Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Well here I am coming after Shane Jones and I'm not quite sure what he actually said but he seemed to say that they will ensure—presumably they" being the Government of the day—that the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) does a thorough job on our leader. That would be an extraordinary statement to make. Is he now saying that he is going to guide the SFO which is an independent statutory body on the police doing their work? He's going to stand and guide the SFO as they do their work? What an extraordinary thing for a Cabinet Minister to say. I can't believe he said they will ensure that the SFO does it well. Well that's a very interesting thing to be saying for a Minister of the Crown and I'd counsel Mr Jones to be a bit more careful with his language.The last thing that this country needs is much higher taxation on savings on investment and on entrepreneurship and those are the three things that are going to be taxed severely by this proposed capital gains tax that this Government is putting on. Savings investment and entrepreneurship—that's what we need in this country. I've never met anybody who thinks New Zealanders save too much. We need to encourage saving. We certainly need to encourage investment. How on earth do we grow the economy if we don't get investment—somebody somewhere taking their money and buying a new business starting a new business hiring a new person buying a new plant investing in equipment? That's what we need to grow this economy and entrepreneurship—people like the Peter Becks of this world starting up new businesses based on research and development. All those three things are what we need in this country and this Government is proposing that we should tax that even more than we do today. What lunacy.We heard Marama Davidson—and I'll be interested to see what the Greens have to say today—saying that the wealthy elite need to pay more. Well that's not what's being proposed here in this capital gains tax if the wealthy elite includes the 2.9 million New Zealanders in KiwiSaver who would be hit by more tax on their KiwiSaver every year as a result of this tax. It includes the 500000 business owners across this country—mainly small businesses—who get up every morning in their cafes or the hairdresser's or the plumber's or the small businesses in local and regional New Zealand that the great bloated buffoon of a champion of the provinces says that he's concerned about. Those people who get up every morning and grow their businesses over the next three decades in order to have something to save for their retirement—they are the ones who will pay the capital gains tax. The tens of thousands of farmers and horticulturalists the tens of thousands of people with lifestyle blocks the mum and dad investors who have bought an extra property in order to rent out and have an income in their old age—all those New Zealanders are not the wealthy elite; they are just New Zealanders trying to save and get ahead and they are going to be punished by this vindictive act which this Government is trying to put on New Zealanders.The Prime Minister has said that they're going to focus on simplicity. Well as we saw the big stack of notes that came to explain the capital gains tax in South Africa that's been introduced there is no such thing as a simple capital gains tax. Where you draw the boundaries is amazingly complex and difficult. So your family home is exempted but if you work from home it's not exempted. If you have a boarder or a renter staying with you it's not exempted. If you rent it out for Airbnb it's not exempted. All these complications massively make the tax bill longer and it makes the accountants happy. Around about 40 percent of the work of the major accountancy firms in Australia is around capital gains and that's what we'll be seeing here.And then finally this Government is all around spreading wealth and not about making it. And as a country we need to generate some wealth in the first place in order to succeed and provide the opportunities for New Zealanders to do well. So here we have the proposal for a capital gains tax that increases tax on savings on investment and on entrepreneurship and that's the last thing we need in this country. And we certainly don't need Michael Cullen getting a thousand dollars a day to tell us how we should take this bitter medicine and to have a spoonful of sugar for it to go well.The other point I'd just like to make in passing of course is that the only reason they want this tax is that they want more money. They want more money because they blow it all in very ill-disciplined ways such as Mr Jones and his Provincial Growth Fund. When you're spending a billion dollars a year flinging it out the door around the neighbourhoods yep you're going to buy some useful things but you're also going to have some very poor quality spending. And if they were more disciplined they wouldn't need this new tax full stop. Thank you Mr Speaker."