Woodhouse Michael; Parker DavidHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): I appreciate Minister Parker's comprehensive reply to that. The reality is just about every tax bill has income consequences. This is not material but if he chooses to exercise that discretion then it will rule the amendment out of order at the appropriate time. That doesn't stop me from discussing it. I want him to check with officials whether or not the million-dollar price tag for implementing this was their own costs because actually what the submitters said to us was that it was going to cost them much much more than that and more than the total revenue that would be collected by the Crown and that was the point I was making about the nuanced difference between these from an efficiency perspective. The income is internalised to the Crown but the costs are externalised to the agents who are collecting the GST on their behalf. Now I want to go to the particular principle of this about double taxation or double non-taxation. Firstly the Minister mentions the OECD. Well frankly we are the exemplar of good goods and services tax legislation not necessarily the countries that make up the OECD. In respect of the double taxation or double non-taxation the solution to that—if indeed there is double non-taxation and I'm not even sure that there is that—is that if an overseas person comes to New Zealand and their roaming devices hook in to Spark or 2degrees or whoever their agent overseas' partner is here in New Zealand then they are consuming a service onshore in New Zealand for which the fee should have GST added to it in the same way that when they arrive in New Zealand and they go to a cafe and they buy a meal that they would have bought at home had they been at home there's still GST on that. So if we are to adopt a consistent principle of taxing once we should tax overseas people on their telecommunications charges here and not impose GST on global roaming charges when New Zealanders are overseas. That would be the correct way to fix this not what IRD are recommending. I'm not sure what the two-way trade is in global roaming charges. It probably favours the overseas telecom providers given how much they blimmin charge us when we get overseas. Actually to the degree that there is more or less the same number of people coming and going it's probably revenue-neutral but it's in principle a much purer approach to apply GST on domestic charges used by overseas people coming here and not on roaming charges used by New Zealanders overseas. Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister of Revenue): I'm advised that the estimate of the cost of software upgrades has actually come to the Revenue from the industry. Hon Michael Woodhouse: Well that's not what they told us. Hon DAVID PARKER: That's what I'm advised and they're confident about that. In respect of the double taxation issue I'm advised that a number of countries such as the UK and the EU are already adopting the OECD guidelines. So that would result in double taxation if we were to tax them for their consumption of roaming services when they were in New Zealand. It would also make it impractical for foreign telco suppliers to sell global or regional roaming packs that include New Zealand because at the time their consumer uses the roaming services they may be required to apportion roaming charges depending on each country's GST or VAT which becomes impractical for them. I think I've dealt with the other issues already.