SpeechSIMON O'CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): I thank the Minister for Arts Culture and Heritage for outlining the bill its history and obviously where she expects it to go. The National Party is supporting this bill but with many questions and with reluctance and I'll touch on why. We are first and foremost very supportive of our creative and artistic community and I'm actually looking forward to releasing National's arts policy in the coming weeks and months to demonstrate why. But we do have reservations if you will philosophically with this bill. In fact shades of it dynamics of it have been before the Parliament before and it's something which National then as now has real hesitations around. But—and the big but particularly for those who are wondering why we are supporting this—fundamentally this is something that the House has to do. We have to do it as part of a free-trade agreement between the United Kingdom and New Zealand and it will soon be also part of the free-trade agreement with the European Union. So it's not really a matter of whether we can should or might. We are bound by that free-trade agreement to make this happen. That does raise some minor—well actually not minor. It does raise some constitutional questions to the extent that the work done by officials to create a trade treaty in many ways binds the Parliament to be passing other legislation. We can leave that to the academics to work through but it's something I do want to note to the House—that traditionally with a free-trade agreement we would pass a domestic piece of legislation to bring it into effect. In this case we're not only bringing domestic legislation to bring that treaty the trade treaty into effect but we are being asked forced bound to bring about this artist resale law as well. And that is of a concern to this side of the House. How we better approach that could perhaps be a discussion for the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee or the Business Committee in times to come but we just want to signal disquiet in that regard. It won't surprise anybody—you'll probably hear it from different speakers on this side of the House—that as I say there's been a variety of views around this and particularly not leaping with great joy at the piece of legislation. But as I keep repeating it's ultimately something we have to bring about. I suppose the fundamental issue here is: why is it that a royalty is paid on artwork or in this case visual artwork when it's not paid on for example shares that you buy? If I bought shares off an honourable member from the Labour side and I sell them a week later for more profit why am I not giving a royalty back to the person who sold them to me? When I have now what is a classic car should I be paying a royalty back to the original designers? I think there are arguments of why we can make a difference in this space. I don't think it's without argument but I think it fundamentally has to be well articulated. What is it about visual artworks that requires a royalty when that artist has chosen I assume to sell their artwork on to someone else?It then moves on to the practical considerations of how this is going to operate. There's a few aspects to touch on here. One is that it is very focused on the professional art market our auction houses and art dealers. I've spoken to many. They're not particularly thrilled about this. Of course they'll comply—they are good honourable New Zealanders—but this is a layer of bureaucracy that is required. It's an extra set of process and as some have pointed out to me it's effectively a tax that is going to be applied. Well in some ways it's a tax—an extra cost that's going to be applied to the art market.As the Minister has pointed out it is only directed to the professional art market. I will acknowledge that the bill says people can voluntarily choose to pay this and kudos to them if they wish to. But you're going to have this funny potential dynamic that people will choose to actually do their sales now through the likes of Trade Me or whatever rather than actually through auction houses or art houses. Yes I've read the regulatory impact statement and so forth but I wonder—and it's only a question at this point and it's why we need a good select committee process—whether the Ministry for Culture and Heritage has underestimated what might be a transfer out of the arts' professional sector into others. There's then going to be debate of course around just what benefit there is. I think if I've read the documents correctly we're not even talking a million dollars a year of royalties. Now look don't get me wrong if you want to give me $700000 that's fantastic. But when you think of the number of artists in New Zealand and what amounts to about—well not even as I say a million dollars in total of royalties a year. We're not talking a massive amount of money. But I will stress—I know it through various reasons—our artists do a wonderful job in this country but they are certainly not well paid. So any amount of money will be welcome. But when you look at setting up a scheme it's not simply about the benefits—$700000 or so a year—but it's also the costs and let's be very very clear: this side of the House sees enormous amounts of costs as you set up a bureaucracy to note the worker who is the owner of that particularly if they are deceased. Let's not even get into the copyright issues—this is for 50 or 70 years. Where's that person now how much is that royalty going to be how much has been paid who paid for it how is it going to be transferred and so on; let alone of course then moving into the tax implications. There's a lot of complexity here and again I know that the Government know this. This is not a surprise. It's just that that's a cost. I'm thinking the Minister could be a little bit optimistic to say that there be no cost to the Crown. If that does become the case then someone is wearing the cost and at this moment I fear it's our art dealers.We've also got the wider issues of whether this is going to function well and prudently. We will be very interested to see what the regulations say. I know the legislation as currently drafted says the minimum threshold for triggering whether or not you pay a royalty is going to be somewhere between $500 and $5000. Importantly for the viewers at home that's not the bottom and the end range. It just says that somewhere between NZ$500 and NZ$5000 becomes the trigger point. So for an artist—which I am not; you'd be incredibly generous if you paid $20 for anything I did—that will not trigger this. But where that figure is set—between $500 and $5000—will be important.That ultimately brings me to my last couple of points which is around the select committee process and the Minister's indication in her speech that she's going to be putting out regulatory proposals. I think it's really important that we as a select committee or those on the select committee get to see those regulations as to people submitting. There's already a little bit of a red light in my head that there is ultimately a sped-up select committee process. I understand we're going to have to report this bill back by July this year. The select committee will be looking at the bill as will the general public who have been asked to submit and the public in particular will not have had time to digest the regulatory proposals and make that part of their submissions to the select committee. So I would hope the Minister will see that there's some alignment and that the chair of the relevant select committee will take that into consideration because on this side of the House it's really important particularly when we have the sort of enabling primary legislation which enables an enormous amount of regulation to be created to go What is that? What are these regulations going to be?" I do not like "blank cheque-ism" where a piece of legislation gives enormous power to any ministry to simply make regulations without sufficient review. So I think that's going to be really really important. The final point and acknowledging why I suspect we are talking July 2023: we have two years from the signing of this free-trade agreement with the United Kingdom to implement this scheme and if memory serves me correctly it was February 2022 that we signed the agreement. So in other words we've got until about February 2024 to get this into play. So I do understand the speed but I really want to underline and emphasise that this needs to be done well and properly. We do have a number of countries—Australia the UK of course and pretty much in fact all the European Union countries—that have this scheme in place so we can learn from them. But the initial hesitation from the National Party remains which is that ultimately we are not as a Parliament able to have a completely free conversation on whether this is meritorious or not. The free-trade agreement has bound our hands to put this into play and again I think that's something that the House needs to look at as a much wider discussion into the future. But with that I'm happy to support it at this stage the first reading and to send it to select committee and if it passes for the public particularly those in the artistic sector to write in and let us know what they think."