Government Launches Search Tool to Help Businesses Locate Its Own $400 Million

The Government has upgraded the Funding Explorer on business.govt.nz, a searchable tool that gathers 15 funding opportunities from seven government agencies into one place. The Government puts about $400 million a year into business grants, funds and equity schemes. Small Business and Manufacturing Minister Cameron Brewer says business owners are busy people who should not have to spend hours trawling through separate websites working out what they might be eligible for.

He is right, and the remedy is a search box. The $400 million was always there. The seven agencies were always there. The 15 schemes were always there. What was missing was any single place where a manufacturer could discover that the money existed at all, which is a fair statement of the problem and an unflattering one for whoever built it in the first place.

Advancing Manufacturing Aotearoa chief executive Catherine Lye welcomed it, noting manufacturers often do not know what support is available. The site logged 6.2 million interactions over the past year with 91 percent user satisfaction, so the platform is clearly doing its job. Nothing about the funding itself has changed. Fifteen schemes, seven agencies, one search bar, and a government that has built a search engine to find its own money.