Chris Baillie
ACT Small Business spokesperson
ACT would cut through the red tape that pushes costs and compliance on to hardworking New Zealanders by tackling the four horsemen of bad regulation.
Successive governments have allowed the bureaucracy of the Zero Carbon Act, the Health and Safety at Work Act, the Employment Relations Act, and the Resource Management Act to get out of control.
Kiwis are naturally innovative and use our number 8 wire mentality to solve problems. Thanks to successive governments interfering in our lives, we now have to call a number 8 wire specialist for the install, fill out 300 pages of paperwork, have it signed off by health and safety inspectors, get council approval, and ensure it’s carbon neutral.
The RMA makes it harder to build homes, fuelling our housing shortage. The Employment Relations Act favours unions over workers and makes it harder to create jobs. New Zealanders are not made safer but do have more red tape because of the Health and Safety at Work Act. The Zero Carbon Act has empowered a plan for a high-cost, state-planned economy.
The system isn’t working. It’s taking control and decisions away from ordinary New Zealanders and making it harder to live and work in this country.
ACT has a plan to make life easier.
We would scrap the Zero Carbon Act completely. ACT opposed the legislation from the get-go because it moves control away from ordinary New Zealanders and fails to provide a sensible plan for reducing carbon emissions.
The one useful thing the Act has done is shown that New Zealand already reduces emissions through the ETS in an efficient way. We do not need this piece of legislation.
ACT would also rebalance the Employment Relations Act to put decisions back in the hands of employees and employers, not unions.
We would add common sense changes to the Health and Safety at Work Act, so it improves incentives for safe behaviour and reduces box-ticking compliance.
We would overhaul the RMA to recognise property rights and the need to develop and split environmental management into a separate Act.
Any new regulation would need to meet high standards to prove that the regulation was needed, the costs were justified, and it proved a clear benefit as set out in David Seymour’s Regulatory Standards Bill currently before Parliament.
ACT’s plan would put more control back in the hands of middle New Zealand and empower them to live their best and most fulfilling lives.
The only people who lose from these proposals is the Wellington bureaucracy.”
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