Matt McCarten: NZ - the most pro-business country on earth is second-worst for job protection

It's official. New Zealand is, according to the World Bank, the most pro-business country on earth. I kid you not. In their Doing Business in 2006 report we were ranked number one of nearly 200 countries surveyed.

Michael Cullen referred to the report this week and there was little media attention to it. I tracked it down and read it. The information in the World Bank's report was a shocking revelation.

You'd think by the hysterical rantings of various business spokespeople that this Labour Government was doing its best to destroy private enterprise and replace it with a socialist state. In fact, the evidence from this report clearly shows the opposite is true. Business has never had it so good under Labour. No wonder Cullen gets exasperated with our captains of industry. This Government does everything it can to make it easier for business to make a buck and all it gets in return is abuse.

All the talk by Don Brash about Australia being the nirvana for business doesn't add up. In the pro-business stakes we pushed Australia into sixth place after Singapore, United States, Canada and Norway.

Only Afghanistan makes it easier for new entrepreneurs to open up for business. Enough said. All this talk about business compliance costs just isn't true either. In New Zealand it takes just two steps to launch a business over 12 days compared to the average OECD of seven steps over 20 days. Registering private property is even better, two steps and two days and it's all done. No one does it better. For businesses that need to get credit we get nine out of 10.

Though New Zealand is on the other side of the world from most of our trading partners, our exported goods take just eight days to reach their overseas destination. The other countries in the OECD take 12.5 days on average.

Our legal bureaucracy ranks fourth in the world for enforcing contracts. It takes just six weeks for our system to resolve legal disputes compared to an average of nearly eight months for the rest of the OECD countries.

The biggest revelation for me was realising our Inland Revenue department is way ahead in being business friendly on tax compliance. A medium-sized company in New Zealand makes eight payments a year and needs someone to spend 70 hours a year doing the paper work.

Businesses in other OECD countries are required to make twice as many payments and it takes them on average nearly 200 hours each year filling out forms for their governments. But I nearly fell off my chair when I read that this Government charges New Zealand companies less taxes than the average that business pay in other OECD countries. I assumed due to the statements by business spokespeople that our businesses were among the most taxed in the world. However, it just isn't true.

According to this report New Zealand businesses are taxed less than the average of their counterparts in other OECD countries. None of these statistics takes into account that the Government also subsidises the wages paid by employers to three-quarters of workers who have families.

But when I thought this Government couldn't do better for business they have done the impossible. The World Bank reveals that New Zealand has the most flexible labour market in the OECD.

You would think with all the huffing and puffing by employers about our labour laws that they couldn't hire and fire anybody without extreme difficulty and penalties. In fact, we are ranked second in the world for the ease that employers can hire or fire workers.

Only Hong Kong is more draconian for workers. In addition, New Zealand ranks first equal with the US in having the lowest dismissal costs in the world. The cost of sacking a worker in our two countries is nothing. Our closest rivals for this dubious honour are Afghanistan and Australia. Even these countries impose a cost of four weeks on their employers. The average of the rest of the OECD is 35 weeks.

Yes, you read it right.

When it comes to job security, only Canada, Hong Kong, Jamaica and Lebanon offer less security of hours for workers than New Zealand. It puts Wayne Mapp's Bill, currently before parliament, into perspective. His Bill would allow employers to sack new workers for no reason at all in their first 90 days of employment. If this Bill is passed then we'd go to the top placing in the OECD for workers' lack of job protection. It makes you wonder what more New Zealand employers want.

The next step is slavery.

What we have is an ironic situation. New Zealand is the most pro-business nation on earth and is second worst country when it comes to workers' job protection. There used to be a time when Kiwi workers would never put up with this.

This outrageous situation has occurred under a so-called worker friendly Labour Government. More than a third of Labour MPs are former trade union officials who earned their previous living from the union dues of workers. The very reason they were put into parliament was to help vulnerable workers get a fairer deal.

What have they done? Very little. They have merely tinkered with employment laws. The free-market economic model created by Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson is cemented in. The draconian employment laws introduced under the infamous Employment Contracts Act remain in place. It shouldn't be businesses raging against the Government, it should be workers. The World Bank people must be scratching their heads in disbelief.