Harawira Hone: Taxation (International Taxation Life Insurance and Remedial Matters) Bill — First Reading 
Harawira Hone: Taxation (International Taxation Life Insurance and Remedial Matters) Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:649;Page:17830] 
HONE HARAWIRA (Maori Party—Te Tai Tokerau) 
: 
 Kia ora tatou e te Whare. When I applied for a job some years back they asked me whether I knew what I was looking at when looking at a financial spreadsheet. I said: “Of course I do.” because I wanted the job. They said: “Well what do you see when you look at one?”. I said: “Well I look down in the bottom right-hand corner and if the figures have brackets around them then the business is in trouble; if they haven’t got brackets around them leave it alone.” So on the basis of that I have been nominated by the Maori Party to be on the Finance and Expenditure Committee and to speak to this bill and I certainly hope never to speak to this bill again. 
The current situation of making companies earning up to $200000 a month file PAYE returns twice a month sounds like a plan to keep bureaucrats in work and bury business enthusiasm beneath piles of pointless paperwork. This bill to change things so that companies making up to $250000 a month will have to file returns only once a month is going to come as a nice surprise for many small businesses such as Te Ropu Pakihi in Horowhenua; Te Kupeka Umaka Maori Ki Araiteuru down south probably in Dunedin; Manaaki Solutions up in the Bay of Islands; and hundreds of small Maori businesses all over the country. It will also be well received by Maori business networks like Te Awe Wellington Maori Business Network here in Poneke Te Waka Umanga o Whangarei up north and even the new network launched up in Gisborne today to “inspire motivate and connect Maori business people throughout Rawhiti”. 
It is important to note that the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor reckons that 73 percent of Maori see starting business as a good career choice while only 60 percent of the rest of the population think so and that Maori have higher expectations of job creation than non-Maori—characteristics that Maori seem to have big doses of: positive thinking; risk-taking; the pursuing of ideas; and big aspirations. All of that ties in with a recent report of the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research entitled  
Te Wa o te Ao Hurihuri ki te Ohanga Whanaketanga Maori 
 which called Maori entrepreneurs “irrationally exuberant”—probably because of the fact that although Maori rate very highly in business optimism we also crash and burn more often than non-Maori. Despite our best intentions and notwithstanding our irrational exuberance Maori business survival rates are very much lower. Maori businesses will really appreciate having to go through the PAYE rigmarole only once a month thereby saving time and money and hopefully being able to focus on the business. 
Another key area in the bill is the updating of the petroleum mining tax rules to encourage greater investment in oil and gas exploration but also to safeguard our taxing rights over our own petroleum resources. For Maori that is important because looking back into our own history we see that Maori still had legal title to petroleum here in Aotearoa right up to 1937 and that as a result of the loss of that title a number of Taranaki iwi took a case to the Waitangi Tribunal for recognition of their rights and settlement of their petroleum claims. The Waitangi Tribunal ruled that Maori had a Treaty interest created by loss of legal title to petroleum and that whenever that Treaty interest came up Maori would have a right to remedy and the Crown would have an obligation to provide compensation. Yet the Government refused to pay up making it very very frustrating for Taranaki iwi to have to sit and watch everybody else clicking the ticket and maximising the bucks from the Taranaki oil and gas fields while the iwi got nothing. Although we recognise that this bill introduces changes to ensure that New Zealand gets its fair share of the benefits from the petroleum mining industry we call on the Government to also recognise how those benefits derive directly from resources stolen from tangata whenua and to consider how full and proper ongoing compensation might be made to iwi in the future. 
The key focus of the bill though is on changing the rules for taxing the offshore income of Kiwi businesses in order to promote growth and to enable them to compete more effectively in foreign markets. That all sounds good but business growth also brings its own set of problems including a culture that values growth at all costs quantity over quality and profit above people. That is why the Maori Party thinks the time is right for a national dialogue about the genuine progress index reforming the tax system regulating growth to achieve a sustainable economy and ensuring that growth leads to real and measurable prosperity taking into account the impact of business activity on people’s well-being health jobs lifestyles energy use resource use and attitudes to the environment—like making big polluters pay up first rather than giving them a big holiday while the ordinary folk have to cough up for that pollution in more ways than one. 
One final thing: we hear reports that the changes to how we tax overseas income may lead to a $50 million loss of tax revenue. Well our calculations suggest that it might be a lot more than that so we are looking to the select committee for a more thorough analysis of what that loss might actually be. Kia ora tatou.