Shaw James: Taxation (Transformation: First Phase Simplification and Other Measures) Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShaw James: Taxation (Transformation: First Phase Simplification and Other Measures) Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 31 May 2016. Volume:714;Page:11544. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): It is my pleasure to rise on the third reading of the Taxation (Transformation: First Phase Simplification and Other Measures) Bill. I wanted to just pick up on one of the points made by my colleague Megan Woods in her contribution just now which is that for a party that is nominally the party of business it does seem strange to me that this Government has made such anaemic efforts in terms of tax reform. There is a lot more that it could have been doing over the lifetime of this Parliament and over previous Parliaments during which they have governed. But I would like to say that the Green Party of course will be supporting this bill.The Green Party fought the 2011 and the 2014 general election campaigns on a platform of tax simplification including measures similar to those that are contained in this bill particularly the ones that are around making it easier for small businesses to simplify their provisional tax arrangements.Having run a small business myself in a country with a relatively high tax burden I can say it is very difficult. When you are a small business you have limited revenues and you do not have a lot of wiggle room to be able to manage your affairs in such a way as to be able to easily handle the provisional tax requirements. So this bill does go some way towards making it easier to run small businesses in New Zealand. As we all know there are many hundreds of thousands of small businesses in New Zealand—many more people are employed in small business arrangements than they are in other parts of the economy. So that part of the bill we are particularly keen on—I am particularly keen on as somebody who comes from that sort of background.The other point that I wanted to mention was that the bill also allows employers to manage the tax implications of employee share purchase agreements which I think is tremendous news because there was a time when—particularly in the 1980s and in the early 1990s—businesses were much keener on including their employees in the ownership of the business than they have been over the course of the last 15 to 20 years.Providing that kind of incentive making it easier for both the businesses and the employees to participate in share ownership schemes will help I think. We all know that there is plenty of evidence that shows that businesses that have got employee share ownership schemes tend to outperform those that do not because the employees are thinking not just about their take-home cheque at the end of the month but also about all of the conditions that make that business profitable and therefore what they will be able to participate in in terms of dividends in that company; and that helps them to think about the overall business. So those businesses do tend to be more effective and more productive than companies that do not have share ownership schemes. So I am glad that there is a provision here that could lead to the expansion of share ownership schemes in small businesses—well in all businesses—in New Zealand.Of course one of the bill’s main provisions is that it updates tax law to account for developments in electronic communications putting them on the same footing as paper communications which I am amused by of course because the World Wide Web was invented in 1990. So here we are 26 years later putting electronic communications on the same footing as paper communications.So I commend this bill to the House.