Mitchell ClaytonCLAYTON MITCHELL (NZ First): Thank you Madam Chair. I appreciate the call this evening. A great contribution there by the member Mr Goldstein" and I have to also say that the one thing that he forgot to say in his contribution was that he did support the bill and for all the right reasons.CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): I think we use proper names—proper names thank you.CLAYTON MITCHELL: Sorry—Mr Goldsmith. That was a Freudian slip—my apologies. It wasn't deliberate. I want to just add to the fact that I don't think that there's a person in this House—or even when we go around the country speaking about this base erosion and profit shifting legislation—not in support of it because it makes sense for us. For two reasons this bill is the right bill because one it actually increases revenue for New Zealand and therefore takes the tax burden away from New Zealanders and two and equally as importantly it actually brings multinational organisations on to a level playing field for New Zealand organisations "New Zealand Inc." to actually work on.Mr Goldsmith did actually get to a point of talking about how important it is to encourage foreign investment into New Zealand and we certainly do not want to be discouraging that but we also don't want New Zealand to be the gold rush trading post that it has become over many years of these multinational organisations coming here and being able to get out of their moral and legal obligation by using base erosion and profit shifting methods to not pay their fair share of tax. In fact just recently we saw that the Google giant had a loss and paid no tax last year which we of course know is not true. How could that possibly be true? So building an economy from the bottom up starts with making sure that everybody pays their fair share of tax and this legislation starts that process off.I think conservatively the numbers are around $275 million of extra revenue that this should generate but on the far end of that we've actually seen and heard some people having estimates as high as $900 million to $1.2 billion of extra revenue depending on how far this goes. My question to the Minister is: does he think this is going far enough or is it a stepped approach to something that we should be looking at in the future for getting more out of these multinationals? This is a very lucrative country to operate in. Certainly in enabling them to trade here they should have their legal and moral obligation to ensure that they do pay their fair share of tax.We understand the situation. It's quite a simple process for multinationals: borrow money from their head office in another foreign country loaned at exorbitant rates to their New Zealand counterpart to justify and write off their profits against the exorbitant rates that they're doing. This legislation simply tightens that ability to loan at exorbitant rates from the mother ship to the subordinate company which is a New Zealand - based company to avoid their tax objectives making sure they pay their fair share of that tax.The other part is actually ensuring that the head office overseas doesn't charge an exorbitant rate for the administration of their burden—on their obligations—to ensure that the trading of that organisation down under in New Zealand isn't actually over the top. In Part 1 of this bill that's exactly what we're looking at doing. In Part 1 the interest limitations rules around that clearly outline what those steps should be and what a reasonable and fair rate of interest should be for those mother ship lenders and also it puts restrictions on the transfer pricing for those organisations. The bill I think as we've heard it go through the House is supported by all members of the House. It is great to see that sort of collegial approach to this sort of legislation.Part 2 gives the powers to the Inland Revenue Department—administrative powers to investigate—CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): We're actually on Part 1.CLAYTON MITCHELL: I thought we were doing it as a whole?CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): No we're on Part 1.CLAYTON MITCHELL: My mistake. I was jumping ahead of myself. Oh you guys didn't want to do that—didn't want to go there.We certainly do support this. Our usual speaker on this bill is away and unable to attend to speak today. But it gives me great pleasure to support this through the committee process and we certainly look forward to hearing the contributions from our coalition partner's side as we progress through the evening. Thank you very much."