Twyford Phil: Taxation (Residential Land Withholding Tax GST on Online Services and Student Loans) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Taxation (Residential Land Withholding Tax GST on Online Services and Student Loans) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 12 April 2016. Volume:713;Page:10400. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): You have had quite enough Mr Nash. I want to come back to some of the comments that were made by Jami-Lee Ross earlier in the debate when he talked about the rationale for this bill and the argument that we have touched on today about whether in fact the associated legislation—the brightline test and the requirement for non-resident foreign buyers of residential property to register with the Inland Revenue Department which Part 2 is enabling—has had any effect or not.We have data right now actually—a right-up-to-the-minute release by the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand—that shows that in fact in the last month the median house price in Auckland which is the market most affected by the problems that this bill is purportedly trying to address has gone up by $70000. That is 1½ times the median income and I think it really undermines any kind of optimism that we have been hearing from members on the Government benches that the brightline test the residential land withholding tax and the requirement for non-resident foreign buyers to register with the Inland Revenue Department has had any kind of sustained impact on the speculative pressures that have been overheating the Auckland housing market.Jami-Lee Ross mounted a great spirited defence of the intention test as if this was enough and as if this was working but he is completely stymied by the fact that the Government introduced this legislation and these measures presumably to tackle some kind of real problem—or was it an imagined problem? It was not clear from what Jami-Lee Ross was saying. The residential land withholding tax is in place there in Part 2 of this bill to ensure that the brightline test applies to non-resident foreign buyers. As Jacinda Ardern pointed out the Inland Revenue Department in its advice on this bill raised the point that we do not have the data—that we do not know what the scale of non-resident foreign buyers in the Auckland market is.When the policy announcement was made that led to this bill and others I think it was the Hon Steven Joyce who said that the Government would release the data that it would be gathering on non-resident foreign buyers by way of the requirement that they open a bank account and register with the Inland Revenue Department and that it would make this data available by 16 April. We are getting very near to 16 April and yet there has been nary a whimper from the Government on the question of this data and what it shows.But interestingly Shamubeel Eaqub the independent economist said a couple of weeks ago in the media that—and it appeared that he has some kind of access to the data that has been gathered—330 properties per month on average have been bought by non-resident foreign buyers over the last 6 months. That is 330 properties per month since the law came into force requiring foreign buyers to register with the Inland Revenue Department. That volume of sales—330 on average per month over 6 months—would account for 5 percent of all house sales across New Zealand which is significant I think. But as Shamubeel Eaqub said at the time it is probably more likely to be 18 percent of all sales in the Auckland market because the presence of non-resident foreign buyers has been so heavily concentrated in Auckland. If it is anything like 18 percent of sales in the Auckland market it is no wonder that the Government has not made any kind of move so far to release that data and I would guess that it will not.Colleen Milne of the Real Estate Institute also said recently that these new tax rules seem to be having limited impact and she predicted that the decline in sales that has been seen—I think over November December and January when there was no doubt that there had been a sort of softening in the Auckland market—would be transitory.