The proposed Employment Relations Bill will prove costly for New Zealand citizens and workers. This report, says the proposed legislation will ultimately drive up transaction costs and risks of job creation, and will hinder productivity.

‘The legislation is an attack on civil society and economic freedom,’ says report author Wolfgang Kasper.  ‘It curtails the economic liberty of workers to negotiate wages and conditions through agents of their own free choice. ‘Workers will no longer have a say in whether there should be a strike or not, unless they pay union fees and express their views at a meeting organised by a government-licensed union. ‘Employers will no longer be allowed to talk directly to workers during bargaining, and individual workers may not know that aggressive monopoly agents from a union are pricing them out of the labour market.’

Professor Kasper says by reversing the successful reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, the Clark-Anderson government is gambling by selectively withdrawing some of New Zealand’s key liberal foundations.

‘This will eventually weaken New Zealand’s never very robust economic constitution,’ he says.

‘Sooner or later, there will be pressures either for sheltering the domestic control regime by a renewed protectionism, or the Clark-Anderson government’s “non-nationalist socialism” will have to be abandoned.’