LilBaP
I started in business before some of the people now lecturing me had started school. In several cases, before they were born. Winston has been telling that one for longer.
Then came marriage, a house, a share of a workshop and then the wage bill: not a seminar and not a secondment. I had a guarantee over the home, loans that did not care about my feelings and staff who expected to be paid on Monday, whether the customer had paid me or not. I still have that regular bill and some loans.
The house on the paper is a different one. In my spare time on Sundays I renovated the original and moved on. The average week was 70 hours and that did not include the renovations. I had two children and a wife who worked just as many hours, often without pay until more recently.
In that time I have faced multiple recessions and kept the staff and the business through every one of them. I got tired and I had sleepless nights. Not once did I stand up and say I had “nothing left in the tank”, the way a certain politician did. Not in the ’87 crash, not through the GFC and not during Covid.
I am not asking for a medal or a book launch. I want the bureaucracy out of the workshop and a fair deal for the people who turn up and do the work day in-day out.
I am writing this because the people who have never had to sign that paper keep designing the country for the people who have. They never left the classroom and they want to lecture the ones who know what the risk is.
Seventy-hour weeks for the first 20 years were not unusual for my wife and me. Today it is just 50, so I get time to write now. Poor you.
Yes, I get paid well for doing my job. If I do not do it, 24 other people do not get paid and the PAYE and GST take shrinks with them. That is before anyone counts the welfare bill that sits behind a quiet workshop. Most of our people have been with us 15 years or more. We are not the story. We are just one firm inside it.
New Zealand is a nation of small firms, not mid-sized factories pretending to be dairies, butchers and barbers. Stats NZ counted 617,330 enterprises in February 2025. Three in four have no paid staff. Officially, a small business comprises fewer than 20 people and about 97 per cent of enterprises qualify. Inland Revenue already calls GST turnover over $30 million, or 50-plus staff, a significant enterprise. The mass of the rest turns over under $1 million. Only a few per cent clear $10 million.
Company tax is on the profit, not the turnover. In the last Stats NZ survey, 23 per cent of businesses made a loss before tax. Among the firms turning over $100,000 to $250,000, more than a fifth made under $10,000 and nearly another fifth made under $50,000. The tax is taken out of that and so is the rates bill.
The left’s answer is a tax on the property and the land. Capital gains, a wealth tax and a percentage of the section, every year, whether the workshop made a dollar or not. Most of the people who would pay it are asset rich and cash poor. The house is the guarantee. The yard is the business. The bank account is what is left after wages, GST and the power bill. You cannot remit a section. If the firm made no profit, the tax bill still arrives and they want cash. The only way to find that cash is to borrow it, sell the thing or take it out of the packet that was meant for the fitter.
And that is before provisional tax. Inland Revenue does not wait to see what you made. It bills you for next year on what you made last year, plus five per cent, in case you did better. Three instalments. August, when the winter bills are in, January, when the customers have not paid since before Christmas and May, when you are still carrying both. If the year turns out worse, you have already sent the money. If it turns out you had no profit at all, you get some of it back later, without the interest you paid the bank to find it.
They want the cake, the icing and the pavlova, and they would like the deposit before the oven is turned on.
I have sat around a board table for 25 years. I know what a negotiation is – it is not a press conference. Sometimes you go with the spin. The facts and the vote count are what win at the end of the day. How many corporates can say most of their people have been there 15 years? Not many.
SMEs are at war on costs and they are the ones everyone forgets, especially government. Big business and government, between them, are flattening the competition that used to live in the middle. A mum-and-dad firm, or an SME with five to 30 staff, sees it on the power bill, the rates demand, the holiday loading, KiwiSaver and the price of the materials that arrived late or did not turn up.
The productive sector in this country is not the ministry and it is not the chain that can pass the increase on. It is the firm with the owner’s name on the van and the staff who have been there long enough to know which job pays the wages.
Government is spending too much and wastes too much. Rates are too much. They spend, they waste and the SME cannot vote it off the ledger. A council puts the increase on the rates bill, calls it a strategy and offers the business very little – except Three Waters under a new name. The workshop puts it on the quote and watches the customer go to the bigger corporate or the offshore yard. That is how competition dies in a country. Not in a Commerce Commission or Reserve Bank report. I have watched it for 42 years.
If you have only been in the classroom, or only read the paper or the screen, you do not have a counter-argument, but an ideology.
The answer they will not write down is a tax cut for the New Zealand SME, spent here. Company tax at 28 per cent is a toll on the money that would have bought the machine, taken the apprentice, or stayed in the packet of the fitter who has been loyal for a decade. A mum-and-dad firm does not remit a dividend to Sydney. It pays the local sparky, the local accountant, the restaurant, the pub and the Saturday crew. Cut the tax on that firm and the money does not leave our borders. It goes back into the community it was earned in.
The loyal employee should see a bit of it. The small business owner who has had the house on the line for decades already knows that. The relationship is the business.
Who would argue? Quite a few – they left university and never left the seminar room. They can price a wealth tax. They cannot price a shift or overtime. They talk about the tax take as if it were a tap and never ask why the tap is attached to a firm being told to produce more with dearer power, dearer money and a smaller box. Growth fills the ledger. Productivity is what makes the hour worth taxing. You do not get either by hiring another reviewer to explain why the first reviewer is essential.
That is the case for a finance minister who has been in the room where the money is counted. Craig Stobo is not a slogan. Investment banking, a funds business he helped build, a tax review for a finance minister and the funding agency he helped set up, which now lends to councils. He has a range of backgrounds, in business and in the system that taxes it. Nicola Willis has a different CV. So did Grant Robertson. So does the Greens’ finance hopeful, whose qualification for your wallet is that she would like it. Stobo is not crowned. He is simply not still in the classroom. Tried in the Beehive, no. Tested in the real world, yes. There’s a big difference in the CVs.
Support the firm that employs. Stop spending its money before it has earned it. Cut the tax on the SME and let the extra stay in New Zealand as incentive for production kit.
Thomas Sowell spent a career showing that the people who set the price have rarely paid it. He embarrassed more than one politician with the facts.
Put that into practice, then watch the tax take. It rises when the workshop is busy and the people who work there spend. Do not tax the overtime hour as if it were a crime. They will spend it anyway. GST will take its clip. The seminar class will never see it. They have never had a callus and they have never had to risk their house. Money is a merry-go-round: if you have not got it, it does not go round.
