Smith NickHon Dr NICK SMITH (National—Nelson): No amount of spin will hide the fact that this Government simply has an insatiable appetite for tax. We saw that with the first bill after the Budget which was to whack New Zealand with another $280 million of fuel tax and we see it also with this bill.There is absolutely no debate that we need to invest in conservation and that we need to invest in tourism facilities. Here's the real question: what is the correct way to fund that and is this a fair and efficient tax?Hon David Parker: Yep.Hon Dr NICK SMITH: If you go to Tax 101—and I'll be keen to have this debate with Mr Parker—there's three rules that should apply for a tax: is it fair is it certain and is it an efficient tax?Well let's firstly test the issue of fairness. Is it fair that New Zealand's biggest tourism market all those Australians do not pay a bean? How can members opposite justify that if a person comes from China they will pay this new tax but one from Australia does not? It is unfair and it's particularly contradictory in a week in which the Minister of Immigration is saying that he wants to have a fairer immigration policy that treats everybody from different parts of New Zealand more equally. But it's equally unfair in this respect: for the tourist that comes into New Zealand for a very short period a single day—and there are those that come in for a conference for a very short period—they pay exactly the same levy as someone that may spend six months here and walk the entire length of New Zealand. That is not fair. Let's think of a tragedy like the beautiful young woman from Britain who was killed. Her family comes out for the funeral; they are going to be hit with that tax. Is that fair? Actually the fact that someone comes through the airport from any country other than Australia is very disproportionate to any demand that they may put on the tourism sector.What's a far fairer way of funding? It's actually GST. GST means that every time that tourist stays for a night in a hotel gets in a rental car rents a campervan travels down the road and uses a bus or a domestic airfare there is no question that the GST in their expenditure in New Zealand is far closer and more related to the amount of pressure that they put on our tourism facilities than whether they have come through the airport. Then we ask the question of efficiency. We know that with GST GST costs less than 0.1 percent to collect. It's a very efficient tax. Does this new tax pass the efficiency test? It's expected that it's going to cost 15 percent—15 percent of the cost is going to be in bureaucracy in the collection of it. That means that every year something in the order of $11 million to $12 million is going to be spent in simply collecting that up. That is inefficient. That makes it not a good tax. Then the third thing about taxation we should test is whether it is certain—do people know how much they have to pay? Well here's my problem and this was so clearly exposed in the committee stage: this bill says that it should fund infrastructure. Well what the heck is the definition of infrastructure? Should tourists have to pay for hospitals? Well they're part of infrastructure. There is the occasion when a tourist may need to get to a hospital. Can they impose this levy for roads? Well they've already whacked them with a petrol tax. There is nothing in this bill that stops the Government being able to use this tourism tax to fund roads. The definition of infrastructure in this bill is so loose that it is the exact opposite of certainty. So I go again and say actually that the tourism sector is the only foreign exchange - earning sector that pays GST. If you're in the meat sector if you're in the dairy sector or if you're in any of those you do not pay and that was substantially debated. The fairer way to pay for those facilities is through GST. My very last point is that I want to quote Ronald Reagan because man it describes everything about this Government. He said that the Government's view of the economy can be summed up in a few short phrases: if it's successful tax it; if it continues to succeed tax it some more; if it keeps moving then regulate it; and when it fails subsidise it. The tourism sector has been an incredible success story by the previous Government led by John Key. The only thing this Government knows how to do with success is to tax it. It will be an extra imposition on the tourism industry. The very sector that is providing so many of hundreds of thousands of jobs and foreign exchange earnings and that is making the New Zealand economy successful is simply being hit with another crude horrible tax from this Government.