Nash StuartGENERAL DEBATEHon STUART NASH (Minister for Economic and Regional Development): I move That the House take note of miscellaneous business.First of all I just want to say congratulations to the Hon Aupito William Sio—good on you mate; he's just left—on having the needle tomorrow having the injection tomorrow. Andrew Little had his today. I asked him if it hurt and he said he didn't even feel it. Mind you Andrew has got pretty thick skin so that's pretty good.What I would like to do is outline very briefly some of the initiatives that we are doing in the micro small and medium business space in terms of building resilience and getting businesses building back better in terms of the COVID recovery. Just a little bit of a background: we all know that small businesses are the backbone of our country. They form 97 percent of our companies about 28 percent of GDP about 40 percent of employees and this is where the jobs are growing in our economy at the moment. So I will outline some of the work that will allow a level of resilience to be built that we haven't seen before through increasing digitisation thus enabling small businesses to engage with markets and consumers online in a way that was probably not imagined pre-COVID. McKinsey which is an American consultancy said that in the States they saw five years' worth of digitisation taken up in eight weeks. Now this was an American study but from what I have seen I suspect it's probably the same in New Zealand and even pre-COVID—but certainly during COVID and in this time as we recover—I have been saying ever since I've been the Minister for Small Business that I think this is probably the last generation of business owners that will survive let alone thrive without being digitally enabled. The reason I say that is nearly every single Government initiative that is targeting the small-business sector involves some form of digital enablement. Whether that's e-invoicing which will allow small businesses to be paid and to pay within 10 days—in fact at the moment the Government is paying 95 percent of its invoices within 10 working days and in terms of cash flow and dealing with the Government that is huge. Hon Dr David Clark: Big step forward!Hon STUART NASH: It is a really big step forward. The thing is that the 20th of the month following is now an anachronism that no longer needs to be in terms of payment for small businesses—or any business. We have a joint Australasian working party on e-invoicing. We're working as one with the Australians to make it easier—or as easy as possible—for New Zealand businesses to interact with their Australian counterparts when they decide to head offshore. But e-invoicing is going global and we need to keep up—we are keeping up—and there's some fantastic work being done on that. In fact I would argue the way e-invoicing is being rolled out across the State sector is that a business will not be able to interact with the Government unless they are e-invoicing enabled.IRD transformation GST online payday filing—what we find is when Inland Revenue rolls out an initiative there's normally a bit of a spike in terms of you know people that are unhappy with Inland Revenue. Then after these things have become embedded small-business owners throw up their hands and say Goodness me why weren't we doing this five years ago?" Inland Revenue had a key performance indicator around business transformation that said by 2025 they wanted 82 percent of small businesses to be working on digital platforms. That has already been achieved five years earlier. The topic that I really I want to talk about is Digital Boost—well I'll outline in the last minute I've got. Digital Boost is really an online digital training network that allows small businesses to learn and to pick up digital tools to learn digital capacities and competency in their own time. They go online at digitalboost.co.nz and there's a series of videos that they can engage with at any point in time and it also provides a whole lot of case studies for businesses that have gone through the Digital Boost experience. It is really a fantastic resource for business owners and operators who may actually be a little bit you know digitally incompetent—their words—but it's up to them. It's up to them! Marja Lubeck: Challenged!Hon STUART NASH: Digitally challenged! That's the word thanks Marja. We all know these—it's the older generation that are incredibly good at what they do but they really haven't engaged in digital technology in a way that this current generation have. But it is there to help businesses engage in 21st century commerce engage with the Government but find a pathway forward on their own terms in their own time. Keven Mealamu is up there as a digital ambassador. He's transformed his business due to Digital Boost. I visited a business in Franz Josef Glacier that's managed to transform their business to allow them to take advantage of digital opportunities in a way they haven't in the past. Digitalboost.co.nz—visit it!"