Lee MelissaMELISSA LEE (National): Thank you Madam Speaker. I'm not sure if I should actually say it's a pleasure to get up and speak on this bill in its first reading the Companies (Levies) Amendment Bill. As Andrew Bayly has laid out the National Party will be opposing this bill but no doubt because of the majority that the Government has it will go to select committee and the Finance and Expenditure Committee will look forward to the submissions of the public. I'm sure that there'll be lots of people who will be complaining about this.The issue that I have with this is that there are 16 different registers including entity registers like the companies register and occupational licensing registers and each of these registers were actually established with separate pieces of legislation guiding their operation. As Andrew Bayly has said levies are set for the purposes of collecting the cost of doing the business—as in Government administering the register the cost of doing that. So for example if the Minister was collecting a levy for his work in terms of his portfolio and his colleague sitting next to him was collecting a separate levy for doing his piece of work imagine if his colleague who has a much smaller portfolio which requires less money dipped into the pool of the Minister's levy collection. This effectively means that it's an uneven playing field for different registers and yet it is pooled into one.That is cross-subsidisation and if this bill supposedly as the Minister said evens out and makes things fair does that mean that every single person who is on a different register will be paying exactly the same levy? Because paying exactly the same levy when it is actually pooled and everybody is dipping into that one pool is what I call fair. But if they are all paying different levies because they belong to different registers and yet the administration of it is being done by one entity and one pool of money where anybody or any entity out of the 16 registers can dip into that is what I'd call a slush fund for the Government. Effectively that should be called a tax not a levy because a levy is only about recovering the cost. The only way that it can cross-subsidise an unprofitable register is because another register is making a profit. The intention of the original pieces of legislation would have never and the Parliament that actually made that law would not have made it because the Government wanted to make a profit by giving a levy or charging a levy to people who were registering for the purposes or registering a company with the companies register for example. It was purely for the collection of money.The change that we instituted during the urgency during the Budget process is because it was discovered that this was actually happening for decades. What was meant to be 16 different registers supposedly charging a different levy were supposed to have been managed individually not dipping into another register's funding. But this activity was happening for decades and it was illegal. So effectively what Parliament actually did under urgency was making—the Companies Office Registers Funding Validation Act 2022 the validation Act literally made illegal legal. So I would have thought that the Minister having done that—making that illegal activity legal—would go back to his office and figure out how to make it fair and actually make the practices legal and not make illegal legal again.This is like an extension of the illegal activity that was what we validated. I just don't understand how he could actually call this a fair system where as I said effectively the 16 registers still collect different levies and now charging a fee as well. I'm unsure how the entities are going to be charging every person who registers a fair fee when the money that they collected is not just for the operations of the register as in cost recovery but some other register effectively has dibs into that pool of money that the Government is creating.I believe that this is actually a very poor piece of legislation—Hon Michael Woodhouse: Lazy.MELISSA LEE: —and very lazy—you're right Mr Woodhouse—and I don't think that members of Parliament who passed the original pieces of legislation who wanted cost recovery only from taxpayers would be happy with what the Government is now trying to do because levies are not meant to be a profit-making activity by the Government or a slush fund for the Government effectively becoming a tax. I do not support this bill.