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As I type it is the Monday after the 2023 elections in Aotearoa New Zealand. There are still 500,000 Special Votes to count, but as we know it will be a National / ACT coalition, possibly with NZ First as the third coalition partner.
Now I don’t know about you, but towards the end of the campaign I really started to turn off. Everyone seemed to be promising everything, blamed everyone else and the noise became a bit too much.
But now it’s over (or maybe it has just begun!), I thought I’d have a quick recap on what the three parties are saying they’ll do for their first 100 days that will have an impact on business. The info was grabbed off their respective websites.
- Restore 90-day employment trial periods for all businesses.
- Introduce legislation to remove the Auckland Regional Fuel Tax.
- Repeal Labour’s Ute Tax by 31 Dec 2023.
- Meet with councils and communities to establish regional requirements for recovery from Cyclone Gabrielle and other recent major flooding events.
- Make any additional orders in council needed to remove red tape to speed up cyclone and flood recovery efforts.
- Scrap the 39c tax rate and we should simplify to a two-rate tax system.
- Bring back 90-day trials.
- Get rid of so-called Fair Pay Agreements.
- Nullify changes to live animal export bans.
- Force a referendum on the Treaty of Waitangi
- Examine the feasibility of lifting the Adult Minimum Wage to at least $25 an hour by allowing businesses a tax concession to do so.
- Make the lowest tax bracket (currently $14,000 pa) of income tax-free no later than 1 April 2027.
- Remove the Accredited Employer Worker Visa and replace it with a Skills Shortage Visa and Labour Shortage Visa.
- Free apprenticeships for in-demand vocations by refunding fees and course costs after successful completion of each trade examination.
- Reinstate the Targeted Trade & Apprenticeship Fund so that we can assist employers to take on more Apprenticeships and Trade workers.
- Establish an ‘Essential Worker’ workforce planning mechanism to better plan for skill or labour shortages in the long term.
- We will end the abuse of immigrant workers working in slave-like conditions by ensuring those who are responsible for such maltreatment are seriously held to account.
Time will tell where we end up and what gets done, but as business owners know, we have become very adept over the last few years adapting to ever changing conditions and it will be the same now. If you want some thoughts on that I wrote an article How to Thrive Regardless of Election Outcomes
