Simpson ScottHon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Thank you Mr Speaker. Normally in a second reading debate the House would have the benefit of having a select committee report back. The House would have the benefit of being able to scrutinise and look at a departmental report that had analysed the detail made by submitters recommendations that submitters had made and also a sense of what the departmental officials had made of those submissions. Of course when we're operating under urgency on a piece of legislation like that we don't have the benefit of that kind of scrutiny or feedback so we are left in a situation where members of the Opposition are going to have to rely on the regulatory impact statement (RIS) prepared by officials from the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment. In the time that's available to me I'd like to go through just some of the points that are raised in the regulatory impact statement in relation to this short but not very specific piece of legislation.My colleague the Hon Jacqui Dean made I think some very good points around definitions particularly the looseness of the definition of Minister" in clause 5(2). Now there are further issues of concern that point to this bill having been thought about for some time but obviously prepared with haste and in a hurry because when one looks through the regulatory impact statement frankly more questions are raised than answered. The very first question that is raised by a quick look at the RIS is that it says that the proposing Minister is the Hon Kelvin Davis. Well actually it's not; it's Iain Lees-Galloway. He's the Minister of Immigration. This is an immigration bill in the name of Iain Lees-Galloway and yet it's the tourism Minister that clearly has done most of the work on this bill. So that raises an interesting question as to the process that members on this side of the House asked questions about in the first reading debate.When we come down to section B of the RIS there's a section that's headed up "Summary Impacts: Benefits and costs." It says "Who are the main expected beneficiaries and what is the nature of the expected benefit?" And it says right at the beginning in that very first sentence "No specific decisions have been made on where [the levy] revenue will be spent."—no specific decisions have been made on where the revenue will be spent. It's envisaged—just envisaged—that revenue will be used to support conservation and tourism infrastructure.Then if you go to the actual bill again it's suitably vague. It just says that the levy will be charged to contribute to the funding of costs associated with conservation or tourism. So there's nothing terribly certain or fixed or defined about that in the bill. Indeed when we go further through it if we look in Part 2 there's a new section 399A inserted into the principal Act by clause 7. Subsection (5) of that says "All levy money collected under this section must be paid [to the Crown account]". Now that's actually the consolidated account. So the money gets put into the consolidated account and then we hope and we hope with the goodwill of the Minister of Finance that he's actually then going to make an appropriation to redirect that funding from the consolidated account—funding that's been collected at the border collected by the electronic mechanisms on the hope that the Minister will make a funding decision in a Budget presumably that will direct funds to conservation and/or tourism infrastructure. But there's no certainty about that. Then we get further into the regulatory impact statement. The question is asked: where do the costs fall? It says in the statement that like any other charge it may—may—have impacts on commercial activity. I mentioned in my first reading speech the potential impacts on small tourism operators in electorates like mine in the Coromandel. So there is—and it's acknowledged by officials—a potential impact on commercial activity and none of the Government members who have spoken so far have paid any attention to that or attempted to answer the questions that we've raised on this subject.The RIS goes on further to say that "Information on price effects of charging the IVL is limited". We don't know what the information is because there hasn't been information prepared and it's unlikely that we're going to get it before this bill is passed. So as my colleague the Hon Todd McClay mentioned when we pass as a House legislation under urgency—rushed as it is without the scrutiny of a select committee without the scrutiny of officials looking at submissions that have been made by submitters—we are almost certainly going to have to come back at some stage and look to some kind of amendment to tidy up this legislation.I want to go further into the RIS because there is an issue that has been mentioned by Ministers on the Government side relating to the consultation process that took place ahead of the introduction of this bill. Now it seems that clearly there was some pre-engagement. In fact the RIS mentions that. It says "pre-engagement with key stakeholders" including Tourism Industry Aotearoa Local Government New Zealand and aviation and cruise representatives. But there is no mention of consultation or engagement with any of the smaller operators that make up the large bulk of tourist operators in the country. A public consultation process it says was held in July 2018 and 107 submissions were received with 45 just under half of those submissions being from the general public—so they weren't even from tourism sector operators or local government people or anything like that at all; they were simply members of the general public who I'm sure made a valuable contribution to the process. But the point I'm trying to make is that the number of submitters in this consultation process was actually very very small. It was a narrow band of quite narrowly defined tourism operators and local government people.But what's most telling in the RIS is the sense that this was clearly meant to be a piece of legislation that was due to have the full proper process of a parliamentary legislative introduction—a select committee and then a report back a second reading a proper committee of the whole House and then a third reading—because in the RIS it says on page 9 "Further targeted consultation is planned to inform IVL expenditure decisions." Then it says boldly "Legislation will also be subject to select committee process." So clearly there was an intention from officials and from the people who did make submissions that this was a bill that would go through a proper parliamentary process and would not be one that was passed in the dead of night under urgency—Hon Iain Lees-Galloway: Oh there it is—"the dead of night".Hon SCOTT SIMPSON: —on the back of a botched Budget. So those people who did consult—Kieran McAnulty: Dead of night—bingo!Hon Iain Lees-Galloway: Oh what? I was one off!SPEAKER: Order! Order! We're a Parliament not a drinking game.Hon SCOTT SIMPSON: Thank you Mr Speaker. Those people in the process who were consulted who did make submissions did so clearly on the basis that they'd have another go—that they'd have an opportunity to make a submission to a select committee and come to the Parliament and present their views and opinions and ideas to the Parliament. That's the way it would normally be done. So for the RIS to actually say "Legislation will also be subject to [a] select committee process." I think actually shows that this is a piece of legislation that the Government's just sort of snuck in trying to create this under the guise of a botched Budget process. And I say to those members who interjected: that's another one for you.I want to in the time remaining just talk quickly about the exemptions because it seems that the Australians have been exempt visitors from Pacific forum countries have been exempt and there is also a category of others that have been exempt which seems to be a little bit arbitrary. One of the challenges I think is that as far as I am aware the electronic travel authority system doesn't apply to Australians so possibly there was literally no mechanism for collecting levies from Australians. So when we get to the committee of the whole House it's my intention to put forward a Supplementary Order Paper that will look at some of these issues and I know that other colleagues of mine will have Supplementary Order Papers as well and we'll be wanting to detail those in the committee of the whole House."