Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Two minutes and 47 seconds—the former chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee. Having left the Minister of Revenue to do all of the work last night and all of the work this morning with no sign of the chair of the finance committee and no sign of the deputy chair of the finance committee all that the Labour backbench can come up with is a two-minute 47-second speech on a very very important piece of legislation being rushed through under urgency that the Attorney-General has said is an outrage—and all Dr Russell could come up with was two minutes and 47 seconds. But that's not the only thing that grinds my gears. The real thing that grinds my gears—and it's particularly evident in this bill debate—is the straw man arguments that are thrown up by Labour members about what the National Party believes and then they criticise it. After my first reading speech Stuart Nash—I'd talked about pump-priming and the importance of actually adding a tax cut not tax increases to the strategy of the bolus of Government spending and Mr Nash gets on his feet and claims that I want to give the top earners a tax cut. It's rubbish it's wrong and it's very annoying—I was about to say something else then. Look tax cuts can come in a number of forms and actually the campaign pledge that National made benefited low-income taxpayers. The threshold changes—one could have a tax-free threshold and I think Mr Seymour needs to do a bit of a primer on what broad based and low rate was when he criticised Mr Bayly for his amendment under thresholds. Broad base isn't about the level of tax rates; it's about the breadth of what we tax. So he needs to go and perhaps grab a textbook. Then we had Greg O'Connor saying that They're all against any sort of tax whatsoever." as if the National Party wants to get rid of the tax system. Well if he'd listened to my first reading speech he would have heard me say I am very happy to pay tax. I've been a higher-income earner for most of my working life. That's fair and I said that it was fair that the top 9 percent of income earners should carry the burden of 42 percent of the net income tax collected by the Crown—that's fair. Mr O'Connor interprets that as me wanting to get rid of the tax system altogether. Then we heard from Mr Parker this morning that he thought that I had an unhealthy defence of tax avoidance structures of the wealthy. Well guess what? I don't. But what I do have is a healthy defence of the rule of law and the liberties that are provided through it and the Attorney-General has said that the Commissioner of Inland Revenue's new powers when this bill is passed are an affront to the right to freedom of expression and the right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure. Now the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act isn't some soft puppy thing because while it talks about these things it actually gives the power of the Crown to say "Well that may be reasonable in the circumstances." But the Attorney-General has said "That is not reasonable." and actually Mr Parker in his third reading speech when talking about section 17GB and its relationship with section 17G makes me think that I was at cross-purposes with him in the committee of the whole House. It wasn't a controlling provision on the Commissioner of Inland Revenue; this is a strengthening provision. This enables her to go further and that makes sense because for all of his—he took his Attorney-General hat off and then put his revenue-gathering Minister's hat on. The question was answered when he said that "Actually this isn't administrative. This isn't information-gathering for policy purposes. The IRD was concerned about avoidance risks in trusts for some time." Then he said "Wealthy individuals that use complex vehicles raise the risk of tax avoidance." Well I've got a pretty good working knowledge of the Tax Administration Act and the Income Tax Act and I've got to say the commissioner has the powers to look through those structures. It may take some time and it may be complex but this is the lazy way out and I don't even believe this is the commissioner asking for it. I will be seeking all of the papers under the Official Information Act of the exchanges between the IRD and the Minister about why this was necessary and I have every expectation that I won't be seeing the tax policy team going "Minister we need this because there's a loophole." I think we'll be seeing "Minister has asked for this and we are responding to it." and he's probably only asked for it in the last six weeks. The question that I asked in the committee of the whole House which was kind of fudgy-answered was whether or not the Attorney-General would have been happy with the amendment that's been made to clause 33. Well it's been emphatically answered: the Attorney-General will not be happy with that at all because it clarified the strengthened powers not the constraining powers. After COVID we heard from the Government about a new normal—things will have to change new approaches new innovations—and I think that was quite good. That's quite exciting. I think maybe we can actually break the mould a bit and think differently about creating new technologies reducing the amount of travel we do working from home strategies innovations encouraging high - net-worth individuals to use their creative talents for the betterment of the whole country and do you know what the first new normal is? A futile gesture of an envy tax on the 2 percent of New Zealanders that create the most wealth. Remember they already pay 20 percent of the tax base—the net income tax base that is—so this is going to be an ineffective envy tax and far from being innovative far from being a new normal this is absolutely the old normal from the left. Not only is it ineffective; it's not even going to pay for that other habit of the left which is a bloated increase in bureaucracy. The public sector went up in cost between 2017 and 2019 by $700 million a year. I'm not talking about teachers and nurses and police officers. That's just Wellington bureaucracy which has gone up by 40 percent more than this tax will raise. My suggestion to the Government is that if they are really concerned about the future generations and the burden of debt to be repaid rather than imposing an envy tax how about they actually get spending under control because we have got necessarily significant extra increases and a now projected debt of $214 billion over the next four years—and that was another straw man argument? When the previous National finance spokesperson Paul Goldsmith suggested that we could actually get debt to GDP down faster than this Government there was righteous indignation from the Minister of Finance who thought that what we were saying was that we've got to cut spending. Rubbish! We do that by growing the economy faster but this Government doesn't even know how to do that. So they go back to type. The new normal is the old normal: an envy tax on the people who create the wealth. That is wrong it is ineffective and it won't improve fairness. Now I just want to finish on the retrospectivity issue. I just don't accept the Minister's explanation about why retrospective legislation is required for an information requirement that is being changed seven years after it was initially put in place. That's exactly the sort of thing that citizens taxpayers should be protected from. What would we do if we had a new criminal offence that was legal seven years ago and illegal today? Would we go back seven years and say "Well it doesn't matter that you didn't commit a crime seven years ago. Now we're going to say that you did."? Well that would be an outrage but that's exactly in an administrative sense what this is doing. It's wrong. It should never have been rushed through under urgency. The tax rates are futile the trust inquiries are punitive and the retrospective elements of this are quite wrong. Debate interrupted."