McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. It's a pleasure to take a short call—and it will be short—on the Taxation (Research and Development Tax Credits) Bill and I need to say I guess for all the reasons so eloquently espoused by Parmjeet Parmar earlier tonight we are not supporting this bill. I want to make a couple of comments about this because the bill—and I would like to remind the last speaker Fletcher Tabuteau that just because the rest of the world does something doesn't mean we should.I want to just go back in history a little bit because this is an issue that we've never dealt with adequately in New Zealand in my lifetime. So if you go back to the reforms of the 1980s which may well have been necessary that was the last time in my view that we adequately funded R & D in New Zealand and we've never been able to primarily I think for fiscal reasons. We've never really got back to the point of funding R & D satisfactorily in New Zealand and no Government in that time since the late 1980s has come up in my opinion with a method of funding this type of expenditure in New Zealand that works. I think that's our great challenge and I don't know whether this is the answer or not but what I do know about this bill is that it's going to deal with the large spenders well but it may well be challenging for anyone else to access it and I think that's the challenge we've got with it.So if you look at our history when we last funded this type of thing reasonably well farming was one of the beneficiaries of that and we were leaders throughout the world in agriculture as a result of that funding. Since that day of course we've had a whole lot of new things come along that weren't even heard of in the 1980s: biotech the technology industry—they were hardly heard of. No one had an email address in 1985 that I know of—they may have had but I didn't know about it. So the world has changed dramatically and I think that's the big challenge we've got.So I think my issue with this bill is that it's expensive to access. Big operators will be able to access it easily and they'll have the infrastructure to do it. Smaller ones I think will struggle and the cost of access is one of the things that really concerns me and the expertise to provide that access is also an issue.One of the things I think that the Finance and Expenditure Committee did well in the course of this was to deal with the issue of outside contractors because in New Zealand because of our scale we frankly don't have the ability—nor should we have the ability—always to internally employ R & D experts or people that are part of this programme. There was a proposal in the initial stages of this bill that would only fund 80 percent of those outside contracts and the reason for that was that there was a feeling that there was profit charged in the course of that and we should take the profit out of that discussion. That has been done away with and I think that was a very good decision the select committee made.So I think some things have come back from the select committee in good order and I congratulate the select committee on doing that. It is a bill as Parmjeet Parmar said that we can't support and the reason we can't support it is because I don't think it encompasses the entirety of where we need to get to with R & D and the way in which we arrange the funding of it in New Zealand. It will be a challenge for the Government to get there and it will be a challenge for future Governments to arrange this stuff but there's no question in my mind that in New Zealand we dragged the chain on this and we need to find a way of satisfactorily doing it. This will do it to some extent in some parts of our industry but I'm not sure that that's where we need to be.So that's my contribution to this bill. We can't support it for those reasons. I would like to think that this is a partial solution but it's not the entire solution. Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker; that's my lot.