Category: ACT Party

Source: ACT Party

Welcoming the Government’s decision to replace the Defence Force’s ageing maritime helicopters, ACT Leader David Seymour says:

“At a time of growing global uncertainty, it’s great to see tangible investment in our national security. ACT has long campaigned for a serious commitment to defence, and now, with ACT in Government, that’s becoming a reality.

“We’re making sure New Zealand is taken seriously. Upgrading our capabilities shows our allies that we’re ready to pull our weight and be a credible contributor to regional and global security. These new helicopters will enhance our ability to deter threats and respond to crises – while reinforcing that we’re a partner worth defending.

“Of course, equipment is only half the equation. Our Defence Force is powered by the brave men and women who serve in uniform. We’re backing them too with increased investment so they can sail, fly, patrol and train more often, along with funding boosts for personal allowances and critical upgrades to accomodation and more.

“After years of underfunding, MIQ deployment, and attrition, this is about giving our service personnel the respect, and resources, they deserve.

“With more to come from the Government’s $12 billion commitment to defence and national security, ACT will be fighting to ensure this momentum continues. The first duty of any government is to keep its people safe. The time for complacency is over.”

Source: ACT Party

Speech to Tauranga Business Chamber: The Case For a Smaller, Focused Executive

Intro

The term of Government is nearing half time, when we should be reviewing the first half and planning the second.

I believe the Government can point to significant progress, and this is reflected in us maintaining a lead in the polls despite tough economic times.

Inflation and interest rates have been beaten back. Government doesn’t control every factor influencing them, but we can control our own spending. The Government’s commitment to spend less, and maintaining that discipline over four years has helped win the war on inflation and interest rates. This week’s announcement that we will come in $1.1 billion under the allowance this year is a very positive development.

The priority in crime has switched from criminals to victims. There is nothing wrong with rehabilitating criminals to reduce crime, and save money on imprisonment. There is a big problem, however, with seeing the gangs as partners, a lower prison muster as a goal in itself, and spending more on pre-sentencing reports for convicted criminals than victim support.

Across the board we have made innocent people the priority and criminals the target. Gangs are no longer partners to the Government, Three Strikes is back, and the expansion of prisoner rights will be reversed, to name just a few. As a result, violent crime is falling and we’re not finished yet.

In healthcare the prescription is very simple and very complex all at once. What we need to do is stabilise years of restructuring and chaos so that New Zealanders get value for money. The health budget is up 67 per cent, from $18 billion in 2019 to $30 billion six years later. The complex part is unblocking the myriad issues that make the system so frustratingly unproductive.

Finally the Government has taken many steps to restore our country’s commitment to liberal democracy. The liberal part means all people are equal, regardless of their immutable characteristics. The democratic part means each person gets an equal say on the wielding of political power, or one person, one vote. These are uneasy conversations, but essential ones. We have problems to solve and they’re easier solved together as a people united by our common humanity than divided by identity politics.

Half time talk

Any good half time team talk, though, should be warts and all. Have we done well? I claim we have. Is it time to declare victory? Far too early? Could we do better? Absolutely, and here’s one way we might do better in the future.

I often hear the change is too slow. People look at Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Javier Milei and ask, why don’t you just change things faster like them?

Part of the reason that we are not a dictatorship, with all the power in one office. That’s a good thing. Power in New Zealand rests in many institutions. There are boards, like the board of Pharmac. There are councils, such as in universities. There are individuals’ statutory positions, such as the privacy commissioner. All of these are there thanks to parliamentary laws, which take time to change. Unless you’re Che Guevara, you probably want a stable, thoughtful political system that consults people affected by its changes and governs by consent.

On the other hand, it’s time to start planning play even better in the future. Today I’d like to float an idea about how we could transform government management and get better results for the people who pay for it.

The suggestion I’m making changes the way we think about government. At the moment it’s supposed to be something that can solve all your problems – although the track record is not good.

Like any business, it needs to be an organisation focused on running itself well first. It is something that a determined manager would do as the first order of business, getting the right people in the right seats on the bus before setting off on the journey, so to speak.

It’s also about tackling head on the lingering feeling in New Zealand of paralysis by analysis, that NOTHING GETS DONE, because there’s too much hui and not enough dui. Everyone is always consulting someone to make sure nobody’s feelings would be hurt if, hypothetically, anybody ever actually did anything.

Our current set up of government, that has evolved over the past 25 years, seems to be an example of our national paralysis.

The idea I’m about to share may seem a little like shuffling deckchairs, but it’s more like pass the parcel, because it involves seriously reducing the number of seats. It goes like this.

Untangling Spaghetti

Here’s a simple question. Each government minister has specific areas of responsibility assigned to them called portfolios. How many ministerial portfolios do you think New Zealand has today? 40? 60?

Well, don’t feel too bad if you’re well off the mark. The truth is, most people wouldn’t know. And frankly, most wouldn’t believe it if I told them.

We currently have 82 ministerial portfolios. Yes, you heard that right. Eighty-two.

Those 82 portfolios are held by 28 ministers. And under them, we have 41 separate government departments. That’s a big, complicated bureaucratic beast. It’s hungry for taxpayer money and it’s paid for by you.

Let’s put this in perspective.

Ireland, with roughly five million people, has a constitutional maximum of 15 Ministers managing 18 portfolios.

And yet, somehow, the Irish have managed to keep the lights on, run hospitals, fund schools, maintain roads, and defend their borders without 82 portfolios, 28 ministers, or 41 government departments.

In fact, they’ve done much better than us on most measures this century. That’s not in spite of having simpler government, I suspect it’s because they have it.

If we look further abroad, the comparison is even more stark.

South Korea, with a population of 52 million, has 18 Ministers. The United Kingdom, with 67 million people, has around 22. The United States, with over 330 million citizens, runs a Cabinet of about 25.

By comparison, New Zealand’s executive looks bloated.

Now I recognise these countries have different political systems. But that doesn’t mean we should accept inefficiency as inevitable. It certainly doesn’t mean we should celebrate it.

Something has to change. That means fewer portfolios, fewer ministers, and fewer departments. Sure, that might put me and a few of my colleagues out of a job. But if that’s the price of having a government that delivers core services efficiently and gives taxpayers real value for money, then it’s worth it.

It wasn’t always this way.

New Zealand once had a lean cabinet. Sixteen ministers all sat at the same table. Each responsible for one or two departments. You were the Minister of Police. That was your job. Everyone knew who was accountable.

Then came the 1990s and the dawn of MMP.

Suddenly, governments needed to bring in coalition partners. The idea of ministers outside cabinet was invented. These were people with the title but not the seat at the table. Four of those ministers were created initially. That brought the total number to 20.

A few years later, Helen Clark came along and took things further. Her government had 20 cabinet ministers and eight Ministers outside cabinet. 28 in total. And it’s stayed around that number ever since.

With such a large executive, coordinating work programmes and communicating between ministers inside and outside cabinet is difficult, and as a result governments run the risk of drifting.

Some departments now report to a dozen ministers or more.

Officials at MBIE report to 19 different ministers. When you have 19 ministers responsible for one department, the department itself becomes the most powerful player in the room. Bureaucrats face ministers with competing priorities, unclear mandates, and often little subject matter expertise. The result? Nothing happens. Or worse, everything happens, badly. There’s a wonderful line in a report by the New Zealand Initiative: “Confusion empowers the bureaucracy.”

The size of the executive might have stabilised, but the number of portfolios has exploded.

It used to be roughly a one-to-one equation between a minister and a department. Now ministers hold three or four portfolios each.

There are portfolios without a specific department, including Racing, Hospitality, Auckland, the South Island, Hunting and Fishing, the Voluntary Sector, and Space, just to name a few of the 82 portfolios that now exist. We have to ask ourselves, do we need a Government Minister overseeing each of these areas?

I’m not saying those aren’t important communities. What I am saying is that creating a portfolio or a department named after the community is completely different from running a real department to deliver a service. It’s not a substitute for good policy. It’s not proof of delivery.

It is an easy political gesture though. The cynics among us would say it’s symbolism. Governments want to show they care about an issue, so they create a portfolio to match. A Minister gets a title, and voters are told in the most obvious way possible that it is a priority.

Take the Child Poverty Reduction portfolio under the Ardern Government. It came after Jacinda Ardern made child poverty her raison d’être. Creating the portfolio was a way to show she meant business. But five years later, has the creation of the portfolio improved the rate of child poverty? Were children better off because of a new Minister for Child Poverty Reduction?

We all know the answer. Child poverty rates plateaued and New Zealand is still grappling with the same problems. At the time, only ACT had the courage to say this and to vote against the Child Poverty Reduction Act, because we knew it was window dressing.

I’m proud to be part of a government that believes the path out of poverty isn’t paved by political slogans but better school attendance and achievement, making it easier to develop resources and build homes, getting more investment into New Zealand, and ending open-ended welfare in favour of mutual obligation.

Deep down I think we all know that the only true path out of poverty is building the individual’s capacity to provide for themselves and their family. There are no examples of anyone escaping poverty though dependence on their fellow citizens.

I know that if I start talking about specific ministries, people will start talking about the examples and the politics of who survives and who is cancelled and so on. Let me just say that I’ve been through the current list and I believe we could easily get to 30 departments.

Now, some people might be thinking, hang on, didn’t you just create the Ministry for Regulation? Yes, I did. And here’s why it matters.

Because government doesn’t just spend and tax. It also regulates. It restricts what people can do with their property. It dictates what can be built, where, how, and by whom. In fact, everything government does is either tax your money or put rules on the property it hasn’t taxed yet. That’s it. Try to think of something government does that isn’t either a) taxing and spending your money or b) making rules about what you can do with your remaining property.

And yet, until now, there was no central department looking at the cumulative effect of regulation. No one asking whether the rules were achieving their goals or just stacking up and strangling productivity in red tape.

The Ministry for Regulation is one of just five central agencies in government. It was created not to grow bureaucracy, but to hold the bureaucracy accountable.

We don’t need more Ministers, we need fewer. But we also need smarter government. And that means focusing on what matters

Portfolios shouldn’t be handed out like participation trophies. There’s no benefit to having ministers juggling three or four unrelated jobs and doing none of them well.

Take Nanaia Mahuta. She was Minister for Foreign Affairs and Local Government. Two large, complex areas. It’s not uncommon for a Minister to fail at one of their major portfolios when performing this juggling act. She managed to be equally bad at both.

Ministers should have a remit over a single, clearly defined, policy area. Stretching ministers across multiple, disparate areas of complex policy empowers the bureaucracy because there will always be a knowledge gap where ministers are overly dependent on the bureaucrats. This situation empowers the Wellington bureaucracy.

That’s how they get away with spending your taxes with little accountability. Take Labour’s health restructure as an example. There’s no doubt our health system needed change, it clearly still does, and this government is working hard to address this. However, the change it needed was never to create more enormous, tax-absorbing bureaucracies with little explanation of how they would change things for you. That’s what Labour delivered.

There was never any evidence that the creation of the Māori Health Authority and Health NZ was going to have any positive impact. Labour politicians simply knew that health was a big issue and Māori health in particular has appalling statistics.

Progress would be figuring out the underlying causes and addressing them with evidence-based policy, like this Government has done with its changes to bowel screening ages. However, it was easier to publicise a glitzy administrative reform that cost billions. It’s decisions like this that mean our next budget is going to be so tight, and getting a doctor’s appointment is still just as difficult as it was before the change.

They burnt billions of dollars shuffling deck chairs, restructuring, and creating the divisive and ineffective Māori Health Authority. We even got to the point where a call to Healthline, New Zealand’s primary telehealth service, began by asking patients’ ethnicity. A voice would say, “If you are Māori and would like to speak to a Māori clinician, please press 1. Alternatively, please stay on the line with Healthline who will triage your call.”

I’m pleased our government is now prioritising workforce training, development, and retention. It doesn’t grab as many headlines, but it’s more likely to provide another GP down the road, train another mental health nurse, or deliver a midwife to rural New Zealand. We’re unwinding the divisive race-based categorising that was so prevalent. The goal must be to treat people first, as human beings, and to not make assumptions of people based on their background.

You could say that the health reforms were just bad policy by Wellington’s prospective Mayor Andrew Little, who despite that disaster is somehow an improvement on the current Wellington Mayor.

But I’d say that the size of the bureaucracy was as much the culprit for the health reforms. They write the memos. They draft the advice. When a minister isn’t providing leadership, they decide the pace and direction of reform, if reform happens at all. When no one is clearly responsible, the only people left standing are the officials. Because if you want to know why it’s so hard to shrink government, why red tape keeps piling up, and why reform feels impossible it’s because no one is really in charge and the bureaucracy is too big to pull itself into line.

That’s not how a democratic system should function.

Now, for the first time, ACT is at the centre of government.

We didn’t set the table, but we’re sitting at it. If we could set it, there would be a lot fewer placemats.

Here’s how we’d do it:

• Only 20 Ministers, with no ministers outside cabinet
• No associate ministers, except in finance
• Abolish ‘portfolios’, there’s either a department or there’s not
• Reduce the number of departments to 30 by merging them and removing low-value functions
• Ensure each department is overseen by only one minister
• Up to eight under-secretaries supporting the busiest ministers, effectively a training ground for future cabinet ministers

Some simple rules to improve the way government works.

This wouldn’t just act as a structural reform, but as a philosophical one.

It’s a shift away from the idea that the government exists to solve every problem by creating a minister named after it. And towards a view that the government’s job is to manage your money responsibly and provide core public services that allow you to go about your life, respecting your property rights

That’s it. That’s enough.

I think we could easily cut the number of portfolios in half, while reducing the number of ministers by eight. Bringing cabinet back to a scale that is manageable, focused, and accountable.

New Zealanders deserve better than bloated bureaucracy and meaningless titles. They deserve a government that respects them enough to be efficient.

New Zealanders don’t need 82 portfolios to live better lives. They just need a government that does its job, and then gets out of their way.

I’m looking forward to the second half, and floating more ideas like this as we plan for a better tomorrow.

Thank you.

Source: ACT Party

Responding to the results of Tauranga’s Te Awanui Māori Ward by-election, Tauranga-based ACT MP Cameron Luxton says:

“Here’s another reason to ditch Māori council wards:

“In Tauranga’s Māori ward by-election this week, less than 12% of eligible voters turned out. It means we have a new councillor elected with just 464 first-preference votes.

“For comparison, in general ward by elections, 22% turned out in Hamilton East last year, and 42% in Ashburton in 2023.

“When we have Māori ward councillors with full decision-making powers, elected by just a handful of voters, it makes a joke of local democracy. It means some people’s votes are more powerful than others.

“In Tauranga the situation is especially absurd, because in addition to Māori ward councillors, we also have unelected mana whenua representatives on Council committees.

“Thankfully ACT has brought back referendums on Māori wards. But councils shouldn’t be introducing them in the first place. Local issues of rates and roads can be addressed without dividing the community by race. In fact, the council could heed the message of this week’s by-election turnout, and simply take the option we’ve given them to remove the race-based ward without even having to go through a referendum process.

“Outside of Tauranga, ACT is standing candidates in this year’s local elections, and ACT councillors will fight for equal rights, democracy, and the principle of ‘one person, one vote’. I just wish we had more of these values at the table in Tauranga.”

Source: ACT Party

“We are now less than one year away from a potential mass extinction event for small incorporated societies across New Zealand,” warns ACT MP Laura McClure, who has a bill in Parliament’s ballot to address the issue.

With the Incorporated Societies Act 2022 set to require all existing societies to re-register under a new regime by April next year, McClure is raising the alarm again that it will impose unsustainable costs on many grassroots small societies.

RNZ has reported that around 18,000 incorporated societies are yet to re-register under the new legislation.

“Small societies are telling me that they lack the expertise to deal with the upcoming regime’s unworkable rules. Stamp collecting groups and running clubs can’t necessarily afford the thousands of dollars in financial and legal advice to stay above board,” says McClure.

“These are not large societies. These are local clubs and community associations that have operated successfully, providing valuable services to the community, and now they face the real risk of folding entirely.

“I have lodged a member’s bill that would define small societies, and effectively carve them out from the most onerous new liabilities and financial reporting requirements. This week I have written to the new Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister to urge that he either implement my suggested changes to legislation, or defer the looming compliance deadline.

“It is not too late to act, but the clock is ticking.”

Laura McClure’s Incorporated Societies (Small Societies) Amendment Bill can be found here.

Her letter to the Minister can be found here.

Source: ACT Party

ACT’s Education spokesperson Laura McClure has welcomed the Government’s move to embed financial education into the school curriculum for Years 1 to 10, saying it will make a real difference – especially for disadvantaged students.

“Every young Kiwi should leave school equipped to navigate a market economy. Knowing how to earn, save, budget, and invest is an essential part of being successful in a civilised society,” says McClure.

“For students who don’t learn these lessons at home, financial education can be life-changing. It gives every student, no matter their background, a better footing to succeed later in life.

“These curriculum changes are part of a broader shift to refocus education on real-world skills instead of ideology. I’m proud to be part of a Government that is taking politics out of the classroom and putting practical skills back in.

“Financial literacy is a great equaliser. The left should welcome a reform that lifts disadvantaged students up, rather than dragging everyone else down.”

Source: ACT Party

The Haps

Quiet? MPs are having a break from Parliament and the country is having a break from MPs thanks to a three-week Parliament recess. The Government announced $68.5 million of repayable loans to people building electric vehicle chargers. Free Press readers will be outraged by that, but under ACT’s coalition agreement it has come down from National’s version: $257 million of grants. Such are the victories under MMP. Meanwhile the Ministry for Regulation started a clean out of red tape from the $6 billion Early Childhood sector, following Brooke van Velden’s Health and Safety overhaul. Beside the resource management reforms at the start of the month, it’s been a good April for ACT and freedom.

The Real Culture War

We are taken with David Seymour’s speech over the Parliamentary recess. In it, Seymour says the real culture war is not about identity or bathrooms, but pioneers vs tall poppy choppers.

Of course, you should be free to point out the very basic fact of a person’s biological sex at birth. The law should be able to use sex at birth as an identifier, when it matters, such as which prison someone goes to. All of that is correct, but only a fraction of a per cent of people claim anything different. The overwhelming majority people are never close to being harmed in real life by them doing so.

The real culture war affects all of us, every day. It’s the war between our pioneering spirit and tall poppy syndrome. We, or our ancestors, all made brave voyages to these isolated islands. These were people with real courage who wanted better through their own efforts.

Then, somewhere along the way, we ended up with one out of every six working-aged people on welfare. Some days half the children don’t show up to their school. We have one of the largest diasporas of people who left a country.

No good deed goes unpunished. Landlords, small business owners, licensed firearm owners, farmers. Under Labour/NZ First/Green they were always just a patronising lecture and one more expensive regulation away from salvation. Now there is some relief for those long-suffering groups, but the culture carries on. Look out if you spent your life building up an owner-operated supermarket, or work at a bank.

It’s easy to blame politicians, but in a democracy they ultimately reflect the culture. The treatment of Zuru lately is a classic.

The toy and home supply company founded by three Kiwis just won Walmart supplier of the year. Walmart is the thirteenth largest company in the world, and by far the largest retailer. It’s difficult to overstate how big this business achievement is. The company put out a press release, which got zero coverage from the New Zealand media. One of the founders building a helipad in Herne Bay gets enough clicks to keep the Herald in business month after month.

The end result is written in our founding story. People with get-up-and-go can get up and leave again, which they are doing in huge numbers right now. Easy come here, easy go away.

How do you change a culture? Government should look at its policies by asking a simple question at every decision: Is this a meritocracy policy? It should favour policies that increase the difference people can make in their own lives. It should reject policies that pull down success or reward hectoring, bludging, nuisance behaviour.

What should happen with taxes? They should be low and flat. If a person earning $20,000 pays $2,400 income tax, how much should a person earning $100,000 pay? If five times the income meant five times the taxes, they’d pay $12,000. Try $22,900, nearly ten times the taxes. Progressive tax rates send the wrong message: if you study, work, save, and invest hard, the IRD will whack you extra hard.

What should happen with welfare? It’s a policy designed to help someone down on their luck. How long can bad luck last? Surely not 44 years, the tenure of our longest-serving (not really the right word) career beneficiary. There should be lifetime limits, and if you keep having children on the benefit you should get a plastic card with controlled spending. Otherwise, people have to ask themselves: why am I working to make a difference when I can make the same on a benefit?

What should happen with red tape and regulation? The Government’s starting attitude should be, don’t regulate. Red tape doesn’t just add cost to things that do happen, it stops things that would happen without the extra cost. It doesn’t just stop things that would happen, though, it deprives children of heroes and gives them bad examples. It’s nice if your dad’s an engineer who’s building New Zealand, but he’s probably actually in traffic management.

What should happen with race and identity? Is your life determined by what you do or what happened long before you were born? The argument against the Treaty being a partnership between races is really an argument for individual self determination. The argument against discrimination by sex, race, sexuality, or anything else you cannot change is really an argument for each person to have a fair chance at living their best life.

There is a culture war in New Zealand, it’s the children of pioneers vs the blob of mediocrity. If you’re a Free Press reader, we can guess which one you are. Please support ACT since we all need to stick together.

Source: ACT Party

ACT Rural Communities spokesperson Mark Cameron has drafted a bill to scrap the red tape forcing banks and financial institutions to make climate-related disclosures, by repealing Part 7A of the Financial Markets Conduct Act 2013.

“Rural and regional New Zealanders are being hammered by banking wokery that judges businesses on political fashion rather than commercial sense,” says Mr Cameron.

“Farmers are already seeing discrimination creeping into interest rates based on perceived emissions. They fear they’ll be the next to be ‘debanked’, not because of financial risk, but because they don’t fit the agenda of the suit-and-tie bigwigs. We’ve already seen it happening to essential industries like mining and service stations.

“These rules are the ultimate virtue signal that only ACT opposed back in 2021. They reduce banking competition and force significant costs on lenders – and therefore borrowers – for absolutely no environmental gain.

“This week I wrote to the Minister for Commerce and Consumer Affairs, raising concerns about the harmful impact these regulations have on borrowers, banking competition, and economic growth, and encouraging him to adopt my proposal as a Government Bill.

“The Bill I’ve drafted sends two clear messages to the banks. First, they will no longer win political favour by making ideological lending decisions, and they can be confident that they won’t be punished for sticking to their core role of serving customers. Second, for those banks that have fallen under ideological capture, it’s a signal to get back to basics – or risk losing customers to competitors who understand what banking is really about.

“For government and the regulators of banks, it’s about getting back to basics too. The role of financial regulation is to ensure the sound functioning of financial markets in a way that promotes trust, efficiency, and stability. The climate-disclosure requirements are a departure from this limited function into social engineering.

“It’s also unnecessary. We already have an Emissions Trading Scheme that makes these woke rules completely redundant – emissions are capped and the cost of carbon is already factored into investment and production decisions.

“So while the disclosure requirements haven’t reduced a single gram of global emissions, they do put pressure on the banks by waving a stick at the banks, tacitly saying ‘if we don’t like who you’re lending to we’ll hit you’. That is part of what’s driving this madness and why ACT believes markets, not ministers should decide where investment is directed.

“The answer to woke lending practices is not more red tape, it’s getting rid of the existing stuff that’s causing it in the first place.

“We’ll win the war on banking wokery by letting better ideas and businesses compete against out-of-touch lenders. Piling on additional heavy-handed regulations risks scaring off new entrants to the market, further entrenching the power of the big players. If we want to force their hand, the market is best placed to do it.”

Mark Cameron’s letter to the Minister can be read here.

A copy of the Financial Markets Conduct (Repeal of Climate-related Disclosure Requirements) Amendment Bill can be read here.

The climate-related disclosure requirements were introduced by Labour in 2021 through the Financial Sector (Climate-related Disclosures and Other Matters) Amendment Act 2021.

Source: ACT Party

ACT Building and Construction spokesperson Cameron Luxton is welcoming the Government’s announcement of a new opt-in scheme allowing trusted builders to sign off their own work and the setting of a mandatory target to slash building inspection wait times.

“New Zealand’s overreliance on councils in consenting and certification results in bottlenecks and delays,” says Mr Luxton, who is also a Licensed Building Practitioner.

“Those delays drive up the cost of getting almost anything built, fuelling higher housing costs and dragging down productivity across the economy.

“ACT has long argued we need to provide alternatives to costly council processes for building. Our coalition agreement commits to ‘explore allowing home builders to opt out of needing a building consent provided they have long-term insurance for the building work.’

“Today’s changes are a good start in getting council bureaucracies out of the way. But unless we fix the underlying incentive problems, councils will continue to grind construction to a halt.

“The fundamental incentive problem is that when building projects are botched, it’s councils, and therefore ratepayers, who shoulder the liability. It means councils only see risk whenever they look at a building project that doesn’t fit into their cookie-cutter understanding of building. Under this system it’s a wonder new designs get consented or certified at all.

“Expert builders should be allowed to shoulder the liability for their work, protected by insurance. That would free them to innovate and build faster, while giving clients the security of knowing that if something goes wrong, they’re protected.

“Crucially, to secure a good deal on the insurance market, builders would need to demonstrate a strong reputation for quality workmanship. Those with proven track records would be rewarded with better terms, while those unable to show consistent quality would face stricter requirements from insurers before being allowed to proceed.”

Source: ACT Party

Auckland Council’s plan to set up a co-governed committee to manage the Waitākere Ranges shows why Kiwis need councillors who believe in democracy, says ACT Leader David Seymour.

“The Waitākere Ranges belong to all Aucklanders, and should be managed democratically. But Auckland Council’s plan would see unelected decision-makers closing tracks and dictating land use in the surrounding rural areas.

“The ranges are governed under the Waitākere Ranges Heritage Area Act. That is a local act, which means any change to the legislation, such as a prohibition on co-governance arrangements, has to come from the elected council.

“We’ve seen the same problem with the Ngāi Tahu Representation Act, where the Minister for Local Government has had to go cap-in-hand to a left-wing regional council asking them to repeal co-governance. The council (Environment Canterbury) declined.

“The Coalition is rolling back co-governance of public services. But when it comes to local co-governance, local action is needed.

“This is exactly why ACT is standing candidates in council elections, not just in Auckland, but across the country. ACT councillors will fight for democracy, equal rights, and accountable government. That means ensuring beloved public spaces are governed by people directly accountable to ratepayers.”

Source: ACT Party

ACT MP Dr Parmjeet Parmar has condemned the recent terrorist attack near the town of Pahalgam, Kashmir, expressing deep sorrow and solidarity with the victims and their families.

“This is a tragic act of terror and hate, and I condemn in the strongest of terms,” said Dr Parmar.

“I am shocked and saddened by this senseless violence. My thoughts are with the victims, their loved ones, and all those affected.

“Those responsible for this terrible act must be brought to justice.

“Every human being has inherent dignity and deserves to live in peace. Disputes must be resolved through dialogue and diplomacy – not through cowardly acts of brutality.”