Sepuloni Carmel: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSepuloni Carmel: General Debate[Sitting date: 06 April 2016. Volume:712;Page:10252. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston): I just want to touch on a couple of things that the previous speaker Melissa Lee just said. She talked about the importance of being a Kiwi and being respected as a Kiwi. I just think it is really unfortunate that a few years ago she made it very clear that she does not respect the Kiwis in South Auckland accusing them of getting off the motorway in Mount Albert and committing crimes in her neighbourhood. Let us not forget that. She also talked about the international reputation that New Zealand has gained under the National Government. Well the international reputation that we have gained under that Government is absolutely an embarrassment to this country. The international reputation that we have gained because of that Government is along the lines of what John Oliver has put out there. Let us just see what that is: the world now knows that our Prime Minister urinates in the shower. That is fantastic for our international reputation—thank you National Government!In the past couple of days there have been revelations about the world’s most wealthy elite using our country as a place to hide its money and that is a shameful indictment on John Key and his National Government. To make it worse in recent weeks we have had it brought to our attention that multinational companies are not paying the tax or their fair share of it that they should be. When we look at that we have to feel a little bit concerned as New Zealanders because on the one hand we have people not paying their fair share and on the other hand here we are as a country struggling with record high levels of child poverty and struggling with record low levels of homeownership. We have got $1.7 billion here that has been effectively cut from our health system we have got an education system that is drowning our young people in debt and while New Zealanders are dealing with all of that the world’s wealthy elite is getting richer off the back of New Zealanders and New Zealand.What is absolutely shocking is that despite knowing all of this John Key refuses to acknowledge we have a problem with foreign trusts and refuses to crack down on multinational companies and the tax that they should be paying. He admits that what they are doing is ethically wrong but says it is still within the confines of our law. There is an easy enough solution the rest of the country would think: review the laws surrounding foreign trusts and tax. The Prime Minister has said on a number of occasions that the foreign trust legislation was introduced under Labour in 1988 but those members are the ones in Government. They have had 8 years to fix it. It was brought to their attention—it was brought to the attention of the country under their watch. It is John Key and his National Government’s responsibility to address the issues.The solution seems simple enough: review the legislation. But John Key is not about meaningful solutions. As Gordon Campbell recently wrote about in an article he is about crisis management ploys and over this issue he has been running the gamut of those ploys so predictably. In fact how about we describe what those ploys look like? The first ploy that Gordon Campbell describes is the “no problem here move on” ploy. “I don’t think it’s embarrassing” the Prime Minister said and “the OECD also had a review of its tax regime in 2013 and they gave New Zealand a clean bill of health”—repeated in almost all media reports. The actual truth is that there has been a continued call for change from the Opposition parties from the Inland Revenue Department and from that same report that he talks about the 2013 OECD report. There have also been calls from professors of taxation including one from the University of Auckland who said “the revelations showed New Zealand’s laws were out of date and the rules needed to be tightened.” but the Prime Minister continues to ignore them.The second crisis management ploy that the Prime Minister is well-known for is muddying the pool with irrelevance. We saw that today actually with Bill English taking a page out of the Prime Minister’s book. When he was talking about the tax issue he quickly said: “Here is the Opposition concentrating on this tax issue.Why is it not concentrating on family violence and youth unemployment?”. They are three completely different issues. That Government should be over everything. The Opposition has to be over everything. We should not be muddying the waters by trying to mix them up.The third ploy for crisis management is blaming Labour and we have seen that all week with the Prime Minister saying that the issues we are confronted with are because of the fact that Labour introduced this legislation but yet on the other hand he says there are no issues. It was 1988 when that trust’s Act was introduced. I was 10 years old at the time but of course it is my fault! It is my fault and it is not the Prime Minister’s fault despite the fact it was brought to his attention and he has done nothing to fix it.