• Undertake an immediate review all legislation and regulations that impose coercive powers and administrative burdens on businesses to ensure the impact on business is minimised, consistent with the overall public interest.
• Conduct a biennial review of the Resource Management Act to ensure that is working as well as possible with regard to improving certainty, shortening timelines and reducing user costs.
• Encourage more New Zealanders to become entrepreneurs by promoting positive attitudes towards wealth creation and business success, including developing appropriate educational resources.
• Improve transport infrastructure, giving priority to areas where roading constraints are holding back economic growth and development.
• Support the retention of the Reserve Bank Act, the Fiscal Responsibility Act, the Public Finance Act.
• Retain the Ministry of Economic Development, but re-focus key elements of their work away from 'picking winners' and towards removing impediments to business.
• Re-instate the Prime Minister's Enterprise Council.
• Upgrade the BIZ website and hotline, so that businesses can make enquiries relating to any government department using a single point of contact, and have their queries answered by staff from these departments (e.g. Department of Labour, Occupational Health and Safety, IRD, ACC).
• Enshrine property rights in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990.

• Further lower income tax rates.
• Increase the tax rebate on donations from individuals to charitable organisations from $630 p.a. to $6,300 p.a. as a first step, with a comparable increase for businesses
• Reduce company tax to 30 cents in the dollar over the next three years
• Streamline the tax compliance and penalties regime
• Zero-rate local body rates for GST
• Develop, in consultation with business, a tax-free 'holiday' for new businesses.
• Establish a "commission" payment of 1% of the net value of GST paid by a registered person up to $200,000 GST per year.

• Support free trade and embrace free trade agreements and pacts where there is a reasonable opportunity for New Zealand to benefit.
• Explore the benefits of a common currency with Australia.
• Ensure that the government meets the full cost of measures arising from the international war on terrorism as a "defence of the realm" issue without new imposts on New Zealand-based exporters and importers.

This term we opposed Labour's employment law reforms such as the Health and Safety in Employment Act (which made employers liable for stress) and the Employment Relations Act (which allowed union members to receive 'bargaining bonuses').

United Future will promote a modern, flexible labour market that is stable. We will avoid wholesale changes to employment legislation every time a government changes on the grounds of ideology, and will instead amend current legislation to make it better. We will not indulge in the political ping-pong associated with this issue, but will instead seek to periodically review the law to ensure that it is workable.

• Increase workforce skills by getting more people into industry training. We will increase the number of modern apprenticeships to 10,000, and increase places with other Industry Training Organisations.
• Improve workplace literacy, since currently 20% of New Zealand adults have insufficient literacy skills to hold down a job.
• Review general grievance and dismissal procedures in the Employment Relations Act.
• Allow employers to take on new employees for a trial period of up to six months.
• Review employment law to ensure that it reflects the reality of workplace relations in small businesses.
• Establish a global online service that matches potential skilled migrants with job opportunities in New Zealand to help fill critical skill shortages.
• Ensure that advice and information is available to businesses to support them in hiring migrants to fill skill shortages.

• United Future supports the continuation of the 'no-fault' regime and mandatory workplace accident insurance, and supports competition in the provision of accident compensation services.

• Review the tax treatment of Research and Development, to generate incentives for an increase in private sector expenditure to 1.5% of GDP.

• United Future has consistently opposed New Zealand's participation in the Kyoto Protocol ahead of our major trading partners. We will push for New Zealand's withdrawal from the protocol in 2012 at the end of the 'first commitment period'. In the interim we will oppose Government measures, like the carbon tax, that seek to meet our Kyoto obligations in ways that will reduce New Zealand's international competitiveness.

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