That is the meaningful difference that the National Government will bring if we are lucky enough to win the election later this year in October. So that's the main point about this bill; why we're opposing it. But of course this bill has a whole stack of other things in it some of which are quite good; some of which are not. Of course it already enshrines more taxes for New Zealanders so that if you are using certain Government services the bill provides for GST to be levied on those. So if you are accessing certain Government services the charges that you might have paid prior to these changes coming into place will now incur a GST liability. This of course is against a backdrop where those levies and those charges have previously been through the House have previously been through select committee and it has been agreed that they would not incur GST. But we've got a Labour Government that wants more money and that is why they're imposing a new raft of GST on a whole stack of Government services which in many cases are not warranted and are inappropriate and of course they come into play on 1 July in a few months' time. The other side of course is the issue—the vexed issue—around the app tax and Nicola Willis covered that very well. That is something that you know as we go into Easter many people would have booked or will be thinking about booking accommodation to be able to take their family away for a few days over the Easter period. Of course if you were to pay for $400 of accommodation—that's probably two nights; you may need three nights to be going away all of Easter but let's say it's two nights—you've got to pay GST on top of that. That's another $60. If you get a cleaning service to clean the bach after you've hired it for the couple of nights—of course you would now be paying GST on that amount—so all up you know that's just adding on about another $85 of costs to New Zealanders who want to go away and have a few days away. This is the impact of this app tax that the Government has been at the forefront of trying to push through. It was interesting some of the submissions we had on this stuff. Obviously the world is moving towards trying to do these types of taxes but of course New Zealand's at the forefront of it—we're at the bleeding edge of it—and there is no necessity to bring this in. We do not need to meet the OECD requirements at this stage. We need to be mindful of them we need to be prepared but we do not need to be bringing in these types of changes already. Of course what it's going to do is to some extent stop certain global players wanting to come into New Zealand because they know their products will be in a different tax regime which will affect probably our hard-pressed New Zealand tourist industry and of course it distorts the GST proposals that New Zealand already has in place. The main thing of course is yet again this Government has broken a fundamental tax tenet which is anyone under $60000 does not have to account for GST on their activities—that has been encased in law and been the practice for decades and yet this Government again believes that it's got the divine right to change those rules and this is what's happening under these new changes to this app tax that the Government is bringing in.Of course related to that the first tenet that the Government broke—that Mr David Parker broke—was the issue around interest deductibility. Of course there has been a fundamental tenet in tax for decades again which says that if you have assessable income—assessable income means that it's subject to tax—you should be able to deduct expenditure to offset that income. Of course what did this Government do when they first came in? They broke that cardinal rule and removed the interest deductibility on people who have properties that they rent out to people—pay tax pay rates on it pay all the good stuff and provide a home for people who want to rent. Of course now we see reinserted back into this bill the tax deductibility for renttobuy long-term rent accommodation which means that you have to have a minimum of 20 buildings or houses in one area—we changed the rules around whether it's contiguous or not. But of course those now allow interest deductibility only for those particular build-to-rent type of assets. Again this may help the renting market and we do need people to come into the renting market and have long-term rental arrangements but what we have seen is a decrease in the rental market. As Nicola Willis quoted $175 increase per week in the costs of renting for hard-working New Zealanders—perhaps some of the most vulnerable New Zealanders—and yet this has been the perverse outcome of this stupid rule of removing interest deductibility and applying a whole lot of other increases on the requirements on landlords. Of course there's been a natural sort of market reaction to that. So that is a bad thing in terms of what it's done to the rental market but we do like to see more build-to-rent but all those many thousands of houses that would have otherwise been rented have now been sold and have gone out of the rental market and made it harder for people.Now the cross-border workers reform—there's an area here. We have a number of people coming into New Zealand—if they can get through the immigration rules of course—hopefully they're starting to come through and coming to help hard-working businesses but one of the proposals here is to allow cross-border workers to actually account for their own tax. That is a good thing because some of them will come here—they might have come from Switzerland to help on special types of printing machine Heidelberg or whatever is an example. They come out for a specific period of time. They are the ones best able to understand New Zealand's increasingly complicated tax rules. They can pay their own taxes here rather than necessarily having the employer to do it but by agreement they can do it; that's a good thing to help support small businesses and businesses in general in New Zealand. But look there are some improvements but the fundamental issue about this bill—it continues to layer a heavy burden of tax on ordinary New Zealanders and they should be paying less tax not more tax.