SpeechDAN BIDOIS (National—Northcote): It's a pleasure to kick off this debate from this side of the House and I want to thank the Minister the Hon Chris Hipkins for bringing this bill before us today. As we have heard from the Minister this bill is an omnibus bill seeking to change eight Acts of Parliament to help make life a little easier for businesses and Government agencies that have struggled through COVID-19. I want to signal to the House today that National will be supporting this bill and we want to explain exactly why we're supporting it. Certainly the purpose of the bill was to support businesses as they struggle through COVID-19 and we want to acknowledge the scale of what has been felt right across New Zealand from businesses large and small and also Government agencies after having to deal with lockdown and then the various levels of the alert system and then now also faced with the challenges where you know we don't have tourism back in New Zealand—and we've got deep challenges that we're facing there.Some of these changes—in fact a lot of these changes—are reasonably uncontroversial and will help the businesses that are struggling and the Minister outlined a number of those changes related to Schedule 1 that deals with the extension of reporting time lines mainly for Government agencies but those will be no doubt welcomed. Also in Schedule 2 the changes to enable R & D to be possibly treated as a tax credit and to now allow those tax credits to be applied and also allowing IRD—I think this will be a really good change actually—to have the discretion to change the due dates and deadlines to help supporting businesses through that. So this is a reasonably uncontroversial bill.I do want to raise the issue that I don't think that this is enough support for the business community. The challenge just going back to some of the challenges that we face in the next 12 to 18 to 24 months is extremely large and Treasury predictions—and no doubt those will be updated as time goes on—indicate that there'll be deep employment cuts that will be coming particularly after the wage subsidy comes off later on next month. I like to say that we are in the eye of the storm. We had the first round of challenges and redundancies and business closures immediately post-lockdown and after the alert system went from level 3 to level 2 and now actually if you asked a lot of businesses throughout New Zealand a lot of them are busy. Restaurants cafes real estate agents DIY businesses wholesale retail operations—they're actually quite busy. I think it masks the challenges that we're going to face in the next few years because once that wage subsidy comes off we're going to have about 470000-odd employees that are affected by that. Businesses will have to make those hard decisions and to lay off staff right across New Zealand. So whilst this bill addresses some of the kind of administrative burdens I would say that businesses will be facing as a result of COVID-19 this is by far not sufficient to address some of the challenges that these businesses will face in the next few years.I do want to outline National's position on what should be done to help address those challenges. One of the things that we've got to think about is anything we can do to make it as easy as possible to bring back those unemployed into the workplace and that's why we've got things that we've talked about which is JobStart which essentially gives employers the chance to get 10 grand or $10000 for hiring an additional staff member. Beyond all the tax and administrative burden ideas like that ideas like JobStart will have a meaningful difference to the lives of small businesses and those that will be directly impacted by COVID-19.Other things we can look at are around starting a business. There's going to be a lot—tens and tens of thousands—that will be unemployed: white collar blue collar you name it. Now what can we do to actually give those people an incentive to go out and start businesses and hire people?DEPUTY SPEAKER: I just want to caution the member that you need to relate all that to the bill that's in front of the House.DAN BIDOIS: Thank you Madam Speaker. I'll definitely do that right away. So look why I raise this is because the changes we're dealing with in this bill seek to help ease the challenges facing small business and businesses right across New Zealand. I raise this in the context that that is part of the challenge that small businesses face but it is not in any way going to make a substantial difference. So I raise that in context because yes we're supportive of these administrative changes yes these changes will help ease some of the burden that these businesses will face post COVID-19 but we need to be realistic that in the next couple of months in the next six to 12 months these businesses will face even greater challenges and that's why we need bigger policy ideas and legislation that is going to help those changes.So we'll be talking more about those changes throughout this process but I do want to signal that National is supportive of these changes. We want to help businesses out in any way we can and I commend this bill to the House.