New Zealand First’s $100 billion “Future Fund” has a carefully calculated political strategy behind it.
It is an attempt to raid the Labour Party’s conservative right wing.
New Zealand First knows that the coalition of voting groups that got it over the five per cent threshold last year is shaky.
Already, ACT is attempting to siphon off the voters concerned about “Maorification”.
Most of the anti-vax voters who supported New Zealand First will move on as the Covid lockdowns and mandates become more distant memories.
That will leave behind only the conspiracy theorists or “cookers”, as some veteran New Zealand First members like to call them.
And though, in contrast to the conference delegates, the majority of Winston Peters’s audience last Sunday for his public rally would have been Gold Card holders, the grey power movement is not what it was 30 years ago when the Bolger Government imposed a super surcharge, and New Zealand First was founded.
Instead, the party has begun to look to its voting base in the provinces and particularly Labour voters there.
The party’s top ten party vote percentages all came from provincial electorates: Northland, Whangārei, Whanganui, Coromandel, West Coast-Tasman, East Coast, Rangitīkei, Kaikōura, Tauranga and the Bay of Plenty.
There is a trend here of seats where the electorate doesn’t want to vote for the “Tories” but can’t quite bring itself to vote Labour.
Most of these seats used to record high voters for the old Social Credit Party for exactly that reason: it was a protest party.
New Zealand First has always had a heavy element of protest in its makeup. Peters himself is an instinctual opposition politician.
But MPs like Shane Jones and Mark Patterson are cut from a different template.
Both are much closer to “the real” economy; Patterson to farming and Jones to aquaculture and forestry, (and now, mining).
Meanwhile, Peters, it seems, is mellowing as he ages, and he must reflect on his pattern of getting into Government and then losing the next election.
And so the party is now talking about itself as the party of the provinces.
One of its co-founders, Doug Woolerton, has always maintained that the party is the party of the “small bloke” in rural towns and villages, not the farmers or even the contractors but the provincial workforce.
Woolerton, even though he lives in Hamilton, was not at the conference but maintains close contact with Peters and Jones and some of the party hierarchy.
And so Peters devoted nearly 15 minutes of his 60-minute speech at the convention to the Labour Party, claiming that New Zealand First was now inheriting its mantel as the workers’ party.
He said the leadership and makeup of the former worker’s party, Labour, had changed for the worse.
“They are disconnected from working people.
“They do not understand the struggles of working men and women or their aspirations. Instead,
“They are driven by ideologies and theories learned at university that prove unworkable in our real world.
“If you look at parliamentarians like Peter Fraser and Norman Kirk you have to ask – how would they recognise their party and the rise of the professional class of politicians that have taken over the former workers party.”
He recalled Labour’s much-revered past by reminding delegates that its spiritual home was on the West Coast, the site of the miners’ strike that led to the formation of the party.
“The catch cry was ‘a fair day’s pay, for a fair day’s work’,” he said.
“They represented those workers in the very industries which have now become anathema to who and what the Labour Party represents today.
“Their focus now is on issues such as race and drumming up racial rhetoric that only serves to divide our country and ignores the vast majority of New Zealanders who just want a functioning health system, a top class education for their kids, first world wages, and an affordable home. That’s what all New Zealanders want – Māori and non-Māori.”
Peters immediately followed his lengthy tirade about Labour with the unveiling of his $100 billion New Zealand Future Fund.
As seems to have become the practice at NZ First conventions, a remit was proposed for Peters’ big announcement calling for just such a fund before delegates on Saturday.
Moving to support it, Northland delegate David Williams said it would be a long-term, apolitical sovereign investment fund that would build our prosperity and grow our economy.
Peters himself has likened it to funds in Singapore, Norway, Croatia and Ireland.
They may not all be strictly relevant to New Zealand.
Singapore’s Temasek was founded in 1974 and has large equity holdings outside Singapore; Norway’s fund, which derives its money from its oil and gas revenue, has $2.8 trillion in assets; Croatia’s funds are heavily dependent on EU funding.
Ireland set its fund last year and aims to have assets of $179 billion by the middle of the 2030s.
Its funding will come from some of the corporation tax windfall that Ireland has received from major global companies. The Irish Government is required to transfer 0.8 per cent of the country’s GDP to the fund every year, but its role is closer to the NZ Super Fund than the infrastructure and development fund that Peters is proposing.
He said on Sunday that the Government would invest solely in a multi-decade infrastructure build “to ensure our future infrastructure security and to enable future economic growth and social enablement.”
“But we want these investment funds ring-fenced from politicians and political interference,” he said.
“Where the fund is solely used to invest in the future of New Zealand’s economic infrastructure. And where those investments are in our national interest, not offshore globalised ownership.”
That question of overseas investment is tricky for New Zealand First, given its long history of opposition to globalisation.
MP Mark Patterson reminded the conference that their party was called “New Zealand First”.
“We are NZ First, so I would want some guard rails that the foreign investment coming into this fund would have a national interest test set around it,” he said.
Peters was surprisingly blasé about the foreign investment issue.
“Let’s face it: if an international investor comes to New Zealand to start a wealth-creating export-driven enterprise where there was nothing before that, then what do we have to lose?” he said.
The other issue is that much of the finance will be debt finance, but again, that doesn’t worry him.
“New Zealand First understands the ‘Deficit Myth’.,” he said.
“If we borrow to spend on wealth creation, rapid export growth, and resilient production, then we will be on the same track as other successful small nations, and dare we say it, the same track we were once on when we were number one in the world.
“It is when you borrow to spend on consumption that so much economic damage is done to a nation, as with a home.”
Though Peters is leading the campaign and has somewhat uncharacteristically apparently even authored some detailed research on it, it is Jones who will be the architect of its investments.
Already, he is hinting that it could be used to develop geothermal resources in the Bay of Plenty and some of his mining projects.
Peters and Jones are believed to also favour folding the existing SOEs and Government shareholdings in companies into the fund.
The SOE sector contributed $22 billion to the Government’s coffers in the last financial year, so revenue at that level would be a healthy boost for the fund.
Peters’s proposal got a lukewarm reception from the Prime Minister on Monday at his post-cabinet press conference.
“I’m aware different parties may have different views or policies that they are free to take to the election in 2026,” he said.
And that is precisely what Peters will do, pitching it as the way to get jobs and prosperity back to the provinces, the part of New Zealand that Labour has forgotten.
In a way, what he and Jones are beginning to sketch out is the transformation of New Zealand First into a sort of New Zealand version of Australia’s National Country Party.
That party’s vision statement says it believes the future of regional Australia is critical to the future of the nation.
“Our priorities are building stronger regional economies and secure communities, delivering opportunity and prosperity for all regional Australians, and ensuring a sustainable environment,” it says.
And it almost sounds like Peters: “The Nationals provide a considered and commonsense perspective on all elements of Government policy and a balance between Australia’s political extremes.”
On Sunday, he said that right from the start, New Zealand First had been the greatest challenge to the combination of blind ideology and social elitism of its opponents.
When the party began, his targets were ACT and National, but now he has shifted his gaze and is looking at the right wing of Labour.
If he succeeds in sucking votes out from Labour, he could do real damage to them and stop them from making any advances in provincial New Zealand.
That thought ought to persuade Luxon to take a bit more interest in the New Zealand Future Fund proposal.
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