Ardern Jacinda: New Zealand Business Number Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeArdern Jacinda: New Zealand Business Number Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 09 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:8828. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JACINDA ARDERN (Labour): I have it on good authority from my colleague David Clark who was obviously a Labour representative in the debate on this bill that it was indeed a good select committee process in the Commerce Committee and of course that is what select committees provide for us: an opportunity to have a thorough debate and listen to the public view and sentiment as to the quality of the legislation that we are examining in those committees. Interestingly we have come out on the side after all of that thorough process of having decided that actually our reservations in part are around whether or not this has been done in the most efficient way but I also sense a lost opportunity here as well.I will come back to the Government’s own Better Public Services target that it has set for itself around small business because I want to ask some questions as to whether or not that is as ambitious as it could be and indeed whether or not this bill really should be sitting at the heart of the Government’s agenda for small business when there are so many other things that we need to be considering for that sector. I want to start off by paying tribute to the fact that small businesses in New Zealand generate more than 40 percent of the jobs per annum if the past has been anything to go by.If we want to look at boosting employment in New Zealand if we want to look at supporting the productive economy we should be looking at what we do to support small businesses. There is no argument on that front on this side of the House. That is why Andrew Little used his state of the nation speech last year to articulate Labour’s view that small business needed to be at the heart of our regional economic development plan and that is the reason that David Clark and I work so closely together on those issues.If you ask small businesses what it is that they want central government to be tackling for them you will see some common themes and I would roughly like to put them under these generic headings. First is about the team. They want the right staff and that means well qualified in the areas that they need them to be qualified in or readily able to be trained and—this is what small businesses say to me often—they want the right attitude.But there is a role for the Government to play in that space—for instance if you look at the fact that we have had a massive shortage of people in particular industries like for instance the trades. We have had a massive shortage of skilled people in that area. When you go out and ask small businesses why they are not training people in that space when they have got that work they will tell you that it is because it costs to train a person on the job: “If I’m training someone in an apprenticeship it is going to take me at least a year before they are productive in my business. Why am I going to make that investment? There is no incentive for a business owner to do that.”If central government wants to answer that call why are we not looking to create that incentive? That is something that Labour looked very closely at. That is why we decided to implement the Dole for Apprenticeships scheme where we are saying: “Look you give something by training your employees we’ll give something back by giving you the equivalent of the dole for a year to train that individual but you finish their training through 3 years.” That is an example of listening to the needs of those small businesses and it is something that Labour is very mindful of.So it is about the right staff the right time and having the right team. Having the right team though almost ignores the fact that actually small-business owners themselves have their own needs in terms of training and capacity. If you talk to a lot of small-business owners when they go into the role of becoming a small-business owner or manager they often do not necessarily anticipate the growth they experience or they will have gone in with the ultimate goal that they would have the bach the boat and more time to spend with their family. They very rarely achieve all three particularly time. We almost need to be asking small businesses to give a little of their time in order to gain a little of their time and by that I mean capacity building and training. Those are some of the needs that they have articulated.How do we service those gaps at the moment? Well banks might offer the occasional training as part of their offerings to attract small businesses to them. On the other end of the scale you have Icehouse with its $20000 programmes that yes generate enormous returns for those businesses but in terms of the cost it is just unaffordable. So there are massive gains to be made in that space if we partner with those who have some experience in that area and whom businesses trust. So that is another area where I think again it is a missed opportunity. Finally I come back to the notion of time—giving back businesses time to work on their business rather than on the compliance around their business. It is a massive issue. It is what we all talk about—the cutting of red tape and so on.There are layers to this though and the Government has decided to pick off a layer with its Better Public Services targets. It wants to reduce the amount of time that business spends basically providing the Government with information. That is not about doing things more efficiently for instance in the way that we might deal with provisional tax. It is not about the meaty stuff—it is simply about the form filling. That is not to diminish its importance but we could be doing so much more. The Government has set itself a low bar. For instance cutting 25 percent off the time it takes to register a company is probably going to save a company about 40 bucks. We could have been much more ambitious—and that is the point Labour is trying to make.The Business Number initiative—12 million bucks of investment—is actually in the very early stages going to produce very little reward for the small businesses that we are so heavily reliant on in our economy. So that is where I think we would express some disappointment. Why did we not go bigger? And on that note I just want to say that we are still waiting for the Government to produce its plans around provisional tax. Labour has already presented a very comprehensive plan on a pay-as-you-go regime. We are yet to see anything other than a couple of flow diagrams and lovely charts from that side of the House. I would love to hear in this environment whether or not the Government—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair.Debate interrupted.