Williams Arena; Russell DeborahARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa): Thank you Mr Chair. Following on from the Minister's contribution I do have a couple of questions about that. Firstly then given that the Minister will not support the sensible amendment proposed by Opposition members can I ask him what was the original intent of the brightline test? What advice has he had that the two-year element of the brightline test will fulfil that original intent? The third question is what advice—or can he talk about why he thinks a two-year test is more effective than the 10-year test when those policy outcomes which are reached by the two-year time frame would be reached by the 10-year time frame as well and then slow down any other impact of property speculation in the market. I also want to ask the Minister a fourth question which is: under the Labour Government in the last three years the number of first-home buyers in the market as a proportion of the market share doubled. I think it went from about 17 percent to 30 percent. I want to ask the Minister: what will the effect of moving the two-year brightline test to a 10-year brightline test have on the proportion of new home buyers in the market? The next question is: has it impacted the Minister's decision making that that is likely to have a downward pressure on the number of first-home buyers in the market?Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour): Thank you Mr Chair. I'm grateful to my colleague Arena Williams for pursuing some of the issues around the brightline test but I want to pull back into some of the technical discussion as well. So here's another issue that I would like to ask the Minister to speak to and it's to do with the bill as has come back from select committee. In particular I want to look at clause 44. Now clause 44 is to do with the global anti-base erosion (GloBE) rules. Of course those are the incredibly important rules making sure that we look at some of the global anti-base erosion rules. So this is clause 44 which inserts new subpart HP into the Act. So in HP 1(3)—in fact in other places in HP 1(1) we get the term applied global anti-base erosion rules."Now anytime you go and pop into the Income Tax Act and there's a phrase like that of course the place to go and look for it is in the definition section to find out exactly what it means. So going and looking at the—there's another section another clause in this particular bill; it's clause 59. It introduces a whole series of definitions into the Income Tax Act and there it says "Insert in appropriate alphabetical order: applied global anti-base erosion rules".So obviously that's where anyone would look for the definition of what that actually means and it says well it "means the global anti-base erosion model rules as applied by section HP 3". So it just bumps us straight back to section HP 3. Now that's new HP 3 as inserted by clause 44. So going back to HP 3 we start to find out exactly what these rules are supposed to be—what are these global anti-base erosion model rules as applied by section HP 3?Then it's where it gets interesting because we start to find out what these global anti-base erosion model rules are and it turns out that it's something that sits outside New Zealand law. So we're defining what the global anti-base erosion rules model rules are not by writing it into our own law but by having something sitting outside our law which we refer to. In particular we refer to the—here we go HP 3 (b)(i): "the most recent commentary to the global anti-base erosion model rules developed by the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting." Then "the most recent guidance on the interpretation or administration of the global anti-base erosion model rules."So that's a complicated little set of rules used in this new part—the global anti-base erosion model rules defined elsewhere in the Act so in the definition section then bumped back to HP 3 (3)(b)(i) and (ii). And what those two clauses direct us to is nothing within New Zealand law but something entirely without New Zealand law. Now that's quite an interesting constitutional move and it is something that the select committee agreed to but it is problematic as well. I think this House needs to understand from the Minister why he thought it was appropriate that the way we define some of our tax legislation is based on words that are put together by the OECD.Now you know we're members of the OECD. We generally work along with their rules; we want to be part of that global community. Nevertheless we are resigning some of our legislative powers to a foreign body and I would like to hear the Minister's justification for making that move preferably—well you know tax can be quite complicated so I would like to understand why it is a viable process to go to the OECD for defining our tax law instead of defining it ourselves."