Shaw James: New Zealand Business Number Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShaw James: New Zealand Business Number Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 12 April 2016. Volume:713;Page:10439. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): It is my pleasure to rise on behalf of the Green Party in support of the New Zealand Business Number Bill. I would like to acknowledge the work of the Commerce Committee and the officials in getting the bill to this stage and in particular I would like to acknowledge the chair of the select committee Melissa Lee.It is nice to be able to see the passage of this bill at last. It is obviously not the longest bill to wend its way through the House but it has taken over a year now to get to this stage. One of my questions which I have always held about this is why it requires an Act of Parliament to be able to issue numbers to trading entities and businesses in New Zealand. It does seem to me quite strange that it actually requires an Act of Parliament for us to pass a law for the Government to say “Here you are. Here’s a number.” but apparently it does and so there you have it—we are committed to this course of action. But it does raise a question to me about the extent to which legislation is required to do what seems to be a fairly basic function.I want to acknowledge that there are a number of concerns that have been raised at all stages of the process that have not been answered entirely adequately by the Government as the bill has wound its way through the process. One of those is the fairly well-worn concern which previous speakers tonight have spoken on in relation to the ability of the Government to actually deliver the New Zealand Business Number project to the people whom it is supposed to benefit and to do so in a manner that is efficient and effective. There is what appears to be a lack of resources that are being provided in order to be able to deliver once the legislation is passed. So I think that that is a concern that does still need answering.One of the things that I think we need to do is ensure that when we have passed this bill and the roll-out starts going we actually have good methods of monitoring the effectiveness because often when it comes to these kinds of programmes these kinds of services they can end up being of more benefit to the Government than they are to the people whom they are supposed to benefit. So they become a tool of the Government making things more efficient and effective for the Government that actually make things in many cases more difficult for the communities that they are supposed to serve. So I would like to know what kind of monitoring is going to be set up as a result of this to see whether this programme is actually delivering what it is supposed to do.One of the other concerns that was raised at a number of stages was around privacy and data security. There have been a number of reasonably high-profile cases in recent times where the Government has lost data or data has become exposed and in order to have a business number obviously users of it need to provide a reasonable amount of personal information. Again we would need to know what kind of monitoring systems are in place to ensure not only that the system is being delivered effectively but also that users’ data is safe and provided for.Having said that there are a number of benefits here—they have been fairly well trotted out in terms of the cost of doing business of interacting with Government services and having to reregister and have different registration processes with different agencies and so on. So that set of benefits is obviously why the Green Party is supporting this bill—because it will make business interactions with the Government more efficient and fast or it is certainly intended to. It does provide the opportunity to harmonise more effectively with Australia which is obviously very important to us and very important to businesses that trade with Australia.But I just wanted to focus for a minute on some of the opportunities—some of things that actually have not been spoken about either in the regulatory impact statement or in the business case that the Government put forward when it tabled the bill in the first place. These are things I think that would be well worth exploring. The first is the opportunity to use this to assist with the Government’s big data set about trading enterprises and businesses in New Zealand. So having set up a unique identifying number and developed a trading relationship with not just limited liability companies but also trading entities of all sorts across the country we should be able to get a much better picture than we currently do—and I say we should be able to get a much better picture than we already have—of the size and nature of New Zealand businesses and trading organisations. That in itself will become incredibly valuable in terms of the Government’s ability to shape services to those different sectors.I just wanted to use the example of that little Wellington-based company Xero which is currently doing the accounts for most of the planet and its ability from that position to be able to aggregate data to build up a very sophisticated picture about the nature of business and of trade in New Zealand and around the world. It actually has better data than the Government does because of course it is doing the books for most of these organisations or a very large number of these organisations. I know that the business number programme is not designed specifically to do that but it does create the mechanism to enable that kind of big data collection and analysis later on. So I think that is an opportunity that we want to explore here.The second which I have mentioned before is the opportunity to try to use this to cut down on fraud and zombie companies which is a large and growing problem—the idea that people in many cases small trades organisations will simply shut down their business rather than pay the bills and then reopen under another name in order to get out of paying bills and they will do this repeatedly. I get this a lot as I travel around the country that people in business are constantly frustrated by this phenomenon and there is not an easy way of dealing with it. One of the opportunities—again not explicitly provided for in the legislation—that this may enable is the opportunity for us to have that one-to-one relationship with these trading enterprises and to use that to be able to cut down on instances of fraud and zombie companies which are operators that are shutting down and then starting up without paying the bills from their previous entity. That is a second opportunity that I think we want to explore having set up this programme.The third opportunity that I think this provides is the ability to create aggregate services. In New Zealand large companies will have access to things like deals on cheaper petrol for company cars; they will have insurance deals health insurance; they will be able to get bulk discounts on materials; and so on and so forth. Actually the vast majority of enterprises in New Zealand which are very small operators do not have the scale to be able to tap into these kinds of deals. So the companies that are least able and most vulnerable actually are the ones that end up paying the higher prices and it is the larger companies that have got the resources that pay the lower prices. I think being able to form this one-to-one relationship with all of these enterprises and trading organisations around the country does provide the opportunity to create aggregate services for very small micro-enterprises and so on which otherwise would not be able to have access to them.Finally I think one of the obvious things here is that we already have business numbers in place for most of our companies in New Zealand or many companies in New Zealand—limited liability companies and so on—and all this really does is simply extend the same service in many ways to other organisations like social enterprises State sector organisations like schools and district health boards non-profits charity shops and so on freelancers and sole traders who are not covered by the other programme and so the idea that actually everyone no matter their trading form will be able to interact with the Government in the same way and on an equal footing is a good one.In conclusion it is odd that it needs legislation to issue a number. There are some concerns that I do not think were addressed adequately as the bill passed its passage through the House. I do think that the bill does have the promise of many benefits and some unexplored opportunities and so the Green Party is pleased to be able to support this bill in its final reading. Thank you.