McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to take a call on the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2017-18 Employment and Investment Income and Remedial Matters) Bill third reading. I was not privileged to be part of that select committee in the earlier stages of this bill so I'll choose to comment on a few issues that have been raised in the course of the debate tonight and one or two other things I think are important.I found the last speaker Duncan Webb really interesting because I almost agreed with most of what he said but one thing he did say which I thought was quite extraordinary was that this Government's aim really is to rebalance the wealth income inequality within our society. Well I can assure him that if taxation's got anything to do with this when you rebalance wealth in a society you just chase it overseas. That's the first thing that'll happen if you're going to start rebalancing our wealth. That's an unbelievable thing I think for any Government to aim to do. I certainly have no problem with equality within a society or with people paying their share of income tax but I think to make a statement like that is extraordinary.The next thing I want to address is a couple of statements that Fletcher Tabuteau made. I don't want to address the statements he made so much as the results of what he talked about. Tax is an interesting beast really because if we don't make it simple we're in trouble and I'll talk more about that a little later but you either tax things to incentivise better behaviour or you tax things because you want more money. Frankly if the brightline test being moved to five years is a tax to incentivise better behaviour I think it's very odd. It seems to me it's just purely a grab for more money frankly and the interesting thing about that grab for more money is it doesn't penalise your normal property investor because they're there for life. It doesn't penalise the people in New Zealand that invest in property to create an income. It penalises the mum and dad investors in this country who put their little bit of life-savings they've got into something that they can touch go down to on a Saturday morning make sure it's still there and make sure it benefits them in their retirement.The reason it penalises them is because often those people are forced for one reason or another—sometimes by Government policy even; sometimes by the need to pay tax—to sell those properties at a time that they'd never planned to sell them at. This sort of tax really in my view penalises those people and doesn't penalise the people that it's aimed to get at at all and that's a fact.If you think about a normal property investor they're in property for the life. They are there to rent properties whether they're commercial or whatever they are to the people who occupy rentals or use commercial premises for rental or whatever. So I think that to put a tax like this on initially—so a two-year brightline test—is there to incentivise better behaviour. A five-year brightline test is basically there in my view to penalise or is a money-grab to penalise people who have gone into investment for one reason or another. So I think the family investors the average person who has a little bit of money invested in property are the people who are going to suffer the most as a result of this.I think there are some very good points to this bill. I think it's necessary to simplify our tax system. I think the simpler our tax system is the better off people are. One of the real challenges—and I'd agree with the previous speaker Duncan Webb on this—we've got in New Zealand is actually understanding the tax legislation. A lot of people who get into trouble with taxation and perhaps not paying it are people who haven't fully understood the tax legislation haven't understood how it should be applied and haven't asked or sought out satisfactory advice on it. I think that anything we do to simplify that tax situation is very positive and the transformation of our taxation system which was begun under the National Government of the last era and continued by this one—and full credit to them for continuing it; I think it is very positive for us. But I also think that the less tax we have—not less tax; the less taxes we have in New Zealand—and the less broadly we spread that net from a different taxation point of view the better off we are as a country.As I said earlier I have no problem with people paying their share of tax. I think we need to be very careful though in this country that we don't continue to penalise those people who make this country go round and those people are the average workers who go out there every day pay PAYE save their little bit of money and invest it on the weekends. If we continue to tax them continue to increase rates on them continue to put more costs and frankly more compliance on them there will be a revolution one day. That's the challenge we've got in this country in my view.So I've got no problem supporting this bill—supporting the bulk of this bill; certainly not supporting the bill through the House but I do think there's some very good parts to it and we'll see where it gets to. Thank you.