Carbon tax rethink fantastic news

Wednesday, December 21st, 2005

Carbon tax rethink fantastic news

Abandoning the carbon tax scheduled for 2007 is fantastic news for business, especially exporters, the Employers & Manufacturers Association (Northern) says.

"This will give business confidence an excellent fillip for Christmas," said Alasdair Thompson, EMA's chief executive.

"The carbon tax represented a huge hurdle detracting from New Zealand as a profitable place to invest.

"We applaud Government's search for 21st century solutions rather than the earlier 1990's approach.

"We expect business to engage wholeheartedly in the drive for these solutions now the big taxation stick has been put away.

"We are keen to help with the new Government focus on carrots that reward and incentivise the development of new technology and methods to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

"In particular, we are keen to see improvements to productivity aimed at achieving higher efficiency from plant and equipment recognised and rewarded.

"To encourage the new approach we suggest, for example, a 150% write off of R&D on technology aimed at reducing carbon emissions.

"On the other hand, any price based measure, whether tax based or not, would adversely impact our international competitiveness and harm the economy by introducing costs not faced by our competitors."

ENDS

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