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The BulletinMarch 13, 2025

Government sets out its wares for global infrastructure investors

Contributing writer
A row of construction crane arms with hooks extends diagonally against a blue sky. The crane arms are angled towards the upper right corner. A blue vertical banner on the right side reads "The Bulletin.
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A two-day summit aimed at wooing some of the world’s most powerful financial institutions kicks off in Auckland today, writes Catherine McGregor in today’s extract from The Bulletin.

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Global financial firms descend on Auckland for government summit

Today marks the kick-off of the government’s two-day NZ Infrastructure Investment Summit, bringing together around 100 international investors, infrastructure experts and government officials in Auckland. Representatives from major financial institutions including pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and major banks will be presented with the government’s “ambitious pipeline of projects” in fields such as transport, health, courts and education. As Luke Malpass notes in The Post (paywalled), “Labour’s finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds will also be speaking on infrastructure as the Government seeks to impress upon investors that, despite differences in political stripes, investment is welcome in New Zealand.”

Iwi representatives will also attend to highlight upcoming investment opportunities in the Māori economy. For them, “the stakes go beyond economic growth,” writes Liam Rātana this morning on The Spinoff. “They are looking at what the infrastructure pipeline can offer Māori – and whether they will be treated as genuine investment partners or simply stakeholders with interests to be managed.” Rātana talks to some of those attending about what they hope to achieve, and why they’re going in with “eyes wide open”.

Pushing PPPs

The concept at the heart of the summit is public-private partnerships, or PPPs. As Oliver Lewis explains in BusinessDesk (paywalled), in a PPP, “the private sector partner designs, finances, builds and manages a public asset for a contracted period; the Government makes ongoing availability payments, and the asset returns to public control at the end of the contract period.” Only four PPPs are ready to be presented to investors at the summit, of which the largest by far is the Northland expressway. NZTA says that project may require more than $10 billion in investment, Lewis reports, which is “eight times as much as the $1.25b cost to build Transmission Gully (although the comparison doesn’t take into account inflation and other factors)”.

What the summit hopes to achieve

“The NZ Infrastructure Investment Summit is about saying to the world that we are ready to do business, ready for investment – and ready for jobs and growth,” writes infrastructure minister Chris Bishop in the Herald. The international investors attending this week collectively manage funds and assets worth around $6 trillion, Bishop says, and the government hopes it can tempt them to spend some of that on infrastructure projects here. In the Conversation, construction expert John Tookey warns that the process is a bit more complex than the government’s spin would suggest. As we become increasingly reliant on PPPs to fund infrastructure, “the real question is whether New Zealanders are comfortable with the dynamics of long-term contracts with substantial service charges that will last decades,” he writes. “Because today’s politicians will be writing contracts our grandchildren will still be bound by.”

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Is that all there is?

Having brought a glittering array of global investors to NZ – at their own cost, as the government is keen to emphasise – it would seem less than ideal that only a handful of PPP options are ready to be presented at the summit. Along with the Northland expressway, the near-term PPPs on offer include prison, courts and army accommodation projects, but these “seem unlikely to meet the minimum size requirements for funders”, Tookey says.

Writing in the NZ Herald, Matthew Hooton is scathing about the event’s potential to be another “ultimately embarrassing prime ministerial summit”. “We’d all better hope BusinessDesk somehow has [the list of projects] terribly wrong because if that’s all New Zealand has to offer major allocators of global capital after 16-hour flights from New York or Dubai, our country will forever be blacklisted as a destination for their funds,” he writes.

“Not even the 24km expressway would meet most funds’ minimum investment thresholds for construction projects and it isn’t clear these are genuine PPPs anyway, but rather slightly more elaborate construction contracts.” Defending the government’s offer, Bishop says attendees will be “interested in the future pipeline as evidence that New Zealand is serious about infrastructure…. It’s not just about the short-term or quick fixes.”

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NZ First leader Winston Peters and PM Christopher Luxon. (Image: Getty / The Spinoff)
NZ First leader Winston Peters and PM Christopher Luxon. (Image: Getty / The Spinoff)

The BulletinMarch 12, 2025

PM joins NZ First’s war on woke

Contributing writer
NZ First leader Winston Peters and PM Christopher Luxon. (Image: Getty / The Spinoff)
NZ First leader Winston Peters and PM Christopher Luxon. (Image: Getty / The Spinoff)
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Winston Peters wants to scrub the ‘woke DEI’ from our public service. Christopher Luxon says he may have a point, writes Catherine McGregor in today’s extract from The Bulletin.

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Peters has a point on diversity, equity and inclusion, says PM

Christopher Luxon has thrown his (cautious) backing behind New Zealand First’s bill to “remove woke ‘DEI’ regulations” from hiring practices in the public sector. “I’d just say, when we took the keys to the place, it was pretty woke, and it’s entirely appropriate that we look at what else we can do to make sure the public service delivers,” Luxon told reporters on Tuesday. NZ First would need to get very lucky for their member’s bill to be drawn from the ballot, but Luxon says he’s asked Judith Collins, who’s been given responsibility for overhauling the Public Service Act, to look at whether any of the bill’s proposals could be incorporated into her refresh, RNZ’s Craig McCulloch reports.

Returning to a country ‘founded on meritocracy’

What are those NZ First proposals, exactly? The party’s Public Works Act (Repeal of Diversity and Inclusiveness Requirements) Bill would scrap the requirement that public service employers ensure their workforces reflect societal diversity, remove mandates promoting diversity and inclusiveness in public service workplaces, and end the public service’s consideration of “workforce diversity and inclusiveness”. The bill would also remove “requirements for chief executives and boards to promote diversity and inclusiveness as part of being a ‘good employer,’ including specific references to Māori involvement”. Leader Winston Peters said the bill was needed because “New Zealand is a country founded on meritocracy, not on some mind-numbingly stupid ideology.”

As the NZ Herald notes in an editorial (Premium paywalled), five years ago NZ First voted in favour of the same law it is now keen to repeal, with then deputy leader Fletcher Tabuteau saying it would “deliver better outcomes and better services” by “creating a modern, agile and adaptive public service”.

Peters’ DEI target claim ‘total bulldust’

Curiously, nobody seems to have come up with any real evidence of people wrongly appointed to the public service because of diversity rules. Asked for examples of wokeness in government, Luxon mentioned Labour’s wellbeing budgets, co-governance, and targets to reduce prisoner numbers – but not any hiring practices. Peters likewise struggles to give an example, but insists the act as it stands is forcing “diversity, equity and inclusion targets” on government agencies.

“To borrow one of Peters’ gentlemanly expletives, that claim is total ‘bulldust’,” writes Stuff’s Jehan Casinader. “The law says nothing about targets or quotas. It does require public sector bosses to promote diversity and inclusion by building a workforce that reflects our society.”

Casinader continues: “Peters wants hiring decisions to be made solely on ‘merit’. Who would disagree with that? But ‘merit’ no longer means what it might have when Peters joined the workforce in the 1960s as a young schoolteacher.”

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    ‘Woke’ banks also in the firing line

    The bill isn’t NZ First’s only legislative parry in the war against woke. Last month, MP Andy Foster’s “woke banking bill” was pulled from the biscuit tin, meaning it’ll proceed to a first reading. The bill aims to prevent the debanking of customers based on “murky ‘environmental, social or governance’ [ESG] moralising”. Debanking – the denial of banking services – has been a hot topic in rightwing circles in recent years. In 2023, UK Reform Party leader Nigel Farage accused private bank Coutts of closing his account due to his political views, prompting a media firestorm. Here at home, to give two examples, KiwiBank has pledged to stop working with coal companies and BNZ closed Gloriavale’s accounts, citing human rights concerns.

    Lawyers at both Chapman Tripp and Russell McVeagh say Foster’s bill is poorly written and unworkable in practice, due to its allowance for banks to still withdraw services “for a valid and verifiable commercial reason”. To take one example, the risks associated with climate change are arguably both an “ESG consideration” and a “verifiable commercial reason” for banks to refuse a loan, making them a grey area under the proposed law. Such a law change would also provoke uncertainty within the financial services sector, scaring away foreign investment, warns economics professor Martien Lubberink in an article entitled ‘How the war on ‘woke banking’ could backfire on New Zealand’.

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