Bishop ChrisCHRIS BISHOP (National): Thank you very much Madam Speaker. Look this is the first of what I'm sure will be many calls on this very tricky piece of legislation. I do have a couple of points I want to make. The first is that I just want to say to the Minister quite seriously it is disgraceful that the bill contains a statement about the regulatory impact statement (RIS) that says that the supplementary analysis report which members can find on the floor of the House—the bill says that the copies are on two particular websites the tax policy IRD website and the Treasury regulatory impact statement website. Neither of those websites have the RIS on it as of about half an hour ago. In particular they didn't have them on it at 2 o'clock when the bill was tabled for the first time. The Opposition saw this bill—sorry at 4.30 once the urgency motion was moved. Look it's Budget. It's fair enough. Governments including past National Governments have tabled legislation urgently and we ran them through the House and it's probably a very poor lawmaking practice but I wouldn't be churlish and complain about it because National used to do it as well. But I don't think it's unreasonable that members have opportunity to scrutinise the supplementary analysis report. So we got access to it because it was finally placed on the floor of the House later on or later in the bill's first reading. I for one while the Minister was giving his speech tried to look up the regulatory impact assessment report desperately trying to see some stuff in it and it wasn't online. I went to the tax policy website and it's not there and I went to the Treasury website and it's not there and it wasn't on the floor of the House. So we had the first reading debate without it. That's a shame because as the Minister knows and as Matt Doocey pointed out there's a lot of stuff in the supplementary analysis report most notably the fact that the IRD said Don't give this job to us." and the Treasury said "Don't do it at all." So I would have thought that was like some pretty interesting information that Parliament would want to know about. The Treasury said "The IRD should do this." and the IRD said "No no no we don't want anything to do with this." You know what else they said? They said this will have a significant impact on our services including for the very people the payment scheme aims to help because they're the very people who contact the IRD and say "Oh look I need a bit of help with this and I've got some issues here." What the supplementary analysis report shows is that those people are going to be affected because there's going to be a significant number of front-line staff to deliver the payment and it's going to be extremely tricky. It's going to "compromise Inland Revenue's already stretched workforce and affect the taxpayer population"—I'm quoting from the supplementary analysis report—"including the families and individuals that this payment would be intended to support."So it says "While Inland Revenue can administer the payment"—which is fair enough I suppose because they're a Government department they do a great job and they move heaven and earth to help the Government—"doing so will significantly impact their services to its customers." So that is pretty material information that the Parliament has a right to know about. So that's my first point and I'm pretty unhappy about it and I would welcome the Minister's comments. The second point is a genuine point and it goes to the departmental disclosure statement which was available on the floor of the House. Now we'll get into the time issues later and I'm sure members are going to want to explore when exactly this bill started to be developed because poor old Glen Bennett said "Oh no look this has been planned for ages." It's in the Government documents that it was come up with in the last two weeks. Let's just put aside the facade that this this was some well-organised and executed plan to assist New Zealanders with the cost of living. Let's just not joke with the House. We all know exactly how this worked. But my question for the Minister is: why is this legislation required? I know that sounds funny but if you read 3.6 of the departmental disclosure statement there's actually quite a serious policy discussion around basically cutting a long story short whether or not the bill's required. I draw the Minister's attention to the legislation design and advisory committee who were asked by the IRD officials for their view on whether the eligibility criteria should be set out in secondary legislation or in an administrative notice. The LDAC as they're called says basically "On balance we think the balance is slightly tilted in favour of treating this as an administrative scheme principally due to its nature as a short-term response to its immediate problem". Well as I understand it that's not what's happened. The question for the Minister is why the Government's done what they've done."