Robertson Grant: Taxation (Bright-line Test for Residential Land) Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRobertson Grant: Taxation (Bright-line Test for Residential Land) Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 08 September 2015. Volume:708;Page:6346. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): What an outrageous proposal from the Minister of Revenue. It is ridiculous at so many levels. The first of those is that he has just acknowledged that 1 October is the date that this comes into force. There is no way because of the incompetent running of this House by the Leader of the House that this bill can actually be passed by 1 October. So now we are going to have a bill reported back on 22 October. It is already retrospective legislation. That is bad enough but given that it is already retrospective legislation why not have a full select committee process? Why not actually give an opportunity for New Zealanders to consider the bill properly and for the Finance and Expenditure Committee to hear expert advice and take the time to get the legislation right? It is not as if there is a rush to get it done by 1 October because the Government has blown that already.Hon David Parker: It’s not going to work anyway.GRANT ROBERTSON: Yes it will not work anyway. We can actually spend some time in the select committee getting it right but no. The Government wants to sweep this away under the carpet. It wants to get it off the books before Christmas because it is embarrassed by this piece of legislation and so it should be embarrassed by this piece of legislation.Having a report-back date of 22 October means that we have a piece of retrospective legislation but we are not even giving the committee enough time to properly consider it. When the Standing Orders Committee decided that these kinds of truncation debates would take place this is what it said: “The truncation of the select committee process can have serious implications for legislative quality and confidence in the legislative process.” That is the problem here. This action by the Minister of Revenue in calling for such a short period of time for the select committee to consider this bill goes to the heart of that concern: the quality of and the confidence in the legislative process. What it does is it raises the concern that many New Zealanders will have having listened to the Government speeches tonight which is that the Government does not really want this measure. It is window dressing at best and it would prefer that there really was not a proper debate on this measure. That is why we are seeing a truncated select committee process to 22 October.If the Government really wanted to get this right it would take the 4 months have a proper consultation go around the country get tax experts to work through the detail look at the consequences test it with international ideas and then come back to the House with what I am sure would be a better bill. But the Government does not want that. It wants to sweep this away under the carpet because it is embarrassed by it and it just wants to look like it has done something right.The other part of the motion that I want to refer to is the question of when the committee will meet. This is under Standing Orders 191 and 194(1)(b) and (c) which have been suspended under this motion. It might be all very well for members on the other side of the House to say: “Well we can meet on Fridays and you know we can meet at select committee meetings in the evenings and so on.”David Bennett: What’s the matter with work? Don’t you like work?GRANT ROBERTSON: Well yeah. David Bennett asks: “What’s the matter with hard work?”. The constituents of—I usually get this wrong—Hamilton East? Yes. The constituents of Hamilton East do not expect their MP to show up on a Friday because they have had David Bennett as their MP for some time. But in other parts of the country they actually expect their MP to come in and do—David Bennett: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I take offence at that.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Oh that will not—no.GRANT ROBERTSON: No. Ridiculous. They actually expect their MPs to show up on a Friday and be there in their constituencies. Here I want to speak on behalf of the smaller parties that are on the Finance and Expenditure Committee which actually have limited numbers of members who can be available to do this. This calls on their time in the House because the suspension of Standing Order 194(1)(b)—if this passes—means that we will allow a committee to meet during a sitting of the House. A committee doing that means that if you are from a small party your resources are stretched very very thinly.This is a bill that is of significant interest to all parties in Parliament and by setting this up we actually set up quite an unfair process in terms of how many people will actually be able to be at the committee. We will also have the ability to sit in evenings on a day in which there has been a sitting of the House which a committee cannot usually do. Again MPs have other commitments. This is putting a lot of MPs in the position of not necessarily being able to attend all of the select committee meetings.We also know from previous experience with truncated select committee processes that this will be used as an excuse by members of the Government to limit the time for submissions. It will be used as an excuse to limit the amount of time for people to put their submissions in and then the amount of time that we have for hearings of submissions. That is not acceptable with a bill like this. We know that working through the implications of tax bills takes time. We have just had a bill passed in this House where the Inland Revenue Department said it did not have time to work out the compliance costs. It did not have time to do a full consultation with those who were affected by the bill. Then we are going to repeat it all over again with this bill.We have independent tax advisers who support the Finance and Expenditure Committee. They often take a considerable amount of time to sit down with tax accountants and with tax experts and to then debate the issues with the officials from the Inland Revenue Department. That debate often leads to better law. That is the nature of taxation work. It takes time to work out how it will be implemented—you know how people like Mr Bayly will organise their accountants to get around the latest tax initiative that comes out of this House. The tax officials and the tax experts who advise the select committee need the time to test those ideas out. Otherwise we come back to the Standing Orders Committee’s concern about legislative quality with truncated select committee processes.We could not get bills more in need of a lengthy process than taxation bills. I would challenge any member of this House to read through every page of every taxation bill that comes up. Sometimes they go over 1000 pages and the problem with that is that we rely so much on the officials having the time to get it right to test out the ideas and to come back to us. We have not had any kind of argument in this House from the Government to say why this should be different. This bill actually needs to be improved significantly and it deserves the time in the select committee to get it right. That is being denied today by the Minister.On this side of the House we have supported this bill going to the select committee. We have done that in good faith because we believe that this is an area where New Zealanders are crying out for the Government to do something to try to rein in the horrendous property speculation that is pushing so many New Zealanders out of the housing market. This Government is not giving us the opportunity to get that right. We have supported this bill in good faith. Good faith in return from the Government would be to say “Let us do this properly. Let us give it 4 months.” or even 6 months because it is going to be retrospective anyway. Those members know it is a shambles once they make it retrospective do they not? They know that all those people who are quickly trying to get in to avoid this will now be placed perhaps with a little bit more wiggle room if it goes on any longer.We know on this side of the House that this is an important measure. It has not been handled well by the Government. New Zealanders and the rest of this Parliament are not responsible for Gerry Brownlee’s disorganisation and that is fundamentally what is happening here today. The Leader of the House has not organised himself sufficiently to get this bill passed by 1 October. We have retrospective legislation—that is bad enough—and now we have a Government that is not interested in hearing from New Zealanders. It simply wants to shove this through so it can get the embarrassment that is this bill out of the way. That is wrong and we need to make sure that as a group of parliamentarians we do not allow that.We are strongly opposed to the motion that has been put forward by the Minister. I think National members could do a much better job.Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Kia ora mai tātou. Tēnā tātou katoa. Members before the dinner break the House was discussing the debate on the instruction to the committee on an early report back-date for the Taxation (Bright-line Test for Residential Land) Bill. Grant Robertson had the call. He has a minute remaining.GRANT ROBERTSON: One minute? Mr Deputy Speaker thank you very much—a bonus minute to recap on the fact that the Government is now so embarrassed about how weak this piece of legislation is that Government members are in this House with a report-back date for this bill of 22 October. Bear in mind it is meant to come into force on 1 October. They have stuffed up. They have not got it in in time. It is already retrospective legislation and they come to this House and say: “We want to get it off the books.” They are embarrassed.They are embarrassed because this is a huge problem for New Zealanders who want to get in and buy their own home. They have come up with a half-baked solution. It is one that does just enough to make it look like they have done something to address the housing crisis in New Zealand and in actual fact they have completely failed. Bill English could not even tell New Zealanders what effect this would have. Treasury told him it would get $5 million of revenue because it was so poorly designed. This bill deserves a proper consideration from the select committee not a half-baked one—not one designed to serve the National Government’s political agenda but one where New Zealanders can have a say.