SpeechHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Madam Speaker. In what I think was one of the great malapropisms of the 53rd Parliament the Minister of Revenue at the end of his first reading speech said the following words: It gives me great pleasure to amend the bill to the House." Actually he stopped himself and ended up saying he commended it to the House but I reckon he was right the first time. He sure amended the bill to the House because this is the bill that has the biggest U-turn from a Minister who folded like a red hot Mars bar within 24 hours of tabling the bill in the House. So boy it's been amended all right.Here's the other scandalous part of this bill: it contains the biggest hidden hand grenade in Parliamentary history a $100 billion tax grab that nobody was talking about. When they talk about transparency and the efficiency of the tax system I think every single member of the public and of this House should remember that this is the Government that hasn't seen a single thing it doesn't want to tax. And if there was that hidden hand grenade—that big and that obvious to spot once the economic and tax commentators saw the eyes of the bill—what else is in this bill? Because as Deborah Russell lectured us—a history lesson on the car parks and fringe benefit tax in 2012—what she did say eventually was that that policy never made it to a bill. The reason it didn't was because the previous Government honoured the generic tax policy process. It set up the small business Tax Working Group and it used the expertise that exist in New Zealand to help it fashion good tax policy that's consistent with our broad based low rate and administratively efficient taxation system.All of that it appears to me has been thrown out the window because for the stuff that we do know in this bill there are some really ridiculous and inefficient taxes. The most obvious one of that is now euphemistically known as the "Uber tax" where drivers—they may be university students they may be part-time parents they may be people supplementing their income and earning less than $60000 the threshold for registration for GST—are now going to have to jump through a hundred hoops and get their calculators out for this extraordinary netting of the 15 percent GST that's going to be imposed on the fares; keeping some and giving some back. If that's administratively efficient I'll eat my hat.Now if these are the things we know about this bill and given what we heard from the Government when they first introduced it what other hidden hand grenades are in it? I look forward to the Finance and Expenditure Committee really getting deep in the weeds on this because at the best of times these remedial matter taxation bills are pretty pointy-headed and it does require the attention of the Finance and Expenditure Committee—Chlöe Swarbrick: Great committee.Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: I have no idea what that member is saying behind the mask.Chlöe Swarbrick: Great committee.Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Great committee. Well it's been better. I'll sound like the grumpy drunk at the end of the bar but it was better in my day—it was better in my day—when I was the Minister of Revenue. We wouldn't have introduced a bill with a hundred-billion-dollar hidden hand grenade. And boy the Finance and Expenditure Committee would have gone through this with a fine-toothed comb. I encourage the member Chlöe Swarbrick to get deep in the weeds on what's in here—Jamie Strange: Don't mention weeds.Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: —because if it's about fairness—that's right that's another referendum we'll be having. If it's about fairness and if it's about administrative efficiency she should put that lens on and make sure she listens very carefully to the tax experts who will be engaged by the committee and brought in as submitters because if there are hundred-billion-dollar mistakes that we can see and ridiculous policies like the Uber GST policy there are bound to be several others.We oppose this bill. We oppose this bill because it's philosophically the wrong thing to do and will set this economy back. But actually we oppose it because it's an inefficient poor process and it should be better. Good luck to the Finance and Expenditure Committee; good luck finding the hidden hand grenades."