Taxation (Annual Rates for 2020-21, Feasibility Expenditure, and Remedial Matters) Bill

It gives me great pleasure to stand and speak on this bill. One of the important parts of this bill is the remedial matters bill, and one of the remedial matters which will be of most interest to New Zealanders concerns the forgotten and missing money. So many institutions in New Zealand have money sitting in their accounts with no owner. They’ve been unable to trace the owners. Sometimes that money can sit around for 25 years before they’re able to do anything about it. What this will allow is to expedite the passage of that money through to the IRD. The IRD will be able to use their systems to track down the owners; the banks get it off their books, where it is costly to administer; the owners of the money in many cases will get money that they probably had forgotten about, or perhaps the family had forgotten about. It is a win-win situation, and it’s one of many measures in this bill which makes much sense and it will make many people much happier than they were before the passing of the bill. I commend it to the House.

Madam Speaker, tēnā koe. I rise to speak on the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2020-21, Feasibility Expenditure, and Remedial Matters) Bill. In an earlier contribution in this debate, my colleague Andrew Bayly commended the Minister for his passion on this subject and I take a slightly different view. I’m very wary of passion in a revenue Minister because I don’t want any revenue Ministers passionately taking more money from New Zealanders than they absolutely need to do. This bill is the first tax bill that I have had the pleasure of considering as a member of the Finance and Expenditure Committee and while it has some positive things in it, it also has many things which speak to a Government who likes to, wherever it can, take more tax and I want to take you through some of the measures in this bill that the National Party takes issue with.

The first issue that we see is that in setting the rates in this bill and confirming the rates of taxation, we can see immediately the effects of bracket creep continuing for another year. Other speakers in the debate have outlined how this occurs but, of course, this is the fact that there is inflation occurring each year. Wages do increase and what we see is that the tax levels still cut in at the same level of income. And the impact of that is that more and more people find themselves in higher tax brackets every year and so the overall amount of taxation being taken from them increases. It has been National’s policy position that we think this kind of tax grab by stealth should not be allowed to continue and that these levels should be indexed to inflation. This bill is a missed opportunity in that it doesn’t do that and it is grabbing a lot more tax as a consequence.

The second area that this bill deals with is deductibility of feasibility expenditure. And while we acknowledge it’s a positive step forward to be allowing for more of this, this is a very narrow, narrow version of what people were expecting to see with this tax treatment, and it’s particularly relevant in a time when we have businesses who are trying to pivot because of COVID, because of the global pandemic, and many of them are investing in other entities or other ventures. For example, you’ve got restaurants who have decided that really they’re going to focus on a takeaway arm or you’ve got businesses that have really pivoted to do a different range of online things. And the way that this bill constructs deductibility for feasibility expenditure, those sorts of activities won’t be able to get the tax treatment that would allow more businesses and investors to have confidence about innovating and pivoting in these COVID times.

The other sneaky tax grab in here is the charging of GST on outbound and overseas mobile roaming calls. This is something that is not required in terms of other jurisdictions doing it. It’s something that has not been the practice in New Zealand to date. It seems to us that it’s a revenue grab and that it will create unnecessary compliance for many people. So watch out, Kiwis, you’ll be paying more tax when and if—if and when—you’re travelling again. And I suspect that if we were in a time with open borders, which we all hope to be in again, there would be much more attention on this issue because this does affect people who are making phone calls overseas.

Finally, the issue of purchase price allocation. I do want to commend my fellow members of the committee on this aspect of the bill, because this is something National members had a lot of concerns about—we continue to have concerns about. But that is reflected in the decision of the committee to have an immediate review of this section. The committee has recommended to put these new obligations under review within six to 12 months. And that’s because of the very real risk that they will increase the compliance burden on taxpayers, that they will be unworkable, they could even result in some small-business owners and unsophisticated investors being at risk of breaking tax laws without any knowledge of how these laws are meant to work. So for people without lawyers, this is going to be a very difficult piece of law and we are very pleased that it will be reviewed in six to 12 months.

Overall, National opposes this bill. It’s got lots of tax grabs by stealth and is yet another impost of obligations on New Zealanders that we think may be very difficult indeed.

I commend this bill to the House.