Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): One minute and one second is all that the chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee can offer on a very very poorly prepared process. An important piece of legislation that hasn't had any consultation. It hasn't had any exposure draft. Parties only saw it—what last night the night before? It hasn't gone through his select committee and all he can do is offer one minute and one second and talk about nine years of neglect. That's the quality of the debate that we've been hearing over the last 24 hours.But as Yogi Berra famously said It's déjà vu all over again." We're back here again in a first reading again of a bill that we're expected as a House to give due diligence to and have passed into law without any of those processes. I want to quote my favourite lefty Professor Andrew Geddis from the University of Otago a fantastic jurist—Hon Member: At least he's principled.Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: A very principled fellow. And he said in an article that quoted of course the Victoria University professor Dean Knight describing the previous bill as a constitutional disgrace—he concluded in his blog piece today—this is Professor Geddis—"But here's the thing. When you're the government you've got to do better than 'just enough'. Putting rules in place to allow society to function in the new COVID normal matters. But how you put those rules in place also matters. And in that respect the government has failed us with this latest bill." I suggest that the Government is going to fail us—us being the people of New Zealand—with this bill and its process.Now on the face of it—I'm going to talk about Part 1—it looks very similar to the bill that we passed under urgency in February this year with National's support; in fact I think with the ACT Party's support albeit that we were critical of the process even then. We were a little bit more forgiving of what we were actually doing because we knew what on earth we were doing—we knew what we were doing because the Minister of Finance who moved the bill at first reading told us exactly what we were doing. And referencing Hansard from that first reading we knew that business resurgence payments will be triggered at higher alert levels at alert level 2 or above that the payments for business resurgence would be $1500 per applicant per firm plus $400 per fulltime-equivalent (FTE) up to a cap of 50 FTEs. We knew that the payment would be made by Government to business that have a revenue drop of 30 percent or more calculated by comparing a seven-day period at alert level 2 etc. etc. Now I would like to know what on earth we are supporting in terms of business resurgence payments. I was expecting the Minister of Revenue to come into the House knowing that we're having to pass this under urgency for a new business support framework that starts in eight short days' time and give the House and indeed the public the businesses that are going to the wall right now waiting for the answers to the questions of when they can open up again what alert level they are going to be at when we're going to see overseas tourists when international students will come back—and we had nothing.We are being asked to pass a piece of legislation that gives the Government extraordinary powers by Order in Council to pass secondary legislation that will cost the taxpayer billions of dollars—money that I don't begrudge when it's well targeted. And of all of the $60-odd billion that this Government has spent mostly under the COVID-19 Response and Recovery Fund my party supports those payments that are a direct response to COVID. So that is beefing up the health system's ability to respond getting the personal protective equipment the vaccinations the intensive care unit beds—not that we've been that successful at that—providing the wage subsidy and the business resurgence payments. But it behoves this House and the people who are in it to scrutinise the amount of spending and we've had no transparency whatsoever on what the Government did announce. We got that information in February and nine months later we're still none the wiser about what the total cost of that is because the Minister clings steadfastly like a comfort blanket to the Public Finance Act and says "Well we'll find out all that information on Budget day next year when the Supplementary Estimates of Appropriations are released." That's not good enough. But I'll give him credit for this: Mr Robertson did come to this House in February and give a detailed description of what those business resurgence payments would be and when they would be qualified for by business. So I turn to the departmental disclosure statement and the regulatory impact statement. Now one would think when they pick it up that at 54 pages long there's a reasonable amount of detail in it about what we're doing how much it's going to cost and when it's going to be triggered. Actually 38 pages of that are actually about the family tax credit and Working for Families changes which my colleague Louise Upston will talk about through this debate. Nearly nothing is being said about what the support framework for business is going to be. Indeed testing of the legislative content on page 10 of the regulatory impact statement says "No formal steps have been taken to determine whether the policy to be given effect by this bill is consistent with New Zealand's obligations." Is it consistent with the Government's Treaty of Waitangi obligations? Well "No formal steps have been taken to determine whether the policy is consistent with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi." And I bet the Hon Willie Jackson the Minister for Māori Development should have been roaring in Cabinet when he heard that—absolutely no scrutiny of the degree to which this bill is compliant with the Treaty of Waitangi. What about external consultation? Because the thing that really annoys me as a chartered accountant and as a former Minister of Revenue is the insidious watering down of good consultation process. It's a process called generic tax policy process actually. It's a different TLA—three- four-letter acronym. That's the good tax policy process where the IRD actually was required by the previous Government—I don't think this Government even knows it exists—to go out and engage with the sector the tax sector through the Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand Corporate Tax Group through the Tax Advisory Committee and the Small Business Advisory Committee and say "This is what we're thinking. Tell us about what you think back." Because the best tax experts actually great though they are don't work for the IRD; they work for KPMG Deloitte Findex—all of those—and they used to advise IRD on what they thought.Now they didn't always agree. But at least IRD was able to take those views into the Cabinet room when we see papers proposing changes to the Income Tax Act and the Tax Administration Act. Nothing has happened in that and the Government said "Oh well it's only a technical change. In fact it's crazily simple in its application. We're taking sections 7AAB and 7AAC of the Tax Administration Act and replacing it with new sections 7AAB and 7AAC." One could argue that the words in that are very very minor changes but what's not said is the big problem with this bill. What's not said is what the Government's going to do with that power. When are they going to do it? For whom are they going to do it? In what circumstances are they going to do it? And how much is it going to cost the New Zealand taxpayer? None of that detail is available and we're eight days out from—what is it called? The COVID support framework or the COVID something framework—the traffic light system and the consequential benefit or otherwise particularly down my way on business and what that means.Because despite any perceived relaxation of the lockdown rules the Government is still standing in the place of commerce. What business really wants to know is when the Government's going to get out of the way and allow them to trade safely and normally because there's two ways that businesses can earn income. It's by corporate welfare which I thought this Government would have been strongly opposed to or it's free trade—the transactions between a willing buyer and a willing seller that creates the economy that enables the Government to pay for the social services we so badly need. And instead it's intervened in a socialist roundabout in the name of safety with no apparent end. Apparently an announcement now that Kiwis can come home. Well whoop-de-doo! They should have always been able to. But no Australians no Brits no Europeans no Americans no international students no tourists. The commerce that we need to make this support redundant is still an uncertain future. This is terrible process. I'd love to be able to support support for business. This isn't it."