Hipkins Chris: New Zealand Business Number Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: New Zealand Business Number Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 03 March 2016. Volume:711;Page:9417. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): I am happy to take what is going to be a short call on this New Zealand Business Number Bill. I have to say as I do so that I have some interest in this because there are 1.1 million New Zealand companies that have been allocated a New Zealand Business Number; only about half of those are active. The company that I am a director of which has been allocated one of those numbers falls into the other category—which is those companies that are not active and not currently trading.But I will potentially benefit from this legislation because one of the things that I have to do as the director of a non-trading company is do a tax return every year. You have to go online to do your return and of course whenever I went to go online I could never remember what my log-on was and could never remember what my password was. So one of the first things the Government did was to give me a new log-on—another log-on and another password—and now I cannot remember what those are either. This is one of the problems with the Government when businesses want to interact with it—they get another log-on and another password and another number. This of course is something that maybe has some promise: the idea that you would have a single number for interactions with the Government. Who could possibly object to that? Except that it is going to be another number in addition to all of the other numbers that companies already have. It begs the question of why could we not just use one of the many many numbers companies already have.Companies already have a company number an Inland Revenue Department number—you can go through them and count them all. There are plenty of other numbers that could have been used as the single business number a company could use to interact with the Government. It seems a bit crazy that the idea is that we can solve this problem by creating another system. It seems a little bit crazy a little bit mad and something that we should certainly do something about.There are many businesses around the country that are small businesses operated by one or two people. They are typically—as at least several parliamentary colleagues have spoken about this afternoon—operated out of a kitchen or a van or a garage somewhere. These are people who do not have administrators working for them. They are people who administer their own businesses and the Government should be doing all it can to make that process as streamlined and as simple as possible for them. A single point of contact would be a good start; a single number is also a welcome opportunity.But there is so much more that can be done to reduce the compliance costs for small business. I am not sure that the Government has necessarily got on top of all of those. There are some big issues around tax for example. I think that would have a far bigger impact on small business—and on provisional tax in particular—than the adoption of the single business number proposal. Although it is welcome that proposal probably is not necessarily going to make a significant difference in the way that some of the other reforms that the Government could take to reduce the compliance costs New Zealand businesses face would actually make.The Labour Party is going to be supporting this bill through the next stages with some reservations and my colleagues will set those out in due course when we get to the Committee stage of the debate. I am sure that there will be some amendments on the Table when it comes time to go through those in detail.Debate interrupted.