Source: New Zealand Parliament – Hansard
Hon TODD McCLAY (National—Rotorua): Mr Speaker, thank you. So early on a Wednesday morning when the House is not meeting in committee but is here to do what the Government says is important business that we have to set aside the work of committees to get on with, I don’t think we should suggest “Let’s rush through this to get rid of some of the brouhaha.”, as the last speaker, Shanan Halbert, said.
National is opposing this legislation, not because we don’t think those who receive a service should pay for it, but in this instance that’s not what the Government is doing. What the Government is doing is saying, “We’ll collect money whenever we want from anybody that’s involved with the companies register, and then get that used any other way.”, and what that means is that there are likely to be some people that pay for a service, but, actually, the fee that they pay isn’t used for that service and it’s used somewhere else. In essence, in a way, that could be seen to be subsidising others at the best, but at worst it comes to having a lazy Government.
When originally the legislation was put through the House to fix an issue because the companies house or the register was charging fees without the legal ability to do so, National supported that. However, this wasn’t looked at at the time and the Government didn’t make those changes then, and it’s now revisiting giving the ability, again, to officials to make rules or laws or decisions through regulation—without the oversight of this House—to collect fees and then use that in ways other than what the fee was used for.
To give you an example, the Government announced a short while ago that it wanted to increase the significant cost of clearing the border in New Zealand. When somebody arrives in New Zealand or leaves New Zealand, a fee is charged as part of, I suppose, the ticket to come in or come out, and that money is used directly and on a cost recovery basis just for the cost of running that service at the border. Well, in this case, this isn’t cost recovery. This is “Collect some money, use it however we want to within companies house.”, and, to give the same analogy at the border, it’s a little bit like saying, “Well, we’re going to collect some money from Australians who are coming to New Zealand as they go through the border, because there’s a cost of running that service of customs and immigration at the border, but we’re going to collect from them more than probably we need to, based on the service we provide to them, and we’re going to use it for something else.” I don’t know of anything we want, including “Let’s move it over to use for the companies register.”
We won’t be supporting this because we don’t think it’s fair and we don’t think it’s proportionate. It is the case that people who register a company and who have access to the companies register must pay a fee as part of the cost of the service they’re provided with, but that’s not what this bill or this legislation is doing. It’s saying that an official, through regulation, can decide what the fee is and what it is used for, and it can be nothing to do with why the person is actually paying the money in the first place.
So this isn’t brouhaha. This is about charging hard-working New Zealanders a fee—it’s a type of tax, I suppose. We know that the Labour Government loves new taxes, and in this case they’re saying, “It’s not enough just to say that we’re going to collect this tax based on the proportionality of user-pays. What we’re going to do is collect this tax and use it however we want.” So it’s the user paying for things for which they receive no service for at all. It’s not good legislation, it’s not something that we can support, and we won’t be voting for it.
