The select committee considering the bill to set up the referendum on the electoral system is due to report back to parliament next month. It is important that parliament provides voters with the best possible process for deciding on this important issue. Read more
The Business Roundtable welcomes the establishment of the Savings Working Group. We think there has been much mistaken analysis around savings over the past decade, especially by the Treasury, and that as a result, costly policies have been based on false premises. Read more
Holidays legislation remains complex and difficult to administer. It is far less problematical in many countries, including Australia. Read more
The Business Roundtable believes that New Zealand employment law has become unnecessarily complex and costly for both employers and employees. Contrary to common misconceptions, there is no inherent and systematic imbalance in bargaining power in the labour market. Read more
The Business Roundtable welcomes the establishment of the Welfare Working Group (WWG). Welfare dependency is an enormous problem that blights the lives of many people and has wider deleterious social and economic effects. Read more
Next month the 2025 Taskforce will be delivering its second report to the government. It is the most important taskforce reporting this year. Read more
Here’s a quick quiz. First question: Name a wealthy country where either party to an employment contract is free to terminate it at any time, provided they give notice. Read more
Last month Rebecca Macfie wrote an article in the Listener entitled “Our slack bosses”. In it she argued that “one of New Zealand’s dirtiest little secrets is that our businesses are not very well managed” and that “the poor quality of New Zealand managers is holding the country back”. Read more
The Business Roundtable has supported proposals for a Regulatory Responsibility Act from the time of its 2001 report Constraining Government Regulation. We made submissions to the select committee that considered the earlier Members Bill. Read more
The savings debate has not always been well-informed, and it’s good that the government has put together a well qualified group to advise it. The last official inquiry was part of the 2001 McLeod Tax Review. Read more
A goal is not a strategy concludes that New Zealand needs to focus on the internationalisation of high value, differentiated export sectors, prioritise labour productivity improvement efforts on these sectors, and reallocate resources from low to high productivity sectors.
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The Business Roundtable does not propose to individually address each of the 204 questions presented in the Discussion Paper but instead address five key issues arising from it. These include: The public policy framework for evaluating New Zealand's securities laws; the scope of the securities laws; the substantive duties of disclosure; the standards of liability under the securities laws; and the securities law reform process. Read more
John Maynard Keynes once wrote: “There is no harm in being sometimes wrong – especially if one is promptly found out.” Unfortunately for the world, the problems with Keynes’ ideas were not discovered promptly, and the lessons were too soon forgotten as Keynesian thinking enjoyed a revival with the recent global financial crisis and subsequent recession. At the time of the Great Depression in the 1930s, Keynes advocated fiscal stimulus – higher government spending or tax reductions – to boost total spending in the economy and put the unemployed back into jobs. Read more
In recent years Statistics NZ has done an excellent job of shedding light on the productivity performance of the economy. It made a further contribution with a release last month of productivity statistics at the industry level for the years 1978-2008. Read more
This submission focuses on making three high-level comments on the discussion paper: problem definition, the need for the law to protect reputable suppliers and customers alike, and the case for general and enduring statute law rather than for detailed law that can quickly become obsolescent. Read more