> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://goodoil.news/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Shared Benefits and Personal Risk - URL: https://goodoil.news/shared-benefits-and-personal-risk/ - Published: 2026-10-19T20:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-19T19:59:59.000Z - Description: The Greens’ business policy does not account for the difference. - Author: Reproduced with permission - Tags: NZ Politics, Greens, Business **LilBaP** The Greens’ business policy reads like it was written by people who have never signed a weekly wage bill, never had to scrape to pay GST because a client paid late and never risked their own house. Their policy opens with “Honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi.” The policy states that “Te Tiriti and He Whakaputanga should actively shape the practices of all businesses operating in Aotearoa New Zealand, including their products, their practices, and their use of resources.” Let’s hope this only applies in Aotearoa. New Zealand already has laws. Businesses that break them should be prosecuted. The problem is not the absence of rules. The problem is that the rules that exist are not enforced evenly or quickly enough. Honest operators pay their PAYE, GST and income tax on time, while some don’t, or undercut them for years, while the IRD adds penalties and interest and then finally liquidates the company once the debt has ballooned into the hundreds of thousands. Creditors lose. Banks, staff and the IRD take their preferential slices. The competitors who stayed current are left with the damage. This is a massive, well-documented problem. Inland Revenue’s own reports show unpaid PAYE and GST run into the billions, with a large share already tied to companies in liquidation or bankruptcy. Penalties and interest have driven much of the growth in the debt book. IRD is one of the most frequent applicants for liquidation and has the power to move faster. It chooses not to. Missing one or two payment schedules is one thing. Missing three or more while still trading and undercutting compliant competitors is another. At that point the operation should stop until the directors can show they can catch up. Leaving them running for two years is not compassion; it is a subsidy for the dishonest at the expense of the honest. Judging by the rest of the Greens’ website, paying the tax is not enough anyway. Under Shared Benefits the policy declares: “The benefits derived from resource use should not be concentrated, but shared across society.” In plain English that means the gains from using your land, capital, equipment or any other input should not mainly stay with the people who organised them, paid for them, took the risk and did the extra work. They should be spread around to everyone else. It seems history and economics are not the Greens’ strong point. So you put your house up as the guarantee, work the extra hours on the GST returns and the PAYE, or getting that last order out, keep the doors open when custom is slow, and then you are told the ‘upside’ has to be shared with people who contributed none of the capital and none of the extra hours. What an incentive to start or stay in a business, especially for an SME. The corporates will love these policies. They have just been handed a way to thin out the competition in a few sentences. Who would have guessed – not people who have operated a real business in the real world. Once again the seminar class is making decisions without understanding the consequence. Shared benefits, but private risk. The business model only a committee of bureaucrats could invent. The rest of the document stays in the same classroom. “Appropriate Decision-Making” is defined as staff and business owners flourishing in a “collaborative, safe, accessible and respectful environment”. Fine words. Appropriate for whom, and judged by whom? The owner or the board of directors decides what is appropriate inside the laws of the country. Not a Green MP sitting on a park bench smelling the weed who suddenly feels they know what is good for every workplace. Health and safety, employment standards and anti-discrimination rules already exist. They are enforced, imperfectly, by the same IRD system that is slow on PAYE and GST non-compliance. Adding a vague requirement that every decision must satisfy an external definition of ‘collaborative’ and ‘respectful’ simply hands more power to people who have never had to make the call between paying the wages and paying the tax. Collaborative, safe and respectful, provided someone else is still signing the wage cheques. They do not address the actual decision that matters. Ecological wisdom, social responsibility, shared benefits, regulating the entire supply chain for environmental and social harm – all of it assumes the business is still standing after the IRD, the bank and the suppliers have been paid. The policy wants to reform market structures, penalise greenwashing, co-invest in skills and support the Māori economy. None of it starts with the basic requirement that a company that collects PAYE and GST actually remits them. The strategic goals make the direction clear. “Aotearoa will be in transition, creating green work and broad prosperity while moving Aotearoa away from carbon-dependent, extractive, and resource-intensive industries.” New Zealand translation: move away from the agriculture and horticulture we are actually good at, the sectors that pay the bills and feed people, and replace them with green work whose value is defined by the people writing the policy rather than by anyone willing to pay for it. “All people will be empowered to shape the systems that affect them through community engagement enabled by good evidence, co-design, and adequate resourcing.” In other words, more process, more committees, more people who do not own the business getting a say in how it runs, funded by the same taxpayers and customers who already keep the lights on. The actions listed are the usual seminar-room toolkit: reform market structures in industries dominated by a few large firms making “excessive” profits, regulate every business across its entire lifecycle for social and environmental responsibility and support relationships between Māori and non-Māori businesses. The agriculture policy makes the same bet more explicit. It aims for a sector that “upholds the mana of the land, people, and animals”, treats farm animals as sentient beings and drives a shift to regenerative practices through an Agricultural Standards Framework, a ban on palm kernel expeller, phase-downs of intensive practices and governance that implements Waitangi Tribunal recommendations. Put your hand up if you think many business owners will want to prepare their growth strategy based on Waitangi Tribunal recommendations – it’s hard enough dealing with local council. Farmers get low-interest loans and grants to transition. What they do not get is any recognition that the current system already feeds the country and generates the export revenue that helps pay for the hospitals and schools. The policy treats the sector that is actually good at what it does as a problem to be managed into something smaller and greener, rather than as the thing that keeps the rest of the economy solvent. The people writing these rules have almost no experience of the thing they want to redesign. Public profiles of the top 20 candidates show activism, public-sector roles, academia and planning. None list owning a commercial business that employs staff, or hands-on work in farming, horticulture or industry. Most NZ businesses are SMEs with 20 employees or less, including the boss. The people who write these policies have never had to choose between paying the IRD and paying the wages. Until they have, the document remains what it is: a seminar-room wish list that ignores the first rule of any business that lasts – you provide a product or service the people need or want, you do it well, the bills get paid or the business closes.