2. NZ Asset Sales - The Long Silence
Political Showcase Aotearoa - 14th November 2025
How we learned to live in the looted house
By 1999, New Zealand was like a burglary victim who had tidied up the broken glass and learned to sleep without the lights on, but secretly still listened for footsteps in the hallway.
We had lived through Rogernomics and Ruthanasia. We had watched rail and forests and Telecom and Air New Zealand and banks disappear into the sharemarket fog. We had swallowed the line that “the eggs could not be unscrambled”, mostly because nobody with power seemed keen to try.
Helen Clark’s government arrived promising to put a “human face” on capitalism. It did. It also left the skeleton of the neoliberal model firmly in place.
Air New Zealand, privatised and then run into the ground, had to be re-nationalised when the private owners stuffed it so badly it threatened to crash into the real economy. Rail, flogged off and starved, was slowly bought back, bit by neglected bit. That repurchase bill alone ran into the billions – a neat illustration of how “selling to save money” often means buying back later at twice the price.
These rescues were treated as one-off embarrassments, not as evidence that the original ideology might have been flawed. We stacked government boards with respectable directors, tidy governance frameworks and KPI dashboards. We called the entities “commercial” and congratulated ourselves on getting beyond old ideological battles.
Meanwhile, ordinary life bent around the reforms like trees growing around a fence.
Energy companies, restructured and partially sold, settled into their new role as gentailers – generators and retailers with a legal duty to maximise shareholder value. Successive governments treated them as cash machines, collecting generous dividends from their majority stakes while the companies quietly lifted prices and under-invested in new renewable generation.
The result was a slow, grinding rise in power bills that showed up as mould on walls, asthma in kids and the quiet humiliation of asking for help from charity when the pre-pay meter cut out.
We normalised things our grandparents would have found unthinkable. Foodbanks as permanent institutions. Private companies deciding whether small towns deserve banking services.
Whole regions dependent on a handful of corporates whose head offices sat in Sydney, Melbourne or further away. “That’s just globalisation,” we were told, as if this had all fallen from the sky rather than been signed into law in Wellington.
Then John Key turned up, smiling like your favourite real estate agent and announced that we were all going to become investors.
The “Mixed Ownership Model” between 2011 and 2014 was a masterpiece in political marketing. Do not call it privatisation. Call it “giving New Zealanders a chance to invest” in Meridian, Genesis, Mercury, Mighty River Power, Air New Zealand. Keep 51 percent to avoid scaring the horses, float the rest and hold a referendum you can safely ignore.
If Rogernomics was a smash-and-grab, the Mixed Ownership Model was a polite garage sale with canapés.
Key and Bill English sold the idea that selling minority stakes would “free up capital” for schools and hospitals while preserving control. “Mum and dad investors” were prominently featured. The fact that most mums and dads were flat out paying the bills did not feature quite as prominently.
Over time, as always, institutional investors and offshore funds steadily increased their shareholdings. KiwiSaver funds, many of them run by the same Australian banks that already owned our mortgages, became big players. The Crown locked in its 51 percent – and its dependency on dividends from companies whose commercial logic rewarded higher prices and lower costs.
Nobody marched this time. There were campaigns, yes. A citizens-initiated referendum said “no” to asset sales. But the anger of the early 1990s had cooled into resignation. People were tired. Politics felt like something that happened over there, somewhere between the Beehive and a business breakfast.
The impacts, however, never stopped landing over here.
Power bills kept rising in real terms. By the 2010s and 2020s, New Zealanders were paying some of the highest electricity prices in the OECD, despite having abundant renewable resources.
Households quietly rationed showers and heating. Energy companies quietly celebrated record profits. Government quietly banked the dividends and hoped nobody would notice the contradiction between its child-poverty rhetoric and its ownership of companies that disconnected families every winter.
Housing, distorted by tax settings and cheap credit, inflated beyond the reach of ordinary wages. Foreign and corporate landlords snapped up ex-government buildings and housing stock once held in public hands. Kiwis paid rent to offshore funds for the privilege of living in what they or their parents had effectively built.
Through all of this, the political class adopted a tone of weary moderation. The 1980s and 1990s were described as a “necessary but painful adjustment”. The fact that most of the big promises – lower prices, more efficiency, stronger growth – never materialised for ordinary people became an awkward footnote, not a reason to rethink the model.
Labour in office managed within the system. National in office polished it. Nobody seriously challenged the idea that key infrastructure should function like semi-privatised cash cows. If you suggested bringing more back into full public ownership and governing them as genuine public utilities, you were treated as a charming throwback, like someone insisting we really should bring back free school milk and the 1970s All Blacks.
This is the long silence. Not a literal lack of words – there were hundreds of reviews, inquiries, white papers – but a deep reluctance to name what happened - that New Zealand ran the purest version of the Reagan/Thatcher experiment, ended up with worse inequality and higher social harm and then quietly decided to live with it.
We tell ourselves we had no choice. That the global tide was too strong. That small countries must bend. Yet other small countries did not sell quite so much, quite so fast, on terms quite so generous to buyers. The “no choice” line survives because it is comforting. If there was no choice, then nobody is really responsible.
The trouble is, history disagrees. Treasury’s own leaked briefings now describe the 1984 - 99 reforms as the largest wealth transfer in our history, from public to private, from many to few.
The very institutions that cheered it on now admit it did not deliver what was promised and yet, like a family that has gradually normalised living in a half-burned house, we keep repainting the same charred walls and calling it renovation.
The long silence is not just about policy. It is about what we decided to swallow as a country. We learnt to treat structural cruelty as an accounting choice. We let the people who benefited from the heist tell us it was inevitable.
Which is why, when the salesmen turned up again in 2025 with the same briefcases and slightly newer ties, far too many people felt an uneasy jolt of déjà vu – and then reached for the remote.
Part 3 tomorrow.
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