Dunne Peter: Taxation (Tax Administration and Remedial Matters) Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Dunne Peter: Taxation (Tax Administration and Remedial Matters) Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:675;Page:20767] 
Hon PETER DUNNE (Minister of Revenue) 
: 
 I was reminded listening to the member Trevor Mallard particularly but also to one or two of his colleagues beforehand about a statement that Winston Churchill once made about I think Aneurin Bevan. He said that the honourable member should not develop more indignation than he can contain which I think was certainly true during the previous speech. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Is that a challenge? 
Hon PETER DUNNE 
: The bar might be high; I do not think the member could get there. 
Let me come to some of the points he has made. I am sorry to disillusion him on a key premise of his argument but I am not in the least unhappy about the Taxation (Tax Administration and Remedial Matters) Bill being passed. I have promoted the abolition of gift duty during the time that his Government was in office and beforehand so I am delighted to see something that I have been committed to for a long time finally being achieved. 
I listened to the arguments that essentially say that this is fundamentally unfair because somehow it is taking away a block. We know it does not actually raise any money but it is a sort of symbolic thing that stops people from behaving in a way that we might regard as inappropriate. Well I have two comments to make on that argument. Firstly tax law is not about symbolism; tax law is about getting the revenue that the Government needs to perform its functions. Every member who has spoken in this debate so far acknowledges that we get no revenue effectively from gift duty but the argument somehow seems to be that it is a symbolic impact. 
The second point I will make is that if we look at the other mechanisms available—the social security legislation the legislation that the Ministry of Social Development administers regarding access to the various long-term health and social subsidies—we can see that provisions within those pieces of legislation can prevent exactly the type of concern that members opposite are professing this afternoon. Then also— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: The student allowance legislation? 
Hon PETER DUNNE 
: I will come to that in a minute. The member made reference to the ability of people to manipulate trusts. In fact one of the things this Government did last year was align the trust and top personal tax rates so that the logic of using a trust as an evasion or an avoidance mechanism was considerably diminished. 
The member talks about Working for Families and he talks about student allowances. We have made it very clear. We legislated in the wake of last year’s Budget for definition changes for the purposes of income affecting Working for Families. Work is under way it was announced earlier this year on student allowances—that is about to follow. I am trying to put before the member the fact that a comprehensive suite of measures is being put in place— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: The Minister just confirmed it. 
Hon PETER DUNNE 
: Confirmed what? 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Confirmed that you can drive the trust Range Rover and then get a student allowance. 
Hon PETER DUNNE 
: Absolute nonsense. No one cannot. A funny claim was made at one stage by the Labour Party in the Finance and Expenditure Committee that somehow one could get all one’s school fees exempted. We went and checked that and no one found any record to give any substance to that claim. I say to the member that the Range Rover claim comes into the same category. 
This issue is a simple one of administrative efficiency. We get no money from this tax we spend about half of what we actually get on administering it and there is a massive compliance cost on people for being part of it. It is a no-brainer when we have other measures in place to address the concerns that members opposite raise that we need not continue with a tax that was put in place in the 1880s—it has been around since 1885—in an entirely different environment from that which prevails today. Members opposite are arguing a bit of nostalgia politics. I would not call it envy politics. It is: “Let’s keep what we’ve always had because it has always been there.” Under that scenario we would never make any change whatsoever. 
This is a tax whose time has been and gone. This is a tax that most New Zealanders will be pleased to see the back end of. The demise of this tax was well and truly foreshadowed. It is now time to perform the last rites on it and this legislation does precisely that.