Land Transport (Clean Vehicles) Amendment Bill

Members, we now come to our final debate. This is the debate on clauses 1 and 2, the title and commencement debate.

Thank you, Madam Chair, for the opportunity to take a call on the title and commencement debate. I’d like to offer to the Minister some new suggestions for this piece of legislation in terms of what it could be entitled, because I think this particular piece of legislation has not been titled correctly. Currently, it has the proposed title of Land Transport (Clean Vehicles) Amendment Act 2021, and I would suggest to the member and to the House that, in fact, it should be called the “Land Transport (Ute Tax) Amendment Act 2021”. Because what we know from this piece of legislation is that this legislation is going to punish our farmers, it’s going to punish our tradies, and it is going to increase the costs that they have to pay for their vehicles when they do not have an alternative for their vehicles. The reality is you can’t take your tools on the train. You can’t take your Tesla on the farm. The reality is some people actually need a ute.

The very clear evidence which came through from the select committee and from submitters, and from the manufacturers who actually make utes and make vehicles, is that they will not be able to provide electric utes to the market for a number of years in New Zealand. So, in the meantime, the only alternative is that these people who have to purchase a ute for their work, for their farm, have to pay the tax, and that will mean paying 15 to 20 percent more per vehicle instead as they are currently paying. Now, that is a tax. That is, effectively, a tax on hard-working New Zealanders who are trying to contribute to this economy, contribute to our country, and to make a positive difference. But the chardonnay socialists on the other side don’t care; what they’re looking for is who they can get some money off—who can they get some money off so that they can subsidise the Teslas for their chardonnay socialist friends who can already afford to pay for those Teslas?

This bill is not about simply trying to provide clean vehicles; it is about transferring money from people who are working, working hard to pay for people who can already afford to pay and buy these electric vehicles. So I do suggest to the Minister that this bill should be retitled and renamed as the “Ute Tax Amendment Act 2021”, because that is, effectively, what it is going to do.

But we know it’s not just our farmers, it’s not just our tradies who are going to be punished by this piece of legislation; we know it’s people who can’t afford to pay for the high cost of an electric vehicle who are going to be paying for those people who already can. And whether it’s a young family trying to buy a slightly bigger car or it’s the need to get a people mover, those people who don’t have current choices in the market, they are going to be, effectively, paying.

We know what’s going to happen. Effectively, what we’re going to see is we’re going to see people either hold on to the vehicles they already have—they’re going to hold on to them for longer, meaning that they hold on to the vehicle which is more likely to be dirtier, more likely to emit more, and they’re going to hold on to that for longer. They will get it serviced. They’ll do whatever it takes to hold on to that vehicle for as long as possible, meaning our fleet in New Zealand doesn’t actually improve over time as it should. What this legislation will do is have those perverse incentives inbuilt for a long period of time.

I do recommend to the committee that this piece of legislation is amended to ensure that it actually reflects the incorrect title.

Then, in terms of the commencement section, the feedback is very clear from the sector, in regards to whether this bill and the implementation is actually an appropriate time frame. So I have put a tabled amendment, effectively, saying it should be around six months from now to actually give officials and the industry time to be able to prepare for its implementation. The reality is that this Minister may be very ambitious but there’s a whole lot of people out there who run companies, who bring vehicles into this country, who sell them, and who do a whole lot of other things, and these people aren’t just sitting there just waiting for the next piece of regulation to sit into their computer system.

💬 Andrew Bayly: Yes, they do.

Oh, well, according to Mr Bayly, they just sit around waiting for the Government to tell them what their next move is to do.

💬 Andrew Bayly: Can’t wait for Mr Wood to tell them what they’re going to have to do.

They just can’t wait for Mr Wood to tell them from his high office there in the Beehive to, “Just please, please tell us what our next business decision is that we have to do.” But that’s not the real world.

Out there in the real world, people are actually working hard, trying to get ahead when this Government is simply bringing in place new regulations, new rules, and new taxes every other day of the week. So these people are busy; they’re already busy. They’re already trying to keep their business afloat during an incredibly challenging time. They’re already trying to navigate the supply chain issues, which are impacting our supply chains, which are impacting so many industries, but, particularly, the importing car industry. It is also impacting the manufacturing of vehicles around the globe. These are very real issues. So the Minister should be open, at least if he’s not open to renaming the bill, to at least providing a little bit of extra time for this piece of legislation to be implemented, to give those hard-working people who are trying to keep this industry going, trying to navigate the challenges of the supply chains, so that they can actually deliver on this new regulation that the Minister is forcing upon them.

So I do commend my tabled amendment to the committee, I do ask that all parties, including the Minister, give very serious consideration to it, and I do ask the Minister to consider renaming this legislation as the “Land Transport (Ute Tax) Amendment Act” to actually reflect the taxes that it is putting on those people who are hard-working, who purchase utes for their businesses, for their farms, for their trading, and for the businesses that they do, making our economy what it is. So I ask for the Minister’s consideration in support of those changes.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Look, I want to support the comments of my friend and colleague Simeon Brown. I think he has very aptly and correctly given to the committee of the whole House a far better, more definitive proposed title for this piece of legislation than the Minister’s suggested title. But that’s not really the point that I want to make. The point I want to make here relates to commencement, and that is that, if members of the public and members of the Government look at clause 2, the commencement clause, it says, in subclause (1), “sections 22 to 24 of this Act are deemed to have come into force on 1 July 2021”. Now, I think today is 16 February 2022, so what we are, effectively, doing with this piece of legislation is giving effect to retrospectivity of subsidies on vehicles that have already been paid out before the legislation was passed and enacted in this House.

Now, the Minister is of an age and a generation that won’t recall the very key common law case that was taken in relation to a former Prime Minister—Muldoon—who, by fiat and declaration, back in the early days of his administration—he’d won the landslide election in 1975—he just said, “Well, look, people who are paying into the Labour Party’s superannuation scheme can stop making payments, because I’ve decreed it, I’ve issued a fiat, I’ve issued a press statement, and that’s what they can do.” And then there was a very prominent piece of case law that followed from that—Fitzgerald v Muldoon—which ruled in the court, in the judicial system of New Zealand, that that was actually illegal, that it was only the Parliament of New Zealand that can make decisions of the sort that the then Prime Minister Muldoon sought to do.

So why is that important to this legislation? Well, there are very similar parallels. This is a Government that is increasingly, day by day, acting like former Prime Minister Muldoon in almost every respect, particularly in relation to the economy. But here we have—by governmental fiat, by proclamation from the Beehive, which is something that this Government likes to do at every possible opportunity. They’ve just said, “Well, we’re going to put the subsidy component of this legislation into effect well before, and in advance, of the legislation itself having passed through the Parliament of New Zealand. Now, that’s just not good policy, it’s not good legislation, and I think it is fundamentally wrong.

Why did they want to do it? They wanted to get some runs on the board. So the Minister announced, with a degree of fanfare that people who were buying cars—eligible for taxpayer subsidy as a result of this piece of legislation—could start receiving the money, the free money, the money that was being provided by the State from 1 July, but the actual legislation giving effect to that payment has yet to be passed by this Parliament.

That is a constitutional abomination, really, and I would have thought that—notwithstanding their desire as a Government to emulate, in every possible way, the worst aspects of Robert Muldoon and his administration, particularly towards the end of that administration. Here they are adopting exactly the same kind of modus operandi that got him into trouble. It is potentially possible, I would imagine, with the passing of this legislation, that some bright-spark law student somewhere may want to dig out the judgment relating to Fitzgerald v Muldoon, and think to themselves, “Well, actually, there are very similar parallels here”. And perhaps a case could be brought in the judiciary to test out the legitimacy of this Government actually by fiat, by regulation, by proclamation saying, “Oh, well, we’re going to start paying out before the legislation is passed, and we’ll worry about the detail, we’ll worry about the mere passing of legislation in the Parliament of New Zealand—that’s a mere detail—

Order! The member’s time is up.

I’m bound by the long-standing conventions of this House to consider all other members of the House to be honourable members and to believe what they say when they say things in the House. And so I have to accept at his word, the member for Coromandel’s comments just now—that he actually believes what he has just said. And if it is the case that he does believe what he just said, and I accept that, then I can only conclude that he is either illiterate or incredibly lazy, because he simply hasn’t read the piece of legislation that is in front of him or taken the most cursory efforts to understand how the Clean Car Discount scheme works.

The Clean Car Discount scheme, as it kicked in from 1 July last year, required no legislation to give effect to the discounts—

💬 Simeon Brown: Why the date?

—that were provided to people. Well, if the member reads clause 2(1), it refers to sections 22 to 24. Has the member looked at what’s in sections 22 to 24? They’re not the parts of the Act that enable the Government to be able to put in place a discount scheme; they’re the relatively minor parts that relate to the Income Tax Act and the calculation of fringe benefit tax. Fitzgerald v Muldoon, this ain’t.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I rise to support my learned colleague Simeon Brown’s amendment for the title of this bill, to change it from the Land Transport (Clean Vehicles) Amendment Bill to the “Land Transport (Ute Tax) Amendment Bill”. It’d be fair to say, to start off, as Labour MPs have outlined in the House, if you look at the legacy of the former National Government in incentivising the take-up of electric vehicles (EVs) that this is a space that, on this side of the House, we support. But the reason why this bill and the ute tax went down like a cup of cold sick in parts of New Zealand, like regional New Zealand, it’s that saying, “You never, sort of, told anyone anything new; you just crystallised something in their mind they already knew.” This bill fundamentally shows the divide between that side of the House and this side of the House: the principle of choice.

Kiwis have an innate sense of fairness, and they know this carrot-and-stick approach is not fair. It is not fair that those people who may need to use a ute for their occupation are penalised, because they do not have a choice. And that is quite right why Simeon Brown has amended this title and moved that we would want it to represent the “Land Transport (Ute Tax) Amendment Bill”.

The Government will talk a lot around equality and inequality when it suits them. But what about this bill and the inequities that this bill will drive, especially in areas like regional New Zealand, especially in the South Island? In the South Island, we pay high petrol tax, we pay our road-user charges, yet our land transport fund is constantly raided by this Government to pay for pet public transport projects in Auckland that provide the South Island with no benefit. Now through this bill, we will have hard-working people in the regions who need to use a ute who will be taxed for that under this bill. It does raise the question: why you would just not incentivise EVs and leave it there? Why the stick? Because the Government fundamentally believes that they know best. Where on this side of the House, we believe people know best. They will make the right decisions for them, and because of this ute tax—as Simeon Brown clearly outlined—some people will actually sit on their gas guzzlers a lot longer. They won’t be moving to fuel-efficient vehicles, which will become counter-productive.

So, ultimately, we’ve got a bill that marginalises a certain group of New Zealanders, and this Government says, “We don’t care about you.” There was an ability and there is an ability in the bill for the Minister to carve out utes and other vehicles during the time that people have no other choice and then bring them in when they do have a choice, but this is fundamentalism. It’s ideology. It’s one-size-fits-all. “We’ll run the country through the beltway of Wellington, we won’t listen.” There’ll be many regional Labour MPs out there who will be feeling the pressure. Of course, when we ran the “ute tax” campaigns, it was fever pitch because New Zealanders didn’t like it. The ute tax, three waters—it all lines up.

You’d have to ask yourself why some members of New Zealand will be marginalised from this bill—farmers, tradies. What about those who have big families that can’t afford to buy an EV or actually need a large vehicle that is not an EV at the moment? Even the Minister’s own words through this debate in the committee of the whole House, he mentioned it might take 12 to 24 months. That’s why this bill should be rightly called a “ute tax”, because that group of New Zealanders could have got a carve-out until they had choice. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

The question is that Simeon Brown’s tabled amendment to clause 2 be agreed to.