4. NZ Asset Sales - What Might Have Been

Political Showcase Aotearoa - 16th November 2025

Without the egos and know-all fools

Imagine we had treated 1984 like a renovation, not a demolition. The country would feel different in your bones.

Keep core utilities public. Set ruthless performance targets. Bank steady dividends into a sovereign fund. By 2025 that fund would throw off billions for hospitals, schools, regional rail.

Power bills would track the real cost of generation, not investor appetites. Energy poverty would be a memory, not a charity drive.

Hold Telecom and the grid in public hands. Build fibre as a national project. Rural towns would have proper connectivity, which means real firms, real jobs, real tax. Instead of price games we would have service standards that bite.

Complaints would drop because networks would be built for resilience, not quarterly theatre.

Treat KiwiRail as a spine, not a prop. Freight off highways onto steel. Regional lines maintained for industry, tourism, civil defence. Provincial manufacturers could ship on time. Roads would last longer.

Emissions would fall because heavy haul belongs on tracks. The network would be a platform for growth, not a museum.

Make Kiwibank the anchor for productive lending. Direct cheap capital to firms that make things, fix things, export things. Less speculation. Fewer ghost houses.

More workshops with light at midnight. Small exporters would have a banker who understands seasonality, certification, supply chains. Margins would flow to wages, training, tooling. Not to fee farms in another time zone.

Keep ports as civic assets with transparent targets. Dividends back to cities for water, housing, transport. Container throughput planned with industry.

Strikes become rare because disputes get settled by adults who plan for the long term. You would see cranes moving because governance is boring, competent, relentless.

Retain forests with a national strategy. Build a value ladder from seed to engineered timber to modular housing. Export fewer raw logs. Export more buildings.

Build warm social homes at scale that stay affordable. The timber sector would be a training engine, not a boom and bust cartoon.

Use procurement as an industrial policy. Tie public spending to New Zealand capability. Certainty breeds investment. Firms buy new machines. Polytechs add courses.

Apprenticeships become default again. Youth employment goes up. Prison numbers go down. The value of a trade stops depending on luck.

Lock in a tripartite wage accord early. Index the floor. Fund retraining properly. Unions treat productivity as a shared project. Businesses get stability. Households get predictability.

Recessions hurt, yet recoveries do not leave people behind. Social insurance cushions shocks so kids do not pay for mistakes they never made.

Health stays universal in fact, not just in slogans. You do not queue for hours in a fluorescent corridor because the dividends that once left the country kept clinics open.

Nurses are paid enough to stay. GPs exist outside wealthy postcodes. Public money stops chasing false economies.

Education turns outward. Every senior secondary student touches real industry. Maker labs in every decent town. Scholarships linked to regional employers. Immigration still matters, yet the skills pipeline starts earlier. Brain drain slows because meaningful work exists outside three suburbs and a couple of glass boxes.

Electricity becomes a national climate lever, not a yield vehicle. Hydros and wind treated as a strategic system. Coal peakers used sparingly. Storage built well before crisis.

The transition to EV fleets runs on planning, not prayers. Bills stay boring. Emissions fall on schedule. Investors still make money, yet not by clipping compulsory services.

Fiscal settings grow up. We borrow to build long life assets because that is what balance sheets are for. We do not flog the roof to fix the gutters. Debt sits lower than it does today because dividends persist.

Ratings agencies applaud boring competence. You do not need a think-piece to understand it. You can see it in maintained bridges and flood banks that held.

Inequality never spikes like it did. Some will still struggle. The floor sits higher. Food banks are rare. Children grow up without that metallic taste of anxiety.

Crime stays lower because work exists and communities are funded. The police do not become the last social service standing.

Politics behaves differently. Ministers compete to deliver patient capital, reliable infrastructure, decent wages. There are fewer TED talks. More commissioning papers with numbers that live past an election.

Treasury runs capability reviews that reward public managers who fix hard problems rather than rename them. Voters spot vanity projects early. The press knows a toll road when it sees one.

Civic culture strengthens. People volunteer because their own lives are less precarious. Marae and community hubs have stable funding. Local sport thrives. Arts groups survive between festivals.

When disaster arrives the state has muscle memory. Logistics exists. Stockpiles exist. Trains run. Military and civilian responses mesh because someone planned before the cameras.

Industry looks like a layered cake, not a strip mine. Agritech beside dairying. Medtech beside hospitals. Creative tech beside education.

Component makers who feed global supply chains rather than dream of unicorns while using desk chairs as collateral. Upgrades come in regular chunks. Firms keep their IP rather than sell it to meet payroll.

The housing market cools to human temperature. A state builder produces a steady pipeline of homes with decent density. Councils get funding tools that reward growth with infrastructure. Speculation faces friction.

Ownership rates tick up for working families. Rents stabilise. The economy relies less on house prices for its mood.

Regional New Zealand hums. Young people leave for a bit, then come back because careers exist and travel does not require a life swap.

Town centres open new cafés without betting the farm. Schools recruit specialists. Councils hire engineers who stay.

This is not utopia. It is a coherent model that many countries chose. Public ownership where monopoly lives. Tough regulation where competition is real.

Sovereign investment that captures the upside for citizens. Industrial policy that builds depth, not slogans. A tax mix that funds the plan.

We could have had it. We still can. The price is honesty about the loss, patience about the rebuild, institutions that outlast vanity. Keep the keys. Keep the dividends. Keep the promise that a small country can do grown up things without selling itself in parts.

Anything’s possible.

Please join the conversation. There’s a lot to talk about and I’d love to hear your perspective, even if it differs from mine.

john.luxton@regenerationhq.co.nz l +64 275 665 682 l www.regenerationhq.co.nz/contact