Parker David: New Zealand Business Number Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeParker David: New Zealand Business Number Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 30 March 2016. Volume:712;Page:10038. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): You know one of the sayings you hear when you have been around this place for long enough is that the longer someone is in Government the more out of touch they become and the more they become captured by the interests of their officials and of the Government departments that start to rule them rather than the people they are meant to be here to serve.I am somewhat shocked to hear that this Government which has introduced this piece of legislation to reduce compliance costs by making sure that businesses can use a common number when they are dealing with the Government is now saying: “Oh but that is actually not what we are going to do with this legislation.” Members of the Government are actually now saying that the Government departments do not have to do it. They do not even have a list of half of the Government departments that would be willing to do it and they are not even willing to give us a time frame within which any percentage of the Government has to deal with people through this unique or universal business number.This idea that there are going to have to be 150 different computer programs written across Government departments is also a nonsense but it belies an incompetence on the part of the Government more generally when it comes to IT projects. Of course there are a variety of IT platforms across Government and the actual interfaces between the new software and those different software systems will have to be a little different. But you know the Government could have already written the overlying piece of software so that it then had to deal with only the interfaces for each department.It has not learnt the lessons of PAYE. How many PAYE systems do you think the Government owns across the public sector?Hon Clayton Cosgrove: Heaps.Hon DAVID PARKER: There are an enormous number of them. Do they all work?Hon Clayton Cosgrove: Bound to not work.Hon DAVID PARKER: Well they do not all work. The Government proves that to us every 6 months. We had Novopay. You would have thought that after Novopay when the superministry the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment—we are not allowed to call it “MoBIE”; there was a ministerial directive that we were not allowed to call the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment “MoBIE”—was formed as the superministry would have checked it had the right PAYE system. Did it check? Was it the same Minister who is responsible for this piece of legislation? No it did not check and as a consequence we recently had the embarrassing spectacle that the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment did not have its own PAYE system right despite the fact that it houses the Department of Labour.Dr David Clark: They don’t even comply with their own law.Hon DAVID PARKER: They do not even comply with their own law.Hon Clayton Cosgrove: Fawlty Towers.Hon DAVID PARKER: It is like Fawlty Towers. And then we are expected to come along and trust Minister Joyce to get it right here despite the fact that by amendment to this legislation there is no compulsion on the Government departments to provide this universal or unique business number.You know I heard it said that this ought not to be used for all Government departments and it is true. But I recommend this to the Police. We have actually got to the point in New Zealand that with less than 10 percent of burglaries resolved the only way the police are going to resolve most burglaries is if the burglars provide their own unique identifier.I do not say that seriously but really consider the laughability of the Government in respect of its opposition to Ria Bond’s very sensible proposed amendment to this legislation to put some date by which the Government has to do something. Maybe the period is wrong. Maybe the Government or the Minister would like to take a call and say: “Actually you know we can’t do it overnight. We can’t do it within 2 years as Dr Clark proposes but we could do it within 3.” I think we in the Opposition would probably agree to 3 years. We would not mind even if we heard from the ministry or the Minister in the chair as to when the first Government department is going to be using it. It would be quite nice to have a unique Government department applying this universal business number. But we have not even heard the Minister addressing that.There are a couple of other issues that I would like to raise quite seriously. One is: I do not think that we have had a proper discussion as to why it is that the IRD number—which every one of these businesses already has and already knows and already uses every 2 months on their GST return or every year on their income tax return—cannot be the unique identifier that Government departments use. I have not heard the Government explain why that is. There may be some good reasons but I have not heard an explanation from Government Ministers or in the Commerce Committee’s report or from the Minister in the chair as to why that unique identifier which every business already has is not the unique identifier that is going to be used across Government. I heard Brett Hudson say that that was impossible. Why?It seems to be possible for the IRD number to be a unique identifier for every New Zealand taxpayer—i.e. every business already—so they seem to be able to work that for every business in New Zealand. Why can the rest of the Government not adopt that number? Why can the Government not be more sensible in the use of data generally?We have got the problem in New Zealand that some people cannot vote at elections. The Government does not mind that because most of the people who are disenfranchised by that are not likely to vote for the National Party. So National actually likes the rolls to be imperfect. You actually see this in election cycle after election cycle. The Labour Party when in power—[Interruption] Mr Chair this is a matter relating to unique identifiers. The Labour Party—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Return back to it.Hon DAVID PARKER: —makes it easier and easier to enrol—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Go back to the New Zealand Business Number Bill.Hon DAVID PARKER: —for people to get their ability to enrol. Then the National Party comes in and it makes it harder every time. There is a cycle to this. Well why can people not have a unique identifier like the IRD number that entitles them to vote? That is how some other overseas countries manage their electoral rolls. They base it on the IRD number. They sometimes put a year of birth after it so that it makes it harder for people to defraud voting because they will turn up and they have got to be about the right age.Why is it that the Government will not do these sensible things that would save money to businesses save money to the Government in the case of the electoral roll save money to the Government in the case of using the likes of the IRD number instead of some other new unique identifier when we already have got one for every business in New Zealand? Why is it that the Government will not do those things? And then more particularly why is it that the Minister in the chair of this Committee stage of this process will not get up and defend the Government in respect of these questions? The answer is that on these issues they are less than competent.We see it time and time again. We have cost overruns in respect of IT projects. We have delays. The one that we have had that is particularly egregious is that Parliament twice has had to have amending legislation to extend the date for implementation of a piece of legislation relating to child support payments. Twice the Government has put deadlines on it for implementation and twice because of its incompetence in respect of IT projects it has not met the deadline and it has had to come back to this Parliament and do it again.Now Government members have become so scared of their own incompetence that they will not agree to any time line even though they know as my colleague Jacinda Ardern has pointed out from their own Cabinet papers and their own Treasury reports that one of the reasons this will not work as well as it could work is that there is no built-in mechanism from Parliament saying: “Well you know we’ll agree a reasonable deadline but actually we want to have some compulsion for the Government to do what it needs to do in terms of its systems to make this unique business number work.”