Hudson Brett: New Zealand Business Number Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHudson Brett: New Zealand Business Number Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 30 March 2016. Volume:712;Page:10031. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]BRETT HUDSON (National): Seeing as we are talking on the purposes and the intentions of this bill I will just respond to Dr Clark’s contribution because I think it highlights a couple of very important pieces. One is firstly that both his amendment to the amendment and Miss Bond’s amendment highlight the fact that they do not actually understand the technology systems that are going to have to be upgraded and changed to actually give effect to a New Zealand Business Number. The other thing is that by trying to do it within 2 years what he is saying is simply that the Government should be throwing money across every Government agency in a really really short period of time to do something.One of the things the New Zealand Government has done an excellent job of is delivering better public services for the same or less public expenditure. What Labour is showing just as it did with its ridiculous plan for a universal basic income is just to say “Let’s spray money we don’t have at a perceived problem” in the idea that you can just fire-hose it down and create a new outcome. Well it simply will not work for them. So what Labour is saying is: “We’ll just throw a whole lot of money we don’t have to get agencies to derail their current IT programmes of work and to focus on this one thing right now to do this tomorrow.” Whereas what a sensible approach would say is that we have a lot of Government agencies and in order to interface with a single New Zealand Business Number system or an interface they are going to have to make changes to their applications—not one but probably several and in some cases many—to be able to pass that information backward and forward and to be able to exchange it in a way that as the member says will actually work.They can do all that now instead of other work that is already on their IT programme or they can do what a sensible business would do which is they would actually integrate it as part of their programme of change. You see businesses including Government agencies are not static things particularly their technology systems. They do not just stay at one place in one shape for all time. They have change programmes already. Dr Clark just says they should completely derail them and move on to something new. It is quite frankly a ridiculous proposition and just shows the Labour Opposition is still not fit to govern.The other point that Labour has made quite incessantly through the readings and the select committee deliberations on this bill is why do we not just pick one number that an agency already uses. Anyone who perhaps has any experience of an IT system or two would realise that if they were to do that—and they could pick any particular agency’s identifier—because you are looking at an identifier to be used by all agencies it would constrain what that one agency could do with what was originally its identifier; for instance the Inland Revenue Department (IRD) with the use of the IRD number.It is an utterance an idea that comes from a party that has no fundamental understanding of technology. It is a ridiculous proposition and one that would derail perhaps the IRD’s business operations and its own transformation project all to try to deliver something that is not actually necessary.You see one of the great things about technology in the last 25 years is a thing called integration and interoperability—the idea that systems and applications can message between each other that they can communicate messages actions and information between each other. You do not need to change every one of them to be some homogenous identical thing.It is a smart IT project to create this unique New Zealand Business Number in a separate central repository and interface those other systems to it. To somehow break that by using one feature of one of those agencies’ systems and then make all of the others fit into that is simply 30-year-old-technology thinking.If we really want to defeat the purpose of this bill if we really want to make it less efficient for businesses or agencies to interact with each other we would support the Opposition members’ amendments. But nothing could be worse for this bill than to follow the amendments that Ms Bond and Dr Clark have tried to put into the House. Thank you.