3. NZ Asset Sales - 2025 - The Garage Sale Nobody Asked For

Political Showcase Aotearoa - 15th November 2025

Exactly how stupid do they think we are?

If you listen carefully in 2025, you can hear it, the sound of hangers clinking, drawers sliding open and someone at the front door saying “we’re just having a bit of a tidy-up”.

The official term is “asset recycling”. The unofficial translation is “we’re selling more of your stuff”.

The new government insists it is all very sensible. Christopher Luxon talks about “managing the balance sheet”. David Seymour wants a “mature conversation” about what the Crown should still own.

Treasury, ever helpful, has produced an investment statement listing the assets on the national mantelpiece and gently asking whether we really need them all.

There is a list of ten State-Owned Enterprises on Seymour’s mental whiteboard. Kiwibank. KiwiRail (again). The farm portfolio. TVNZ. Bits of the power system. You can almost see the Post-It notes being shuffled: “Could be sold”, “Part sale”, “Too politically noisy… for now”.

We are told this is different from the old days. No fire sale. No ideology. Just a pragmatic way to “unlock capital” for infrastructure. Sell some assets, pay down debt, build roads and hospitals. How could anyone be against better hospitals.

If this feels familiar, that is because it is the same pitch we heard in the 1980s, 1990s and 2010s, only this time the PowerPoint template has nicer icons.

Take Kiwibank. It was created precisely because we had sold every other major bank and discovered, too late, that being entirely at the mercy of Australian lenders was not, in fact, sovereignty.

Kiwibank gives the government one direct lever in a banking system that determines whether small businesses get overdrafts and whether mortgage rates push families over the edge. Selling even a chunk of it would be like throwing away your last set of house keys because the landlord promised to be nice.

Or KiwiRail. We have already watched one privatisation of rail end in under-investment, line closures and an expensive buy-back. The tracks themselves had literally been taken up and sold for scrap.

Now, as the planet heats and freight needs to move in lower-carbon ways, the logical response in most countries is to re-invest in rail as strategic infrastructure. Our response. Put it on the maybe-sell list again.

The farms. Landcorp’s portfolio is not just a collection of paddocks. It is a lever over land use, water quality and rural employment. It is one of the few tools a government has left to model sustainable practice rather than just beg private owners to be nice.

Hand that over to private equity or overseas pension funds and you can be sure the conversation will shift from soil health to quarterly returns.

TVNZ. Yes, the business model is strained. Yes, the previous government handled the media merger like a badly written soap. But broadcasting is still about who tells our stories and on what terms. Run it purely for profit and the logic is simple: more reality shows, fewer difficult truths.

Then we will get the pleasure of watching privately owned news bulletins explain, very reasonably, why selling public assets is unavoidable.

Behind each item on the list there is a potential buyer. Infrastructure funds with friendly names and not-so-friendly return targets. Macquarie. BlackRock. Infratil. The same Australian banks that already clip the ticket on our mortgages and fees. To them, “asset recycling” is not an abstract fiscal tool. It is a shopping list.

The government insists ordinary New Zealanders will benefit. “Mum and dad investors” are wheeled out again, as if we have all forgotten that inflation, rents and mortgages leave very little spare cash in most households.

Realistically, who will end up owning chunky slices of these assets. The funds. The banks. The people who already own a disproportionate share of everything else.

We lose dividends that could fund services for decades, in exchange for a one-off cheque that disappears into a pothole patch here and a hospital refurbishment there. We lose the ability to align big systems – banking, energy, transport, media – to long-term national goals rather than quarterly earnings.

We lose another layer of democratic leverage in a country that has already handed far too much power to offshore capital.

We are told that selling assets is necessary because public debt is too high. It is worth pausing on the punchline history offers us here. After selling more per capita than almost any other developed country, New Zealand still sits with public debt around the 40-something percent of GDP mark – about where many countries sit without having auctioned off their infrastructure.

In other words, we already tried to sell our way out of debt. We ended up with the debt and no assets.

The deeper insult in 2025 is psychological. Having lived through the original heist and the long silence, we are now being invited to smile our way through the encore. We are expected to forget that Treasury’s own leaked documents describe the 1984 - 99 reforms as the biggest wealth transfer in Crown history and to trust the same institution when it whispers that maybe Kiwibank and KiwiRail no longer “justify” their presence on the balance sheet.

You can see why ordinary people feel like they are in a rigged game. They pay Sydney-owned bank fees, Australian-owned power prices, rent to foreign landlords and are now being told that selling the few remaining public levers will somehow make things better.

This is not a neutral policy debate. It is a choice about who we think this country is for.

If you are a fund manager in London or Sydney, New Zealand’s asset-recycling chat is a promising investment opportunity. If you are a nurse in Invercargill, a small business owner in Hamilton, a family in Ōtara trying to keep the house warm without going broke, it is something else entirely.

It is the sound of the garage door rolling up while someone quietly sticks price tags on the last things in the house that still belong to you.

We do not have to do this again. We could, instead, have a genuinely mature conversation about tax, about fair contributions from those who have gained the most from forty years of policy, about sensible borrowing for long-term investments, about rebuilding public capacity rather than selling it.

Those conversations are harder. They upset donors. They require courage.

Selling assets is easier. You call it recycling. You hire a bank to run the sale. You cut a ribbon at a new piece of infrastructure and hope voters do not notice that the bills they pay to use it will flow offshore for the next fifty years.

Forty years ago we let ourselves be talked into a grand experiment. We were told there was no alternative. We know now there was. The question in 2025 is brutally simple.

Do we really want to be the only country that looked at the wreckage of its last privatisation binge and said, “Great, let’s do another round – this time with feeling”?

Hopefully not the sad and desolate end.

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