All we want is fairness
under-used and marginalised since her return from the wilderness she was banished to after the Dirty Politics revelations and she is known to be not exactly close to Prime Minister Bill English.
In her role as Revenue Minister, which is typically a low profile portfolio, she has announced a range of policies to crack down on multinational companies that generate profits in New Zealand but shift them overseas. It will apply to companies that have a global turnover of more than NZ$1.1 billion.
Some names spring to mind. Facebook paid $43,000 tax on $1.2m in revenue to the New Zealand taxman last year. Google paid $362,000 on revenue of $14.9m and Apple paid $9m on revenue of $732m.
Most have just a skeleton staff here. Google reportedly employs only 20 people in New Zealand.
This could make it hard to squeeze more tax from them as one of the features of the reforms that Collins proposes is that profits driven by New Zealand-based staff must stay in New Zealand rather than being booked overseas.
It is a cat and mouse game. Companies perform accounting tricks that shift profits to jurisdictions with a lower tax rate. And while some countries devise new rules to catch them, others lower their own tax rates to attract the business.
How much tax is New Zealand missing out on? Estimates vary but the figure could be as high as $300 million per year. Some experts doubt whether we could recover that much money and there is a sense that the tax reforms proposed by Collins could be symbolic as much as anything else.
The acknowledgement of the problem by the Government is in stark contrast to earlier claims that the tax system is working as it should. The u-turn came after Collins replaced the underperforming Michael Woodhouse.
Some will say that the Government’s belated response to this long-running problem is cynical electioneering. It is in an election year and English has been looking apathetic and under-motivated since he took over the top job in December.
A crackdown on big international players is populism at its best and there will be few on either side of the political divide who will not applaud the general thrust of the reforms, even if there is quibbling over details.