Shaw James: New Zealand Business Number Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShaw James: New Zealand Business Number Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 05 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3196. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAMES SHAW (Green): It is a pleasure to stand to speak on the New Zealand Business Number Bill. The overarching aim of the Green Party’s economic development policy is to facilitate the transition to a smart green economy and so to that end initiatives to support businesses to reduce their time and administration costs are to be welcomed. The Green Party will be supporting the New Zealand Business Number Bill.Before I get into why we are going to be supporting the bill I just want to set a little bit of context. A number of previous speakers have spoken about the intended benefits mostly to do with the efficiency gains that may be available to businesses as a result of having these unique business identifying numbers. In terms of the number of businesses out there some really useful information that came up in the regulatory impact statement is that there are 1.1 million companies already in New Zealand 500000 to 600000 of which are actively trading and that these companies already have business numbers. But in addition to that there is another entire half of trading relationships in New Zealand that are organisations that are not companies. So trusts make up 15 percent of trading relationships in New Zealand sole traders make up 19 percent partnerships make up 12 percent and 4 percent is made up of Government agencies non-Government organisations and social enterprises.So there is a significant number—as many as half of all businesses in New Zealand—that are not currently covered by the existing business numbers that are already out there. I want to pick up in particular on the sole traders and the freelancers because they obviously cover a huge portion of New Zealand’s business people and in fact of our total population. There are by some estimates 270000 or so sole traders freelancers one-person companies and so on. So for those individuals—and having spent much of the last 10 years of my life as a freelancer—the administrative burden that comes when there is only you to run your business and to interact with various agencies and so on is significant because every moment that is taken out of my day as a freelancer dealing with just data entry is an hour that I cannot spend growing my business.One of the interesting opportunities in this bill if it was to cover sole traders is the idea of an aggregator effect—being able to essentially pull together some bargaining power across all of those sole traders and freelancers around in New Zealand. If we had better access to those people and were able to identify them more clearly it is conceivable that we could actually build further services for them and maybe bring some other costs down—for example insurance costs or even energy costs and things like that.It does however raise a question of privacy which I will come to in a minute and which some other speakers have already referred to. One of the other benefits that may be available from this which is also privacy-related is the idea that consumers and employees who have been hard-done-by by some businesses may find it easier to get recourse to justice if those businesses are easier to track because there is a sector of our society in which businesses change their names or shut up shop and reopen over the road and so on in order to avoid for example court judgment costs. So one of the benefits of this approach may be that people will actually have more access to justice if they have been hard-done-by.All of those things do bring us back to this question of privacy. If there are something like a quarter of a million or more freelancers and sole traders and so on in New Zealand that is nearly one in eight people in the entire country and most of those people will be operating their businesses from home. So the question of their residential address and contact details being tied to their company does raise some privacy concerns for a very substantial portion of the New Zealand public. It becomes a sort of proxy personal identity number for a significant portion of our population. So we do have some questions about how the data will be managed what the security and integrity of that data is and so on. Of course this is not an issue that is unique to this particular initiative but as has been amply demonstrated across a number of agencies it is a real concern.The other concern that we have which was raised in the regulatory impact statement is about whether this initiative will actually achieve the stated objective—that is to increase efficiency. The Government has talked about something like up to $34 million worth of costs that could be mitigated across the entire economy. That is actually not a terribly large number of course when you consider the overall trading economy.Apparently there are no other countries that the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment has been able to find that have the experience of having unique identifying numbers for their businesses where they have been able to quantify the efficiency gains to businesses so there does not seem to be a clear precedent. Although we have been able to estimate that $34 million worth of benefits are available if we go down this path we are not sure whether that will actually eventuate. Other countries’ experience does seem to say that unique identifying numbers have been good for increasing e-business services. That will clearly be an increased benefit and you can see how that will be available to businesses that are using these numbers.So we do have some concerns particularly in the domain of privacy and it will be very interesting to see the submissions that come through on the bill and to see how those go and to see also the extent to which we are actually confident that having put in place this system New Zealand businesses will be able to capitalise on the savings that we think that they may be able to.As I said at the beginning of my remarks it does seem like a very sensible initiative and pretty uncontroversial generally. Any initiative that is sensible and does not carry a great deal of risk and that helps to reduce costs or facilitates the reduction of administrative time for small businesses particularly for sole traders and freelancers we would like to support. With that I commend the bill to the House.