I am tired of hearing the same conversation.
Productivity is too low.
Infrastructure is behind.
Housing costs too much.
We need more investment.
Businesses need capital.
Healthcare costs are rising.
The population is ageing.
We need higher-value exports.
Then a few years pass.
The people around the table change. The language changes. A programme disappears. Another one arrives. There is another review, another strategy and another announcement.
And we start talking about many of the same problems again.
This is not about one government.
It has happened over many years, under different governments.
I am not particularly interested in who gets the blame.
I am interested in why we keep doing it.
We are not broke
Let us get one thing out of the way.
New Zealand is not bankrupt.
The latest Treasury forecasts do not show some imminent fiscal collapse.
For 2026/27, Treasury forecasts an operating deficit before gains and losses excluding ACC of $6.8 billion. Net core Crown debt is forecast at $209.6 billion, rising to $223 billion in 2027/28 before eventually beginning to decline.
Treasury expects net core Crown debt to peak at 43.9 per cent of GDP in 2027/28.
So, I would not describe New Zealand as broke.
That is too easy.
The more important question is what we are doing with the economic capacity we still have.
A country can continue borrowing.
A country can continue taxing.
A country can continue spending.
But none of those things, by themselves, make the country richer.
Eventually somebody has to produce more value.
That is where I think the conversation should begin.
Our problem is not a shortage of plans
New Zealand does not lack intelligent people.
We certainly do not lack reports.
We have Treasury.
We have ministries.
We have commissions, agencies, consultants, universities, economists, business organisations and working groups.
Some very good work comes out of them.
Then what?
A country cannot build twenty-year infrastructure, industries and skills on a three-year attention span.
A new government must be able to change policy. That is democracy.
But changing governments should not require the country to rediscover its economic problems every few years.
There should be a small number of national objectives that survive governments.
Not detailed policies.
Not ideology.
Objectives.
Governments can argue about how to achieve them.
But at least we would know where we are trying to go.
I would start with five.
1. Make every hour worked in New Zealand worth more
This is the first objective because almost everything else depends upon it.
Productivity sounds like something economists discuss at conferences.
It is much simpler than that.
Over the past two decades, Treasury says New Zealand's productivity growth has averaged just 0.7 per cent a year.
That is the number that should bother us.
If an hour of work produces more value, there is greater room for real wages to rise without creating the same inflationary pressure. Businesses can pay better salaries. Government collects more revenue without necessarily increasing tax rates. Families have higher incomes.
The country becomes wealthier.
If productivity barely moves, eventually we end up fighting over who gets what share of a pie that is not growing fast enough.
That argument can continue forever.
I would rather grow the pie.
So, establish a twenty-year national productivity objective and report against it every year.
Not another slogan.
Measure it.
If productivity improves, tell us why.
If it does not, tell us why.
And stop changing the measurement because somebody does not like the result.
The question behind major economic decisions should become very simple:
Will this make an hour worked in New Zealand more valuable ten years from now?
If it will not, we should at least ask why we are doing it.
2. Build infrastructure for thirty years, not three
We know we need infrastructure.
Water.
Electricity.
Transmission.
Roads.
Hospitals.
Ports.
Digital infrastructure.
Public transport where the economics justify it.
None of these things can sensibly be planned around one election.
Yet New Zealand has become remarkably good at announcing, reconsidering, redesigning and sometimes cancelling major projects.
Every change has a cost.
Engineers have already been employed.
Land may have been acquired.
Consultants have been paid.
Design work has been done.
Then priorities change and we begin again.
There must be a better way.
New Zealand needs a genuine twenty-to-thirty-year national infrastructure pipeline.
Projects should have published costs, economic assessments, priorities, expected completion dates and maintenance requirements.
Governments should still be able to change it.
But if a major approved project is cancelled, redesigned or delayed, publish the cost of doing so.
Let us see the number.
Then we can decide whether changing direction was worth it.
Infrastructure is too expensive to become an institutional version of musical chairs.
3. Go out and compete for productive capital
New Zealand is a small country at the bottom of the Pacific.
Investors are not going to come here merely because we have clean air, mountains and nice people.
I like all three.
They are not an economic strategy.
If an international company is considering investing $500 million in a factory, technology operation, pharmaceutical facility, food-processing plant, data centre or research operation, I want New Zealand sitting across the table.
And I want us asking:
What would it take for you to build it here?
Not a blank cheque.
Not subsidies without economic justification.
Not selling everything that moves.
I mean competing intelligently.
What land do they need?
What electricity?
What skills?
What infrastructure?
What regulatory approvals?
What legitimate incentives would change the investment decision?
And what does New Zealand receive in return?
Jobs?
Exports?
Technology?
Research?
Training?
Supply chains?
Intellectual property?
Tax revenue?
That is a commercial negotiation.
Treat it like one.
Singapore's approach to economic development is worth studying.
Its Economic Development Board does not simply wait for investment applications to arrive. It actively promotes investment and develops industries.
In 2025, Singapore secured S$14.2 billion in fixed-asset investment commitments. Those commitments, when realised over the following five years, are expected to create 15,700 jobs and contribute S$18 billion in value added.
New Zealand is not Singapore and should not pretend to be. Our geography, institutions and circumstances are different.
But the lesson is worth understanding:
Small countries do not have to drift.
New Zealand should become one of the easiest developed countries in which to make a serious productive investment.
And somebody should wake up every morning whose job is to win those investments for New Zealand.
Not merely process the application when the investor eventually finds us.
4. Stop treating rising house prices as an economic strategy
New Zealand has spent an extraordinary amount of money buying houses from one another.
There is nothing wrong with owning a house.
There is nothing wrong with investing in property.
And building new housing is genuine productive activity.
But endlessly increasing the price of houses that already exist does not, by itself, make New Zealand more productive.
If I buy your house for $1 million and sell it to somebody else for $1.3 million, we may feel richer.
But where is the new export?
Where is the new machine?
Where is the new technology?
Where is the new intellectual property?
Where are the new highly paid jobs?
That is the distinction we need to start making.
The important question is not whether investment is good or bad.
It is:
Where do we want the next billion dollars of New Zealand capital to go?
Into bidding up assets that already exist?
Or into businesses, machinery, technology, automation, research, intellectual property and export capacity?
I would like considerably more of it going into the second group.
That does not require punishing homeowners.
It requires making productive enterprise a much more attractive place to put capital.
5. Pay for the country we promise ourselves
This is probably the hardest conversation.
New Zealand is ageing.
Healthcare becomes more expensive as populations age.
Retirement costs increase.
Infrastructure still has to be replaced.
Debt has to be serviced.
And younger New Zealanders will eventually inherit whatever decisions we make.
There are many legitimate ways to deal with that.
Governments can disagree about tax.
They can disagree about spending.
They can disagree about retirement settings.
They can disagree about the size and role of government.
I do not need to settle those arguments.
But I think there should be one rule that survives them:
One generation should not continually promise itself services that it expects the next generation to borrow to provide.
That should be a national objective.
Every government should publish what its policies mean over thirty years.
Not merely next year's Budget.
Show us what happens when the population gets older.
Show us the healthcare costs.
Show us the retirement costs.
Show us the debt.
Show us the assumptions.
Then let the public decide whether the bargain is reasonable.
That is not left or right.
It is arithmetic.
A twenty-year scoreboard
I do not want another large government agency.
We have enough institutions capable of producing information.
Use them.
Create a simple national economic scoreboard.
Five objectives.
Twenty years.
Published every year.
Productivity.
Are we producing more value for every hour worked?
Infrastructure.
Are we building what the country will need before it becomes an emergency?
Productive investment.
Is serious domestic and international capital going into businesses that expand New Zealand's productive capacity?
Capital allocation.
Are we becoming better at putting money into enterprises, technology and innovation rather than merely increasing the price of existing assets?
Fiscal sustainability.
Are the services we promise today capable of being paid for tomorrow?
That is enough.
No 400-page glossy document.
No new slogan every three years.
No pretending a target disappeared because somebody changed the website.
Put the numbers on one page.
Target.
Actual result.
Direction of travel.
Explanation.
Publish it every year for twenty years.
Governments can change. The destination should not disappear.
This is where I think New Zealand has gone wrong.
We confuse changing the government with changing everything.
Of course governments should have different priorities.
Otherwise, there would be little point having elections.
But some things are bigger than an election.
A functioning electricity system is not ideological.
Neither is clean water.
Neither is productive investment.
Neither is infrastructure maintenance.
Neither is producing enough economic value to support the standard of living we expect.
We should be capable of changing governments without resetting the country's economic clock.
That requires institutional memory.
It requires targets that last longer than the people who announce them.
And occasionally it requires the discipline to continue something that somebody else started because it is working.
That may be harder than announcing something new.
Twenty years from now
Imagine New Zealand in 2047.
Not next year's Budget.
Not the next election.
What should we want to see?
An economy where each hour worked produces substantially more value.
Modern infrastructure built before it reaches crisis point.
International companies competing to establish high-value operations here.
New Zealand businesses with enough capital to grow internationally without having to leave.
More household wealth invested in productive enterprises.
Exports containing more technology, intellectual property and high-value services alongside the primary industries we already do well.
And public finances strong enough that the next crisis does not frighten us every time the Government has to borrow.
None of this can be delivered in three years.
That is precisely why we should start.
New Zealand is not broke.
We still have assets.
We still have skills.
We still have institutions.
We still have credibility.
And, most importantly, we still have choices.
But we should stop expecting a three-year cycle to answer a twenty-year question.
There is a bigger question.
What does New Zealand want to become?
Decide that first.
Then give ourselves twenty years to build it.
And this time, stay with it.