Sage Eugenie: Land Transfer Amendment Bill Tax Administration Amendment Bill — Third ReadingsText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Land Transfer Amendment Bill Tax Administration Amendment Bill — Third Readings[Sitting date: 10 September 2015. Volume:708;Page:6553. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Well Mr Bishop was indeed trying too hard and waxing lyrical. There is certainly a difference when Government takes a policy issue and does not take the advice of the public sector but here this is a technical issue of tax law and the strong advice of the Inland Revenue Department and submitters was that this notion of “greatest connection” is too subjective and is going to cause confusion.If he had read some of the submissions—and I would just like to quote from Ernst and Young: “We are not aware of that term being used in any relevant New Zealand revenue legislation so there is not any existing or accepted understanding of how it should be interpreted and applied. It is therefore open to various interpretations assessment approaches and subjectivity where the relevant party has other residential land. Alternatives which come to mind include considering connection based on relative values relative net worth days spent there history sentiment or other connections with the specific location region or New Zealand as a whole compared with residential land in any other jurisdiction.”When you have got that amount of potential for confusion and subjectivity and when you are dealing with tax law it is not good law. We are supporting this because as Mr Bennett said something is better than nothing but there is a great deal—Denis O’Rourke: It is nothing!EUGENIE SAGE: —and I recognise the comments that New Zealand First made but there is a need for a clear register of overseas land purchasers. The Government and the public have invested significantly in Landonline. It was described as a world first when we digitised paper land records and enabled the electronic filing of land titles and survey documents back in 2003. That came at substantial cost—$141 million I think—and there was a substantial cost blowout. So when there has been that amount of public money invested in maintaining the land title database and when as other speakers have noted it would take a minute or so of a conveyancer’s time to file the necessary transactions why can we not have good law that provides good solid information so that we have then got the information to inform good policy-making to control the overseas speculation in New Zealand property that is driving up house prices?Instead with this legislation the Government with this main home exemption and the failure to take the good technical advice of not only the Inland Revenue Department but also of submitters like Ernst and Young and others who have got specialist advice in tax law administration—by failing to take that advice we are not getting a good information base to drive good policy-making decisions. So that is one of our objections. The other one is the very wide regulation-making powers in the legislation to make some other property transfers exempt from the information requirements if it is impractical or if it involves high compliance costs and to make regulations around what are non-notifiable transactions. That potentially leads to further loss of transparency in the transactions that are noted.So we will support this legislation because it is a tiny step to having a register of land and house purchasers and the extent to which overseas purchasers are involved in that but Parliament should be making good law. The National Party in Government should have taken the advice of those who know about the technical administration and not had things like this main home exemption. We will support the legislation but it has a number of defects and I suspect we will be back here remedying those. Thank you.