Policy Comparison - The Economy

This comparison includes policy from the following parties: Mana, Greens, Labour, NZ First, Maori, National, ACT

Mana

• Pursue measures to create full employment with the dole abolished over time.
• Abolish GST.
• Introduce a tax on financial speculation, the “Hone Heke tax” (chopping down GST and income tax).
• Make the first $27,000 earned tax free and introduce a more progressive tax scale.
• Introduce a capital gains tax on all but the family home and Maori land.
• Collate all sources of income, including from shares, bonds and investments, to be taxed at an individual’s personal tax rate.
• Reintroduce inheritance tax to be paid on a progressive scale for inheritances valued at over $500,000.
• Regulate family trusts and other tax avoidance devices.
• Close corporate tax loopholes to make sure that all businesses, especially transnational companies, pay their full share of tax.
• Require all State-Owned Enterprises and Maori corporate entities to prioritise the employment of New Zealand residents or face significant financial penalties.
• Regulate loan sharks and restrict banks’ profit margins on loans, credit cards, and mortgages.
• Incentivise the processing of New Zealand resources in New Zealand so the value-added component benefits the country.
• Increase government investment in iwi and community housing construction projects in areas where there are shortages of low cost rental housing.
• Invest in a national biocrop/biodiesel initiative to create large-scale employment and energy independence from lands not suitable for food crops or farming, including Maori-owned lands.
• Invest in the research and development of clean energy systems.
• An affordable and comprehensive public transport system. The main cities will directly own and control their own public transport systems and be subsidised to charge a one dollar a day fare.
• Invest in the development of widespread, small scale sustainable energy generation such as solar, wind and micro-hydro by households and communities.
• Invest in the research and development of clean energy systems.
• Stop the privatisation of energy companies.
• Use the energy companies for the development and introduction of renewable energy technology that will be publicly owned and used for the public good.
• Ban deep sea oil exploration and drilling.
• Ban the growing of and experimentation with GE and GM crops.
• Build 20,000 more state houses within the next two years.
• Work towards a coal free Aotearoa within 20 years with just transition to other work for workers employed in coal mining.
• Promote and resource organic food production including hua parakore foods and extend current funding for the establishment of maara kai by whanau, marae and communities.

Greens

• Reduce the pressure on the exchange rate and the export sector by empowering the Reserve Bank with more tools to manage monetary and prudential policy beside the Official Cash Rate.
• Introduce a comprehensive tax on capital gains (excluding the family home).
• Require large commercial water users to pay for their water.
• Phase out current subsidies under the Emissions Trading Scheme.
• Review all current royalty and access charges, and remove any concessionary tax treatment for the petroleum and mining sectors.
• Establish a mining royalties reserve fund from the proceeds of increased mining royalties.
• Require Solid Energy to abandon plans to develop lignite and instead develop clean tech biofuels, wood carbon for steel making, and wood chips to replace coal in boilers.
• Investigate automatic enrolment in KiwiSaver (with an opt-out option) and a default ‘Public Option’ KiwiSaver provider allowing savers to invest in the New Zealand Superannuation Fund.
• A higher foreign ownership test and an outright ban on the sale of land to non-resident owners.
• Strengthen Kiwibank by allowing it to retain its earnings plus a further capital injection, if necessary.
• Implement new measures for defining ‘progress’ complementing growth in GDP.
• Extend home insulation to a further 200,000 homes.
• Build an additional 2,000 energy-efficient state and community houses.
• Stimulate planting of approximately 665,000 hectares of new forest in the next ten years by removing uncertainty in New Zealand’s response to climate change.
• Retain state ownership in the publicly owned energy companies and issue Green Energy Bonds.
• Use the publicly owned energy companies to become large-scale exporters of renewable energy technology by partnering with green energy entrepreneurs.
• Extend Nga Haerenga, the New Zealand Cycle Trail.
• Fund freshwater science research and explore economic opportunities from the research.
• Government procurement to recognise the wider economic benefits of buying New Zealand made.
• Green government procurement and certification processes to drive the rapid commercialisation of clean technologies and manufacturing processes.
• Introduce mandatory country of origin labelling for all consumer foodstuffs.
• Start-up capital fund of $100 million for clean technology SMEs and community enterprises.
• Increase Government funding of R&D by $1 billion over three years, prioritising clean technology industries.
• Establish a supermarket code of conduct and ombudsman to ensure fair competition in the supermarket industry.

Labour

• Introduce a 15 per cent capital gains tax (exempting the family home, personal and retirement assets).
• The first $5,000 of personal income a year tax free.
• A new top tax rate of 39 percent on income over $150,000.
• KiwiSaver compulsory from 2014, with 2 percent employee contribution and employer contributions raised to 7 percent over 9 years.
• Raise age of eligibility for New Zealand Superannuation from 65 to 67 between 2020 and 2032 at a rate of 2 months per year.
• Resume contributions to the New Zealand Superannuation Fund by 2015/16.
• GST off fresh fruit and vegetables.
• Ring-fence tax property losses so they can be written off against future property income but not other earnings.
• Address aspects of tax avoidance including a review of the taxation of trusts.
• Broaden the objectives of the Reserve Bank Act to include employment, economic prosperity, and the health of the export sector.
• Take pressure off the Official Cash Rate through complementary monetary and prudential policy tools.
• Encourage more aggressive Reserve Bank interventions to increase risks for currency speculators.
• Restore research and development tax credits at a 12.5 percent rate.
• Bring agriculture into the Emissions Trading Scheme in 2013 (two years earlier), starting with 10 percent of liable emissions phasing up over 12 years.
• Decline sales to an overseas purchaser of farm or forestry land unless they will also invest in significant further processing of related primary products and related jobs.
• Prevent overseas purchases of more than 25 percent of monopoly infrastructure.
• Ministerial discretion covering all overseas purchases of assets worth more than $100 million.
• Government procurement - require government departments and agencies to undertake a wider (economic) analysis of the impact of preferred providers on the domestic economy; require companies selling to the government to have an apprenticeship/internship programme; for contracts over $50m, require an Industry Participation Plan, showing how Kiwi companies can play a bigger role; encourage greater diversity in IT suppliers.
• Assist agricultural industry restructure where there is clear support from a majority of sector producers, and the formation of more industry co-operatives and organisations such as Zespri.
• Continue to work on opening up new markets through free trade agreements.
• Implement a resource rental for water.

New Zealand First

• Buy back land that is in foreign hands.
• Prevent anyone other than New Zealand citizens from buying freehold land; allow land already owned offshore to be sold back only to a New Zealand citizen.
• Prevent the sale of power stations, rivers and lakes to foreign hands.  Pledge to do everything possible not to sell off revenue generating assets like the power companies.
• Oppose Government support for companies that send jobs to other countries where wages are even lower than ours.  
• More trade training and incentives for apprenticeships.
• No free trade deals with low wage economies that work against us.
• Invest in the manufacturing sector to provide more jobs and apprenticeships.
• Make trades training a condition of receiving the unemployment benefit.
• Make first $10,000 of interest earned tax free.
• Government guaranteed inflation proof bonds, available only to New Zealand citizens resident in New Zealand.
• Give all Government banking business, national and municipal, to a locally owned bank.

Maori

• No tax on the first $25,000 earned.
• Exempt all food from GST.
• Remove tax from prescription medicines and investigate the viability of green prescriptions.
• Implement a financial transactions tax.
• Incentivise small businesses to grow by reducing unnecessary compliance.
• Invest in the rourou economy, a model of reciprocal and collective development based on food security.
• Expand maara kai so that we produce our own food, develop our own sustainability and live healthily. 
  Identify lands and resources to grow food for overseas and local markets; at the same time initiating new employment.
• Encourage the return to iwi trading of specialist kai including organic food production.
• Encourage whanau back to their whenua with a grant per Ahu Whenua and Whenua Tapu lands trust to investigate ways to generate revenue or create jobs from their land.
• Champion social lending, by bringing together iwi with the philanthropic sector and social lenders, and with Government support to create a collaborative network to help communities take responsibility, create real work and free up resources for whanau development.
• Eliminate the debt of collective ownership through local government ratings.
• Investigate establishing a Maori Monetary Fund; using the pooled funds of iwi, land trusts and incorporations so that Maori landowners can access finance for development.
• Seek to quicken the pace of settlement by supporting more cognate bills (to consider bills concurrently).
  Introduce legislation to encourage commercial banks to help meet the needs of borrowers in all sections of their communities (the Community Reinvestment Bill).
• Do not support asset sales.  If privatisation of state owned assets occurs it must be managed in a manner that is consistent with Te Tiriti o Waitangi.  The Maori Party will support iwi who wish to invest into state owned assets  as a means of retaining New Zealand ownership.
• Devolve state housing to Maori and Pasifika community groups for whanau to purchase their own homes, including a rent-to-own scheme.
• Encourage businesses to set up public/private partnerships where small/rural communities could benefit from industry; the businesses could receive tax incentives for creating jobs in low income/high unemployment areas.
• Insert a Treaty clause into the overseas investment legislation, to give iwi first right of refusal.
• Introduce a stronger Treaty clause into all Free Trade Agreements.
• Support iwi investments in geothermal and water power plants.
• Produce a Maori Economic Strategy looking at: growth models (Genuine Progress Index), Iwi infrastructure/ Maori economic consortiums, Maori investment capital funds/ Maori bank, Maori trademark and intellectual property protection, Maori/Iwi economic sector infrastructure, Maori representation on NZ Trade and Enterprise, initiate Government joint ventures with industry to buy deep sea fish processors and boats to avoid bringing in foreign contractors and achieve at least 5000 local jobs.
• Implement a renewable energy strategy to address our reliance on fossil fuels; to be developed in consultation with iwi; and which establishes a cross-party inquiry to investigate our response to the peak oil crisis.
• A moratorium on off-shore drilling to enable full consultation, particularly with mana whenua, on the appropriate mechanisms to ensure any adverse economic, environmental, social and cultural risks are managed.
• Implement the Crown Minerals (Effective and Meaningful Engagement with Iwi, Hapu, and Whanau) Amendment Bill to ensure full consultation and negotiation with mana whenua / mana moana before any mining contracts are let.
• Establish a priority investment fund for Maori Research and Development; promote collaboration between Maori entrepreneurs, scientists and innovators.
• Create and resource a real and virtual incubation hub for hapu and iwi to test the economic viability of new ideas on the local and global market and to mentor researchers.
• Introduce an inquiry to shut down loan sharks. 
   

National

• KiwiSaver auto-enrolment in 2014/15 subject to returning to surplus.
• Increase the minimum KiwiSaver contribution for individuals and employers to 3 per cent, halve the Member Tax Credit for employee contributions to 50 cents in the dollar, with an annual maximum of $521.40; employer contributions no longer to qualify for the Employer Superannuation Contribution Tax exemption.
• Sell part of the three electricity SOEs, Solid Energy and Air New Zealand, retaining 51 percent.
• Open ACC to private competition.
   

ACT

• Reduce government spending to the level it was at in 2005.
• Pass ACT’s Spending Cap Bill into law requiring government spending to increase only by the level of inflation and population growth.  
• Sell state assets such as power generation companies.
• Reduce taxes.
• Allow more mining when the economic benefits outweigh the environmental costs.
• Remove the agriculture sector from the ETS legislation.
• Totally suspend the remainder of the ETS unless and until the majority of our trading partners have caught up.
• Introduce road pricing as a way to reduce congestion and emissions.
• Introduce more market pricing of water.
• Support onshore and offshore mineral exploration.
• Encourage competition between public and private sector health providers.
• Target primary healthcare subsidies at those on the lowest incomes.