Companies Office Registers Funding Validation Bill

I move, That the Companies Office Registers Funding Validation Bill be now read a second time.

As I’ve said already in the House during the first reading, this bill validates the past collection and use of fees collected by the Companies Office on all of the 16 registers it maintains. It seeks to rectify past issues of cross-subsidisation within the Companies Office ahead of the implementation of a new funding system. It allows the Companies Office to spend its existing surplus to fund shortfalls while we put the longer-term regime in place.

The legislative framework for the new funding system is the forward-looking Companies (Levies) Amendment Bill—look out for that one coming around the House. I hope it will be introduced to the House before too long. This bill is the first step in the Government’s legislative package to modernise Companies Office funding, and with that I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. What a privilege being the second speaker on a bill. This is certainly a slightly unusual situation. This is like the Diet Coke version of lawmaking.

I thank the Minister for, at the very least, providing the House with a legislative statement in both readings so far. I’ll note that this is an omnibus bill. There’s a lot of aggregation being made in the law, in a heartbeat. Note we’ll have no submissions from the stakeholders, so we can’t particularly terse out the unintended consequences in advance.

We just have to hope that the Government has done its homework with this one and that the regulations work as expected. The fact that they’re doing this in Budget week, in the traditional urgency segment, it kind of—the reasons given for using urgency were not overly compelling, but at least it’s something that has cross-party support.

The Minister said New Zealand wants it to be a fair, transparent, and easy place to do business. In the global context, that’s quite true. You know, New Zealand is a relatively easy place to start a business. Those of us that have done that before know that.

But lawmaking like this can cause a bit of uncertainty, sometimes, with the levies that were mentioned in the forthcoming bill. You know, when we’re talking about enabling—like this bill does—a future unknown law, we really should ensure that the first one goes through a proper process, not just the second one.

But in any case, with some reservations—certainly some reservations about the process and this, frankly, very unusual and strange way of making laws on a Friday afternoon—we are going to support the bill.

Our next call is a remote call. The question is that the motion be agreed to. In going to the remote call, I call Dr Emily Henderson—I suspect, the first of three doctors I’d want to visit.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker, again, and any visit from you is, of course, a welcome one, especially in this House. I rise to speak in support of this Companies Office Registers Funding Validation Bill again. The Companies Office fulfils a vital function in New Zealand life, providing the authoritative source of information about New Zealand businesses, and it is absolutely vital we keep it running. However, under current legislation, each individual register is supposed to be funded from fees charged to users of that register. Some run at a surplus, others run short, and in those case, the Companies Office has, understandably, been applying the excess funds from one to the support of the other. This in fact ultra vires the legislation, and thus we gather today to make this small but vital fix. I commend this bill to the House.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

I declare the House in committee for consideration of the Companies Office Registers Funding Validation Bill.

In Committee