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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

Holidays legislation remains complex and difficult to administer. It is far less problematical in many countries, including Australia. 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

Writing in the Dominion Post in 2006, New Zealand Business Roundtable chairman Rob McLeod (Ngati Porou) reminded us that when the general unemployment rate had been over 8 percent there was widespread anxiety, yet Maori unemployment was still that high and was attracting little comment. 1 At that time, 88,500 or 29 percent of working-age Maori (18-64 years) were receiving a benefit. Read more

Representatives of two separate and distinct peoples signed the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. Maori immigrants from the Pacific region, who had lived in isolation on the islands now known as New Zealand for somewhere between 500 and 700 years, had been connected with the rest of the world in the decades following James Cook’s arrival in 1769.1 Their separation from the traders, religions, cultural achievements, military forces and diseases of other nations was inevitably going to end. Read more

It is interesting in a public policy sense to review the various roles that have been given to the Maori portfolio of government over the last 160 years. Maori Affairs is one of the oldest of all government portfolios. Read more

This paper explores the nature of iwi through time and is structured in three parts. First, the role and institutional limitations of a tribal collective are examined. Read more

The Bill aims to increase ACC payments to some categories of persons. It contains a regulatory impact statement (RIS) certified by the Department of Labour that purports to make the case for these proposals. Read more

This paper is intended as an introduction to the topic of public policy. Contributing to the development of good public policies for New Zealand is central to the mission of the New Zealand Business Roundtable. Read more

Proponents of income redistribution generally see it as the easy solution to poverty and inequality, and believe all that is needed is the political will to act. But, as Mark Harrison points out in this empirical study of the effects of the income redistribution, they rarely question how effective it is. Read more