Source: Alliance Party
Friday 18 September 2026
The Alliance Party has announced its Small Business, Local Enterprise, and Cooperative Development policy, with a strategy to protect independent operators, raise working standards, and curb the dominance of corporate monopolies.
Alliance Party small business spokesperson and Taieri candidate Anna Knight says New Zealand’s small businesses, family farms, independent contractors, and cooperatives are essential to a democratic, resilient economy.
“Small businesses keep wealth in local circulation and communities sustained but are currently bearing the brunt of an unfair economic system.”
Ms Knight says small businesses suffer from a race to the bottom when it comes to wages, hours, and conditions, both for their workers, and for owner-operators who are under immense pressure.
The policy launch follows a spike in insolvencies, with 2025 company liquidations reaching levels not seen since the aftermath of the 2010 Global Financial Crisis.
About half of New Zealand’s small businesses close within five years, and fewer than thirty percent survive a decade.
“Insolvency doesn’t happen overnight, the so-called ‘failure curve’ creeps up and is the result of many forces. We want to attack these at the root.”
“We want to reset this dynamic and ensure everyone in a small enterprise gets a fair deal.”
Ms Knight says to reverse this trend, the Alliance will restructure the tax base so the burden falls on concentrated, accumulated wealth rather than productive small enterprises.
The Alliance will overhaul competition law to break up corporate market power, with a focus on sectors like the supermarket duopoly, which extracts an estimated $430 million annually in excess profits. Suppliers can’t negotiate easily with just two buyers, and small retailers simply can’t compete.
A publicly owned development bank will be established to deliver low-cost financing for local enterprise, backed by community resource hubs and an Applied Technology Programme to foster domestic tech sovereignty.
The Alliance will create a framework to support employee buy-outs with targeted development in regional economies.
Minimum employment protections will be extended to contractors to stop wage undercutting, alongside mandatory maximum payment terms and public reporting on payment times for large corporate buyers.
Ms Knight says it is important to remember that all wage-earning is essentially a credit given to your employer, and, by the same token, a small business should not be providing an interest-free loan to a company many times its size.
“Our goal is not simply to grow business balance sheets, but to decentralise economic power so it directly serves local communities, workers, and families.”