Edmonds BarbaraHon BARBARA EDMONDS (Labour—Mana): And here we are a mere three four five days before Christmas with a bill that's coming under urgency that adds to the anti-worker agenda that that side of the House that Government wants to run. We have seen under urgency over the last day—over the last three days because this is Tuesday—an absolute agenda of removing fairness in our system fairness for workers fairness for employees. This bill continues that unfairness because the unfairness is no longer going to be subject to evidence or data.Now I have worked for a long time in the tax community outside of these walls including for one of the Ministers the Hon Judith Collins who in the time that she was the Minister did a very important piece of work around a multilateral instrument with overseas jurisdictions. She championed that piece of work to ensure that overseas companies and overseas jurisdictions could share information with New Zealand to ensure that people overseas were paying their fair share of tax.This piece of work allows New Zealand to share the information so that the rest of the public who are listening to this debate understand where the incidence of tax lands and unfortunately this Government has shown that it is not evidence based or perhaps it's going to be evidence based on the data that they want to use. This report would have been written—there's a draft report. I look forward to our members' Official Information Act (OIA) requests to Inland Revenue for that draft report to understand the evidence that's been written. But when I looked to the Minister's press release as to why exactly that side of the House this Government wants to ram this piece of legislation through just before Christmas I couldn't find the answers and all I found were a whole bunch of contradictions.On the Taxation Principles Reporting Act I quote the Minister: despite widespread opposition". Again as evidenced by one of our own Finance and Expenditure Committee members and other members who were sitting through that tax principles bill that was absolutely incorrect. There wasn't "widespread opposition". Then the Minister's press statement goes "The bureaucracy it would have entailed is completely unnecessary." Again even in the officials' regulatory impact statement it states 2.5 fulltime-equivalents (FTEs)—2.5 FTEs—and I object to the Minister using the word "bureaucracy" to describe our hard-working public servants the 2.5 of them who would have already written this report and whose time therefore is being wasted by this Government. But then again it is official information so again I encourage other members of this House to put in that OIA request.The Minister's press release then carries on: "be on higher priority measures to address the cost of living and get the government's books back in order." Well the cost of living just yesterday in the Minister of Finance's mini-Budget removed two key elements which would have helped with the cost of living: that is the half-price transport fares and that is the removal of the 20 hours' early childhood education (ECE). Those are two policy initiatives that would have helped our families with the cost of living. I'm aware just today of a family that was absolutely banking on being able to have 20 hours' ECE free next year and for that family to be able to go back to work for one of those parents but this Government is not about the cost of living.The Minister's press release statement then goes "[it] requires Inland Revenue to report under the Act by 31 December unless the Act is repealed prior." Again the work's been done—another contradiction in the Minister's press release because the work has been done. We know that because the Green member quite clearly showed that there's only a few more working days. So again the OIAs are going to be flooding through.The last thing I want to point to in the Minister's press release: "[it means it's] focused on collecting tax and contributing to the delivery of the Government's income tax reduction plans." I can bet my bottom dollar that the 2.5 FTEs are probably working in the evaluation section of Inland Revenue. Their information will help target where you need to put your compliance costs where you need to put your compliance resources because again the Minister in his press release has failed to provide an absolute foundation for repealing this Act under urgency. It shows that that side of the House wants to be anti-workers. It wants to be anti-transparent. I do not commend this bill to the House and I look forward to the debate we're going to have over the next couple of days."