Watts Simon; Parker DavidSIMON WATTS (National—North Shore): Madam Chair thank you very much for the opportunity. I just wanted to raise a new point obviously in regards to part A of this amendment and that is in regards to the—and I refer to the departmental disclosure statement section 3.7 which obviously has considered you know that this bill has been through internal review of subject matter experts and looking at the administrative impacts of such a bill and obviously the key department responsible around this bill is the Inland Revenue Department. I have a little bit of experience; I actually worked for the Inland Revenue Department back in the day. I don't know if anyone else in the Chamber has ever done that. Back in the day—I was a student actually. That's how I paid for my university. But anyway very good organisation and I think very highly of them—Hon Michael Woodhouse: All good IRD staff should be over this side of the House. SIMON WATTS: But anyway—anyway—let's get back. I'll just try to stay on piste here Mr Woodhouse—but anyway.So what I want to get to the point on here Minister is a little bit more context a little bit more picture around some of that consideration that was put in around this bill. I've read and we know that Inland Revenue has had a transformation programme that has had significant delays which have led to significant financial issues so they've got staffing challenges. I've noticed that they've made staff redundant in their IT space only earlier this year. So that's the context of a Government department under a lot of pressure and we've seen the challenges of immigration as well. So I don't want to sort of generalise but I think we've got some challenges in terms of workforce.So getting back to this obviously any change in terms of bills and legislation is going to have an impact. It's going to have an impact on people. I guess what I'm really wanting to get context of because I know that this Minister and this Government—they say they care. So I want to get an understanding of this: what is the type of assessment that you went through? What are some of the findings that were given in terms of the costs and benefits of making this change some of the challenges around how you weighed that up? The other aspect is in regards to the IT systems. I'll tell you what—and I obviously am the associate spokesperson for health—we've had some pretty significant announcements around IT cyber-issues in Waikato DHB. Gosh you know I feel sorry—Chris Bishop: Oh don't forget about Canterbury.SIMON WATTS: —oh and Canterbury. I mean I'm sure there's a few. But in terms of the IT system issues as well any changes can have an impact on the system. I'm really keen to get an understanding at a high level around what that's going to look like and yeah if you could just paint us a little bit of a picture about that Minister.Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister of Revenue): I suggest that the member talks to the Hon Michael Woodhouse who is former Minister of Revenue who was one of the Ministers over a period of years now who's overseen the Business Transformation project which has been a huge and incredibly successful transformation of the IT systems at Inland Revenue. That's been successfully handled by successive Governments actually going back to when the Hon Peter Dunne was the Minister. So it's been under way for a while now and the good news is it's coming to an end and that huge spend and increase in IT staff that was necessary to see it through is coming to an end. Because we're such an efficient Government we've actually managed to land this project and bring it closer to conclusion. Because it's closer to conclusion some of those extra IT staff that were needed are no longer needed and that's what happens when you efficiently run a Government department. In fact so efficient is it that I'm sure that the computer system is now better able to handle this not very complex change to the minimum family tax benefit.