Paul Swain: Government focus turns to home enterprise

By PAUL SWAIN*

Running a small business is hard work, but rewarding. Choosing to run a business from home allows people to spend more time with their families and less time on the bus, train or motorway.

As technology improves and people seek out more balanced lifestyles, we are seeing an expansion of home businesses. Already there are about 200,000 home business operators in New Zealand and the Government wants to do all it can to help them.

While running a business from home presents its own special challenges, many of the issues facing home businesses are similar to those facing small businesses generally.

This term, small business is a major focus for the Government.

Many portfolio areas affect small businesses so we are taking a co-ordinated approach. A group of ministers comprising Finance Minister Michael Cullen, Economic Development Minister Jim Anderton, Commerce Minister Lianne Dalziel, Associate Minister of Commerce and Small Business John Tamihere and myself will drive the small-business programme over the next three years.

As part of our E-Government strategy, government departments are gradually offering more services electronically. Being able to interact with the Government online has the potential to save home businesses, especially those in isolated areas, a lot of time and money.

As I am also Minister for Information Technology this is a special interest of mine.

Last month Inland Revenue unveiled its e-enablement programme, setting out a timetable to offer more of its services electronically.

Filing GST returns via the internet will be especially beneficial to home businesses and this will be possible for all taxpayers early next year.

The focus will then move to electronic filing of income and fringe benefit tax returns.

Simplifying the tax system for small businesses is a priority. We now have 10 tax simplification initiatives in bills before Parliament, which will soon become law. Those initiatives include increasing the number of taxpayers who do not have to file tax returns.

There's a large amount of government advice and assistance available to small and home businesses. Industry NZ provides a range of services under the BIZ brand. These include: BIZinfo, a free business information referral and help service available via phone or internet; BIZtraining, which runs seminars and workshops on business planning, compliance, marketing, finance, e-commerce and managing resources; and the BIZenterprise awards, which give grants of up to $20,000 for well-defined commercially viable business projects.

To improve access to this business information, the Government announced in the Budget that it was spending $562,000 to develop a one-stop internet portal. This is a response to the recommendation of the Ministerial Panel on Business Compliance Costs to establish a single site from which businesses could access and/or search for business and regulatory information.

This portal should be available early next year.

Being able to run a business from home is closely tied to the availability of cost-efficient technology.

For many home businesses high-speed internet is vital. While the CBDs of our major cities are well catered for in terms of telecommunications infrastructure, this is not the case in outlying suburbs and rural New Zealand. The Government's broadband project, announced in the Budget, is aimed at remedying this situation.

We have allocated tens of millions of dollars to ensure that most New Zealand schools and communities have access to two-way, high-speed internet by the end of 2003 and the remainder by 2004.

Small/home business growth is critical to the New Zealand economy.

The Government wants to play its part in making sure this growth occurs as quickly as possible.

*Paul Swain is Small Business Minister