Taxation Principles Reporting Act Repeal Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Taxation Principles Reporting Act Repeal Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O’Connor): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon SIMON WATTS: I move, That the Taxation Principles Reporting Act Repeal Bill be now read a first time.

The bill that we are considering today has one simple purpose: to repeal the Taxation Principles Reporting Act 2023. The Act it repeals is not an ordinary taxation Act. It imposes no taxes, nor does it remove taxes. It neither makes the tax system fairer nor less fair. What it does do is require the Commissioner of Inland Revenue to commit resources to this make-work programme dreamed up by the former Government. In New Zealand we have a long history of a low rate - broad based tax system, and it is fitting that we have principles when it comes to tax that have never been in contention.

As the Minister of Revenue, I’ve signalled very clearly the principles this Government holds when it comes to tax. We want a tax system to be efficient and we want it to be effective. We want it to be focused on simplicity and compliance—making sure people pay their taxes they owe, cracking down on evasion, and making it easy to navigate the system and reduce complexity to reduce cost. We also think that Kiwis should be paying less tax, and I’m proud to say that on this side of the House we will deliver tax relief.

This Act has fundamental flaws beyond the lack of justification for which it was ever passed into law. Firstly, it is the right of an elected Government to devise, shape, and implement its tax objectives, such as those that I’ve just articulated. An elected Government should not have those ambitions hobbled by the views of an earlier Government on what constitutes a fair tax system—especially a Labour Government.

This Act paints a picture of the previous Government’s view on taxation using tax principles that it dreamed up. Yes, we all want and should strive for a fair tax system. But what is not fair is one view of fairness to crowd out the views of others. That is what this Act does. To be a valuable enduring—these principles, as they are described, need to be universally accepted by tax experts, the public, and across the political spectrum. In this Act, they are not.

In the various pieces of feedback the previous Government received when they passed this into law, there was a clear objection to the idea that the principles defined in the Act are widely understood or accepted, especially by those people who deal with this on a daily basis. Even the Treasury—even the Treasury—said it could present a risk to the integrity, and I quote, “independence, and endurance of the reporting framework.”

As I said earlier, this legislation does not make the tax system fairer, however one describes that. It merely describes what a fairness is according to the previous Government. It also does not make tax or change tax settings, or make anyone pay more or less tax, but it does set the foundation for more taxation, particularly regarding wealth taxes. But what it does do is it requires Inland Revenue to report on the performance of the tax system against these principles. There has been never any justification for why resources should be used to chase down information simply to make a point in regard to the previous Government instead of it being focused on core taxation services.

It might be somewhat confusing there, why such a bill, which makes no changes to taxation and merely adds redundant reporting, was passed into law in the first place. To answer that question, one only has to look at the Government that produced it. One whose wasteful spending drove an insatiable desire to squeeze every last cent out of the back pockets of hard-working Kiwis. This was a Government that worked behind the scenes on wealth taxes and job taxes, and the door is open again—not more than a few weeks after falling out of power, Labour is already back on the “tax the people more train”.

Revenue spokesperson Dr Deborah Russell said it might be time to “seriously look at capital gains”. Clearly, she has forgotten that her leader has tried to rule that out, or maybe there has been some information—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O’Connor): Mr Watts, this is a legislative statement. First reading—you’re introducing a bill. You are straying away from what the convention is on that. Can I just remind you.

Hon SIMON WATTS: Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. The Inland Revenue is a highly respected department with a strong history of managing highly complicated policy and operational areas. This Government, through the legislation that we’re placing on the Table today, will ensure that they are focused on ensuring they have the tools to make our tax system more straightforward, efficient, and better overall. We should not be wasting their time putting together reports on the last Government’s ideas of tax principles.

This bill repeals a bill that has no place in law, and it is right to consign it to the history as another example of unnecessary bureaucracy. Its repeal cannot come soon enough, and I won’t be using any more of the House’s time to discuss it. I commend the Taxation Principles Reporting Act Repeal Bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

So much to say; so little time. It’s a little hard to know where to start with that speech from the Minister of Revenue, but where I want to start is with the idea that in actual fact, this bill, repealing the Taxation Principles Reporting Act, does away with an incredibly valuable piece of information that we need in New Zealand’s democracy.

I want to put the idea out there that, as Mr Watts said, this bill does not collect more tax. It does not change how our tax is calculated in any way. But what the Taxation Principles Reporting Act does is it gives us information about our tax system. It tells us how well our tax system is doing. Now, that’s incredibly important in a democracy. Every three years we vote—that’s part of our democracy. We spend time lobbying the Government, we spend time making presentations to select committees, we spend time on petitions and on demonstrations, we engage in our governance on all sorts of levels. That’s our democracy. It’s a complex and multifaceted beast.

But one thing that makes our democracy function better is information so that people have a good understanding of the issues in play. Now, here’s the problem: tax makes up half the Budget. It’s an incredibly important part of our annual Budget process. It’s something that people need to understand. It’s something that people need to have good information about. Yet most people find it quite mysterious, and it’s actually hard to find information about our tax system.

Now, Mr Watts asserted that this was redundant reporting, suggesting that we could get all the information that the Taxation Principles Reporting Act would give us elsewhere. But I’m going to challenge him on that during the committee stage of the debate to find out where else we could get this information.

But I also want to talk about two other things that that Mr Watts said. He said that New Zealand has a broad based - low-rate tax system. It certainly has a low-rate tax system. Tax as a proportion of GDP is lower than OECD averages, but it does not have a broad-based system. It has big gaps in our tax system, and that’s something we do need to address.

There was something else that he asserted. He asserted that what the Taxation Principles Reporting Act does was ask Inland Revenue to report against principles that had been, and I quote him, “Tax principles that it dreamed up.”—tax principles that were just made up out of nowhere. That’s a canard. It’s just completely false. These tax principles have a long, long history, and I’ve brought to the House my trusty copy of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations from 1776—my well-thumbed and well-read copy of this really important work. Sitting in this incredibly important early work of economics and political theory are what are referred to as the four canons of taxation. So now we refer to them as the four main principles of taxation, and what they give us is how to assess a tax system.

Way back in 1776, Adam Smith set out four principles of taxation: fairness, certainty, convenience, efficiency. Since then, other principles have been added, but they are widely agreed. They are widely discussed and widely agreed amongst the tax community. There may be some nuance, there may be some detail, but to assert that they are dreamed up out of nowhere is absolutely ridiculous. We do have well-established tax principles. We can use them to judge the effectiveness of our tax system, and this is exactly what the Taxation Principles Reporting Act was in place to do, to enable us to have good information so that we could make good judgments about our tax system. This throwaway Government is going to throw away this incredibly useful piece of information. What a way to end the year. I do not commend this bill.

E te Māngai, tēnā koe; tēnā koutou e te Whare. Much like Dr Deborah Russell, I don’t really know where to start here and I’m a bit gutted for the new Minister, because this is embarrassing, mate. You’re scared of the data and evidence that you’ve made a lot of a song and dance about caring so much about. So let’s talk about precisely that.

The first report under this legislation is due in 10 days. Two of those days are public holidays—that is, of course, Christmas and Boxing Day—two of those days are weekends, and that leaves six ostensible working days. But I’m certain, as with most white-collar jobs across the rest of this country, that those who would be working in the IRD on this would be on holiday, probably from tomorrow, which means that all of the work necessary for the first report is done. Yet the Minister is rushing under urgency to repeal the enabling legislation, because he is terrified of what that report might, in fact, behold.

I do have to say that that, kind of, has to leave us with the conclusion that the National Party, the ACT Party, and the New Zealand First Party are terrified of the data and evidence that they profess to care so much about. I also just want to refer to some of the comments as made by the Minister in introducing this legislation that somehow these were these foreign and alien concepts when it comes to tax principles—those seven tax principles, mind, that we scrutinised heavily throughout the Finance and Expenditure Committee throughout this year, and the National Party could not identify one that they disagreed with.

But to that point of how foreign and out the gate these are, these are the comments about independent adviser from that Finance and Expenditure Committee scrutiny on the initial legislation—Sir Rob McLeod, none the less, who said, and I quote, “I would omit the descriptors because the meaning of each design principle is sufficiently well understood on their own.” That is not ideological; that is independent advice about the inherent value of each of those tax principles and how they are understood out there within the sector.

So there is a fundamental problem here, and that is the fundamental problem of the lack of data and evidence that we have consistently reported against in Aotearoa New Zealand. That has led to an issue of perception, which the National Party proclaimed to care about so much when they were repealing the dual mandate of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and refocusing things just on that sole mandate. It wasn’t about the data or evidence then either, by the way; it was simply about perception and the imputed behaviour of market players.

So let’s talk about that fundamental issue. Here, I think, I would invite all members of the Government to read Max Rashbrooke’s Too Much Money, published in 2021, within which there is a brilliant graphic contained. It was read, the Hon Simon Watts, by one of your former colleagues—that was, of course, the one now leading the Chamber of Commerce in Auckland.

So this here is a really, really, really important graph. What this tells us is the distribution of wealth that New Zealanders think is ideal. It looks pretty fair; it looks pretty equitable; it looks as though it’s distributed in a relative equitable smattering. Then we have, below that, the distribution of what New Zealanders think the distribution is. So you can see that from the ideal, we deviate into what New Zealanders think it is, and they think it’s a lot more unfair than it actually is. But in fact, as reality and the data and evidence bear out, Minister Simon Watts, things are so, so much worse than New Zealanders think it is. As you can see here, that is the top 20 percent of New Zealanders holding far more than 60 percent to 70 percent of the wealth of everybody in this country.

Of course, this suspicion and this data and this evidence was even more borne out by the high-wealth individuals report from IRD and the subsidiary papers from Treasury at the beginning of this year. That confirmed what New Zealanders have suspected for a really, really long time: that our tax system is fundamentally unfair and it results in the aggregation of wealth from the top 311 families of approximately $85 billion. That is more than the bottom 2.5 million New Zealanders combined hold. What that IRD report told us, Minister Watts, is that that is not an accident. It is a consequence of a tax system which sees the wealthiest New Zealanders pay, effectively, half the tax rate of our nurses, of our firefighters, of our front-line essential workers, of those who work in early childhood, of our teachers, of the average New Zealander.

So what we are standing here today debating under urgency is the repeal of a bill that is largely already done from a Government that pretends to care about data and evidence, but spits in the face of public access to that information on. So I’m at a loss, and really we will continue to prosecute this case throughout the committee of the whole House, because the Minister should be embarrassed.

Thank you. ACT will be supporting this bill, and the hypocrisy from the other side this morning is staggering—staggering.

Hon Grant Robertson: Point of order, Madam Chair. I recognise that the member is a relatively new member, but the use of that term is one that’s been ruled out by many, many presiding officers, and I’d ask that he be asked to withdraw it.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): I agree with the point of order. The member will withdraw—

TODD STEPHENSON: I withdraw.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): —and apologise.

TODD STEPHENSON: And apologise to the House. The bill that we’re repealing was done without proper public policy consultation. The then Minister announced that it would be widely consulted on, and it wasn’t. It didn’t even follow the IRD’s own principles for developing policy. The generic tax policy process was not followed. If the former Government had taken the time to actually widely consult on this bill, maybe there would have been some tax principles that could have been agreed and reported on. It was—

Chlöe Swarbrick: You don’t know what you’re talking about.

TODD STEPHENSON: No, I do. It was not done in an appropriate way. It was not done with a full and long select committee process, and the submitters overwhelmingly did not support it. You had accounting societies, the Law Society, all saying that it was not a bill that they would support. If the former Government had actually taken the time, we could have potentially agreed on some principles—[Interruption]

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Order! I know everyone is tired and this is the end of the year, but there are people in in the community who would like to hear this debate with a little less background noise. Thank you.

TODD STEPHENSON: Thank you, Madam Speaker. As I said, if the time had been taken, perhaps a set of principles—ACT is very interested in tax, as I’m sure everyone would know. If time had been taken, perhaps this could have been a useful piece of legislation. But it wasn’t. [Interruption] It wasn’t, and we are not going to support it, and we want it repealed immediately so that something that wasn’t properly consulted on and didn’t have the support of the majority of submitters—[Interruption] What we should be looking at is actually having tax principles—actually, Dr Russell made some very good points about trying to have some consistency around tax principles—

Chlöe Swarbrick: So which one do you disagree with?

Hon Members: Take a full call.

Hon Member: Great speech, Todd.

TODD STEPHENSON: Yeah, thank you. [Interruption] I know. I’m just letting them get it out.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): It’s your call.

TODD STEPHENSON: Thank you. I appreciate that, Madam Speaker. Look, as I’ve said, we do support this bill amending this Act that we think was ill conceived, inappropriately consulted on, and did not have widespread support. So I commend this bill to the House.

Point of order, Madam Speaker. I seek leave of the House to table the Finance and Expenditure Committee’s report on the Taxation Principles Reporting Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Is that available?

CHLÖE SWARBRICK: It is, but it appears the members of the Government have not read it.

That’s not the use of the leave system. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. The passion around this bill is absolutely remarkable. I’m really impressed by the Opposition benches that they can keep going after the last two pieces of legislation and are still doing this in the last week before Christmas. Very impressive.

What we’ve heard is that this is about understanding principles. No, it’s not about understanding principles; it’s about whether you actually need to report on those principles in the way which is being suggested. This Government is very, very clear that we want to reduce bureaucracy. What we have seen in the last few years is a burgeoning increase in the number of public servants required to do all sorts of reporting and compliance and all sorts of other things, and what we want to do is to save some money and give that back to the people who have worked so hard to pay for it.

Dr Russell said this is incredibly important information. Well, it may be incredibly important but we’ve managed to cope for more than 180 years without that information and it hasn’t done us too badly. Chlöe Swarbrick says she’s given us the indication of how much is owned by various different parts of the community, but how much is paid in tax? About half our population doesn’t actually pay any net tax by the time they’ve interacted with the Government system. So I think we need to recognise that as well.

Chlöe Swarbrick: So let’s report on it.

ANDY FOSTER: I think we already know that. We don’t need a bureaucracy to report on that.

What is very, very clear is that this was clearly contested at the select committee stage. We’ve got the regulatory impact statement here, something that the Opposition benches are very, very keen on, and you can see the Inland Revenue Department’s advice there—that there are concerns about that, they reflect the concerns about that, and they can also report on some of these things in other ways as well. I commend this bill to the House.

Madam Chair, thank you very much for the opportunity, somewhat earlier than I’d expected, to speak on this bill. Mr Watts, in his opening speech, I think, articulated a very important point about any piece of legislation that comes forward. He said that the reason why the Government wants to repeal the Taxation Principles Reporting Act is because, “The principles are not universally accepted by tax experts.”

Well, I’ve got news for Mr Watts. His Government’s programme of tax cuts is not actually “universally accepted” by tax experts. So we’ll ditch that now, will we, as well? We’ll get rid of that because it’s not universally accepted. You see, the thing is that Mr Watts actually doesn’t have a reason for getting rid of this legislation other than who brought it in. That’s it; it’s the only thing. Because the reporting and the information that is provided under this Act, I would have thought, is exactly the thing that parties opposite would want: information in the public arena about our tax system.

Now, we all know that there are people in this House who know the intricate and arcane details of our taxation system—I’m thinking about tax lawyers and people who’ve lectured in tax policy—but most New Zealanders don’t. Most New Zealanders don’t have access to that kind of information, and actually being able to understand our tax system, being able to understand how tax is collected, what basis it’s collected on, and how that affects core principles of how we live our lives is relevant and important information. The tax principles as listed in the Act that is being repealed by this bill are ones that I think universally—to coin Mr Watts’ phrase—are ones that people would want to understand: equity, efficiency, integrity, compliance costs, certainty, flexibility, and adaptability. Now, we will disagree across this House about tax policy and about what policy we think should be implemented at any given moment. But what I would have hoped we would not disagree about, Madam Speaker, is the importance of transparency and the importance of information being available to New Zealanders to be able to understand this core and critical part of our financial system.

I’ve heard today already—and fair warning for Mr Watts; these will be questions that come up in the committee of the whole House stage. I’ve heard from him that there’s a bureaucracy involved here. We know exactly how many people are involved. It’s 2.5 full-time equivalents. That, as Chlöe Swarbrick has said on multiple occasions during this debate already, is 0.06 percent of the staff of Inland Revenue; less than 0.1 of 1 percent of the staff of Inland Revenue to actually help all New Zealanders understand their tax system. That is a very, very small price to pay for that information to be available.

But, Madam Speaker, do you know what makes this all so much worse? It is that the work on the first report has undoubtedly already been completed. As has already been pointed out by previous speakers, we are towards the end of the working year. IRD are a very effective and efficient department and they will have completed this work. It will exist. Mr Watts should also be warned that we’ll be asking about that when we come to the committee of the whole House stage.

This is a Government that rails against wastage. The work’s been done and they want to waste it. They want to say, “You know what? Even though we oppose this legislation that the previous Government brought in, we’re going to make certain that the work that’s been done on it is wasted.” They are actively passing a piece of legislation today to ensure that the work of the Public Service is wasted. What a remarkable thing it is, for the first act of the Minister of Revenue to be coming to this House to take away a piece of legislation that means more New Zealanders will understand the tax system and that will provide more transparency about our taxation system. That’s the priority of the Government here.

Among all of the bizarre things that they’ve brought in front of this House over the last couple of weeks, this is the one—this piece of legislation is the one that makes the least sense to me. They don’t like workers, so they’re going to do the legislation that we just had before. But this one’s about the transparency of our taxation system. Every member across there should want to know what is in this report or at the very least give New Zealanders the opportunity to hear it. They are afraid of what’s in it. We will be strongly opposing this legislation.

Just for the Green Party’s reference, I will swap the Labour Party call with your call and keep the order, and I’ll call the National Party—Stuart Smith.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, there’s certainly been some extra shots of coffee this morning by the sound of the energy in the House. Who knew people would get so engaged about tax? This is a very simple bill. It was, in fact, the Hon Grant Robertson who talked about the principles in the bill earlier. But in the select committee, it was quite clear—it came out in the report—that there was a lack of common understanding on the principles. In fact, the Inland Revenue themselves stated that in their view, the anticipated benefits of the Act are unlikely to be fully realised for that reason. So it’s an unnecessary bit of bureaucracy, which we know that the former Labour Government loves. We don’t; we’re more efficient, and we’re getting on with it. I commend the bill to the House.

Well, obviously the members of the Government don’t have a great deal to say about this bill. They can’t defend it, because it is an indefensible bill.

As far as I’m aware, no one in the coalition Government has said that they object to any of the seven principles that are outlined in the Act that is about to be repealed here. So if they don’t object to the principles themselves, the question then is: why are they spending the last sitting day or two of the year repealing this? They ran an election campaign saying that they were going to be relentlessly focused on the cost of living for New Zealanders. The question here is: when there are 2½ fulltime-equivalent staff in an operation of 4,000 at Inland Revenue, how does repealing this Act reduce the cost of living for middle and low income New Zealanders? The answer is that it makes no difference at all to the cost of living of middle and low income New Zealanders.

So the question then is: in whose interests is the Government repealing this Act? That is obvious—the answer to that is obvious. It is the interests of the people who pay less of a share in tax as a proportion of their wealth and income than middle and low income New Zealanders, and those are the people who are the donors to the National Party and the ACT Party and the New Zealand First Party, who funded those parties’ election campaigns in order to ensure that their tax transparency would be erased so that questions would stop being asked about what an unfair, unproductive, unprofessional, and inequitable tax system we have.

Particularly for those members of the National Party who, when they were in Opposition, sat on this side of the House and day after day after day taunted the Labour-led Government around how transparent they were being, how open and transparent they were being, throwing that in the faces of the Government at the time—and one of their very first acts as a Government is to take away openness and transparency about the tax system of this country, to simply eliminate that and to say, “We actually don’t want to know. We want to see no evil, we want to hear no evil, and we want to speak no evil about what an inequitable tax system we have.” Because that is what is in the report that has already been written that is under the current Act.

So those are the only interests—

Hon Judith Collins: Point of order, Madam Speaker. I draw to your attention Speakers’ ruling 55/5 where it is out of order to say that a Government is influenced, and certainly that is what I am hearing from the member who has just resumed his seat. It’s out of order to suggest a Government or any member is subject to outside domination. It does say that the term “pressure” is a borderline one, but it is really not in the spirit of Speakers’ rulings, nor is it, by the way, in the spirit of Christmas, and when I’m on my feet—thank you—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Is this still the point of order?

Hon Judith Collins: So I would ask the member to withdraw his statement, please.

Hon JAMES SHAW: Speaking to the point of order, I did not say that the Government was acting under influence.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Just to the member that raised the point of order, I did seek clarification when I heard that comment, and technically it is within the Standing Orders. Thank you.

Hon JAMES SHAW: Well, in the spirit of Christmas, just seeing as we’re taking away transparency, we’re taking away openness about the nature of this tax system in a way that obviously makes no difference to average New Zealanders, which the members of that Government said that they were supposed to represent. And I do want to thank the Minister for her interjection there, just because it helps to kind of really point out just how defensive they are about what a pointless bill this is, given that, actually, the one thing that we did not have a good understanding of in this country was an understanding of the nature of the tax system and of wealth distribution and so on and so forth. That was why this Act was there.

So for all of those new members who have been elected as part of the Government benches, I’d just ask them to reflect on exactly why it is that this has been introduced. What is so urgent that it gets introduced under urgency right before Christmas, in order to kind of fill the time? I have to say that for a Government whose coalition agreements refer to saying that “decisions will be based on data and evidence”, one of their very first acts is to ensure that there is no data or evidence in relation to the tax system of this country. I have to say that it is appalling that this Government would say, as one of its very first acts, having fought an election campaign saying that the whole point was to focus on the cost of living, that this only serves the cost of living of the wealthiest New Zealanders of this country.

I support the repeal of the Tax Principles Reporting Act because we don’t need more bureaucracy, more reporting, more tax, and, as my colleague referred to, redundant reporting—and, as the member on the other side of the House also referred to, redundant reporting. We don’t need more time-wasting and wasteful spending. We need a fair tax system that is simple and efficient, that supports hard-working New Zealanders.

We don’t need a tax principles Act to tell us our principles on tax. On the other side of the House, they are obsessed with taxing hard-working New Zealanders and creating more bureaucracy and more rules. On this side of the House, we are focused on getting things done, delivering for New Zealanders, and creating less bureaucracy. I commend this bill to the committee.

And here we are, a mere three, four, five days before Christmas, with a bill that’s coming under urgency that adds to the anti-worker agenda that that side of the House, that Government, wants to run. We have seen under urgency over the last day—over the last three days, because this is Tuesday—an absolute agenda of removing fairness in our system, fairness for workers, fairness for employees. This bill continues that unfairness, because the unfairness is no longer going to be subject to evidence or data.

Now, I have worked for a long time in the tax community outside of these walls, including for one of the Ministers, the Hon Judith Collins, who, in the time that she was the Minister, did a very important piece of work around a multilateral instrument with overseas jurisdictions. She championed that piece of work to ensure that overseas companies and overseas jurisdictions could share information with New Zealand to ensure that people overseas were paying their fair share of tax.

This piece of work allows New Zealand to share the information so that the rest of the public who are listening to this debate understand where the incidence of tax lands, and, unfortunately, this Government has shown that it is not evidence based, or perhaps it’s going to be evidence based on the data that they want to use. This report would have been written—there’s a draft report. I look forward to our members’ Official Information Act (OIA) requests to Inland Revenue for that draft report to understand the evidence that’s been written. But when I looked to the Minister’s press release as to why exactly that side of the House, this Government, wants to ram this piece of legislation through just before Christmas, I couldn’t find the answers, and all I found were a whole bunch of contradictions.

On the Taxation Principles Reporting Act, I quote the Minister: “despite widespread opposition”. Again, as evidenced by one of our own Finance and Expenditure Committee members and other members who were sitting through that tax principles bill, that was absolutely incorrect. There wasn’t “widespread opposition”. Then the Minister’s press statement goes “The bureaucracy it would have entailed is completely unnecessary.” Again, even in the officials’ regulatory impact statement, it states 2.5 fulltime-equivalents (FTEs)—2.5 FTEs—and I object to the Minister using the word “bureaucracy” to describe our hard-working public servants, the 2.5 of them who would have already written this report and whose time, therefore, is being wasted by this Government. But, then again, it is official information, so, again, I encourage other members of this House to put in that OIA request.

The Minister’s press release then carries on: “be on higher priority measures to address the cost of living and get the government’s books back in order.” Well, the cost of living just yesterday, in the Minister of Finance’s mini-Budget, removed two key elements which would have helped with the cost of living: that is the half-price transport fares, and that is the removal of the 20 hours’ early childhood education (ECE). Those are two policy initiatives that would have helped our families with the cost of living. I’m aware, just today, of a family that was absolutely banking on being able to have 20 hours’ ECE free next year and for that family to be able to go back to work for one of those parents, but this Government is not about the cost of living.

The Minister’s press release statement then goes, “[it] requires Inland Revenue to report under the Act by 31 December unless the Act is repealed prior.” Again, the work’s been done—another contradiction in the Minister’s press release, because the work has been done. We know that, because the Green member quite clearly showed that there’s only a few more working days. So again, the OIAs are going to be flooding through.

The last thing I want to point to in the Minister’s press release: “[it means it’s] focused on collecting tax and contributing to the delivery of the Government’s income tax reduction plans.” I can bet my bottom dollar that the 2.5 FTEs are probably working in the evaluation section of Inland Revenue. Their information will help target where you need to put your compliance costs, where you need to put your compliance resources, because, again, the Minister in his press release has failed to provide an absolute foundation for repealing this Act under urgency. It shows that that side of the House wants to be anti-workers. It wants to be anti-transparent. I do not commend this bill to the House, and I look forward to the debate we’re going to have over the next couple of days.

I rise to speak on the first reading of the Taxation Principles Reporting Act Repeal Bill. I am in total support of this bill because it is truly a bureaucratic scheme by an Opposition member. I was from the profession of tax and accounting in my pre-Parliament life, and so I know that in practice both taxpayers and tax services providers need a fair, simple, transparent, easy, and adequate tax system to service our country’s revenue needs. Kiwis don’t need another bureaucratic scheme, so therefore I commend the bill to the House.

This bill is set down for second reading immediately.

Second Reading