Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Now it was interesting that the previous speaker Mark Patterson talked about the fact that it's important to have growth in the economy because what we've heard most about in just about every speech and every announcement of this Government has been about spending money—the Government spending money on all manner of things and spreading wealth across the community—and there's been very little spoken of in this Government about creating wealth and growing the economy. There's been very little in the way of a clear economic development strategy. I do remember asking the economic development Minister David Parker in this House what the economic development strategy was and he did nominate three things: this the R & D tax credit; secondly the Provincial Growth Fund which I would argue is reasonably discredited in many ways in the way that it's been handled by Shane Jones; and the third one was changing the tax settings.Of course subsequently that has been dropped so when we look at the Government's economic development strategy there's only two legs left to it with one being the Provincial Growth Fund. We've been having a bit of a debate about that with Shane Jones as to whether it's generated 54 jobs so far and 118 bureaucrats or not and he has not come up with any robust figures to challenge that and so it has been a very thin output indeed so far for the money spent. I'm fascinated with the idea of how you can spend half a billion dollars promoting the planting of trees about 60 percent of which are supposed to be native trees and how you convert land which is currently producing sheep and beef and employing people and sustaining an industry and converting that to native forestry—how that's generating wealth or jobs. It's destroying wealth and jobs. But anyway that's one plank and the other plank that is left in terms of their economic development strategy is this R & D tax policy. So it's a fairly thin economic growth strategy because essentially what it's doing is shifting the focus away from the grants-based policy that we had whereby a certain amount of money was set aside in order for grants to be handed out through Callaghan Innovation. No particular way of doing this is perfect because whichever way you do it has benefits and negatives.The problem with the R & D tax credit way of doing it of course is that you've got no idea how much it's going to cost. It's brilliant for accountants and rest assured the accountants are slathering at the prospect of this bill because they will get very fat commissions working with big companies in order to make sure that everything fits the description of R & D in order to get the tax relief. So it's great for accountants but it's hopeless for small start-up businesses that don't have big incomes and justifying taxes for that in order for that to be built. If you're investing in a company that is not going to be profitable for 10 years for example—which is quite common; it may be 10 years before you have a profit and pay any tax—then an R & D tax credit is not much use to you. So the cash-flow support that you'd get from the grants-based system is more useful. Now there are negatives for a grants-based system as well. So you can have an argument for ever about which way of doing it is better and it would be interesting. There is sort of an implication there from previous speakers that they're going to spend the billions of dollars on the R & D tax credit and continue to do all the grants as well. I'd be very surprised if that's the case but we may learn that that's the case and if they're doing that well I'd be very interested to see that. But what we are seeing is a change between those two ways of doing it. So that's all right. You can have an argument about it. We don't support it. We think the downsides are more substantial in the sense that it is great for accountants and not so good for start-up companies but the broader point I'd make is that that is just a change in the way that we go about supporting R & D in this country and the mechanism with which we deliver it. But that on its own is about the only thing that this Government is talking about in terms of economic development and that ultimately is part of the reason why we've had business confidence at all-time lows. The growth in GDP has dropped from nearly 4 percent to nearly 2 percent—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Order! Order! This is a third reading debate and it is really about what the committee of the whole House has returned to the House. Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Thank you very much Madam Assistant Speaker. Well on that basis I will finish my speech.