Cameron MarkMARK CAMERON (ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker. The ACT Party will be supporting the Companies Office Registers Funding Validation Bill. Thank you Mr Speaker for the opportunity to speak on this first reading of this bill. As one might appreciate this piece of legislation is well outside my normal port of call. That being said I will endeavour to offer a fair and balanced contribution for those that seek clarity of how this bill will affect them.The bill as written is an omnibus bill and it will amend 13 Acts to retrospectively validate fees that have been collected under those 13 Acts and that have been and will be applied under any register administered by New Zealand's Companies Office. This bill as written amends those 13 Acts. I could go through the full 13 Acts this bill seeks to amend and quote them verbatim but as I'm cognisant of time and as I am aware that some of my parliamentarian colleagues will be wishing to share their contributions—equally perhaps not as well versed as I in this area or more—so I'll keep my comments moderately short. However for the benefit of some of my colleagues that are like me that may want to be more intimately versed in this legislation here are some examples that the legislation addresses: the Companies Act 1993 the Financial Markets Conduct Act 2013 the Friendly Societies and Credit Unions Act 1982 and several others.Over time the Companies Office has moved towards providing shared services to the registers and has allowed the Companies Office economies of scale in the delivery of registry services and to leverage technological developments this enabling registry services to be centralised and shared across registers. Over time these changes have reduced cost to users but unfortunately this has made it increasingly difficult to distinguish between the costs of providing services to each register. Equally the fees charged for some small registers have not managed to keep up with the cost of operating them. The shortfall was met with a surplus from fee collections for other registers. This practice is not authorised in legislation.In essence the bill addresses the Companies Office practice of applying funds collected in fees not in the scope of current legislation and does this by retrospectively validating the Companies Office charging and expenditure practices. The crux of this bill addresses that shortfall and will enable the Companies Office to use the surpluses it has collected to fund anticipated shortfalls on certain registers while a new unified funding regime is established. In short order it provides for a lawful basis of funding shortfalls while reforms in the Companies (Levies) Amendment Bill are implemented. The regulatory impact statement produced by the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment suggests various options of how best the legislation could be worked through and compared to those counterfactual. After reading through these the ACT Party found that the option that had streamlined accounting practices—compared to the counterfactual—would avoid additional costs to regulators and regulated groups. It was certainly the most practical way to address the underlying issues needed in the proposed bill. There were some concerns under the current fees-setting provision that the cost of providing a shared service for each register is recovered from fees charged to the users of that register this because the unit cost of each register depends on the total number of entities registered. Users of an identical shared service can be charged materially different fees for what is fundamentally the same service this of course depending on how many users of the register there actually are.However on balance with full consideration given to the benefits and the potential cost the ACT Party believes this bill should go through the necessary legislative scrutiny and further debate in this House to iron out any discrepancies or unintended consequences in the bill as currently written. The ACT Party does support this bill and we look forward to the contribution of other members in the House. Thank you Mr Speaker.