I have had an absolute gutsful of the idea that New Zealand’s economic destiny is to become a beautifully regulated, environmentally certified, bureaucratically supervised nation of paupers.
We’ve spent decades arguing about how to divide up the economic pie while paying little attention to making the thing bigger.
New Zealand has enormous productive potential.
We have fertile land, minerals beneath our feet, energy resources under our seabed, productive industries, and some of the hardest working people on God’s green earth. Yet thanks to political tinkering, asset flogging, and regulatory tomfoolery, we have managed to turn this abundance into an economy that struggles to pay its own bills.
The tea towel wearers and gang groupies on the left have a vision for New Zealand that sees economic growth as a regrettable side effect of human existence. They want to strangle growth, prevent prosperity, and effectively drive our young people off overseas to lands where they are rewarded for their efforts.
They treat “economy” like it is a dirty word. But New Zealand First don’t talk about the economy for the economy’s sake. It is for the people of this country! We must grow our economy to lift everyone up. For opportunities, prosperity, and well-funded public services.
The lanyard-wearers in the capital seem to think prosperity materialises from government strategy documents and endless hui.
Well, I’ve got news for the clipboard brigade. Wealth has to be created. Someone has to grow the food, catch the fish, dig the minerals, build the factories, manufacture the goods, and get our exports onto ships.
And they need affordable energy and functioning infrastructure to do so.
New Zealand First has set out an ambition to double the size of our economy by 2050. And we are quite aware that is going to require an altogether different attitude to productive enterprise than the one which has prevailed in this country for far too long.
Other parties promised at the last election that they could fix the economy in three years. Ever the pragmatists, we said that was nonsense because the damage of Labour’s borrowing and spending on consumption instead of production was never going to be undone in one term.
We have turned things around, but we have got a long way to go. We need more time to undo the damage inflicted on our economy by Harry, Hermione, and Ron. And we can’t afford another government led by the only one of the trio still standing.
We have a plan to unleash the productive potential of this country, invest in essential infrastructure, develop our resources and ensure that New Zealanders keep a greater share of the wealth generated here.
And the first great economic taniwha we intend to confront is the cost of electricity.
I have travelled the length and breadth of provincial New Zealand, and the price of power is one of the top issues brought to me at every stop. The timber processors, manufacturers, food producers, and industrial employers who form the backbone of our regional economies cannot compete internationally if their electricity bills are enough to give their accountants heart palpitations.
Not to mention the households receiving their own power bills. Palpitations all round.
The gentailer market structure isn’t working.The major electricity companies generate the power, sell the power, and enjoy considerable influence over the prices paid by the poor souls at the other end of the transaction.
At present we have the Electricity Authority who are meant to keep on eye on all of this but they are about as useful as a chocolate teapot.
That’s why New Zealand First proposes splitting the major gentailers, separating their generation and retail businesses, reforming the wholesale market and encouraging investment in additional generation.
The objective is to inject proper competition into the market because I have no interest in watching another generation of New Zealand industrial capability disappear because we couldn’t organise an affordable and reliable supply of electricity. Getting it back is a damn sight harder than keeping it here in the first place.
And when I talk about keeping industry here, I mean the provinces as well as the metropolitan centres. Northland, Taranaki, the West Coast, and Southland are perfectly capable of being engines of national prosperity. They should not be reduced to picturesque backdrops for city dwellers seeking somewhere to spend their long weekends.
That brings me to infrastructure, where New Zealand has developed an almost supernatural talent for spending money with little to show for it.
A bridge needs replacing, so naturally we convene a committee, establish a working group, commission several expensive reports, and then discover that the original price has doubled while everybody was having meetings.
Meanwhile, the bridge is still falling to bits.
To put an end to the lurching between grand announcements, reviews, cancellations, redesigns, and cost blowouts, New Zealand First will establish a Future Fund of up to $100 billion to support a thirty-year programme of infrastructure development.
Singapore has demonstrated the benefits that can be reaped from a disciplined, long term approach to investment. We want a similar approach with a professionally governed fund, protected from the whims of the political cycle, capable of attracting capital and investing in the infrastructure required to develop our economy.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that infrastructure should come before population growth rather than afterwards. New Zealand First gets it. Though someone might need to explain it with crayons to the other parties.
And infrastructure investment should be driven by economic necessity, rather than the vanity of whoever happens to occupy the ministerial office.
There is little point building infrastructure and industrial capabilities if we then make it prohibitively expensive for businesses to operate in New Zealand.
Small and medium sized businesses are the workhorses of our economy. Their owners take the risks, employ the workers, buy the equipment, keep local suppliers busy and, far too often these days, lie awake at night worrying about how to make the next payroll.
They deserve an economic environment that rewards ambition and encourages investment. So New Zealand First is campaigning on reducing the company tax rate from 28% to 20% for companies with annual turnover below $30 million.
Companies that retain more of their earnings have more in the kitty to spend on reinvestment, expansion, and hiring Kiwis to come work for them.
Our new policy for a targeted expansion of Investment Boost is another way we can do this. The expansion would see a 50% first-year accelerated depreciation rate for new plant, machinery, and equipment in manufacturing and key export sectors, including farming, forestry, fishing, aquaculture and mining.
The existing Investment Boost provides a 20% upfront deduction for eligible assets, but this new proposal is specifically aimed at the productive industries that require serious capital investment.
The intention is to make upgrading equipment more financially attractive, encourage businesses to invest sooner, and get more modern machinery onto factory floors and into our primary industries.
This is how a good Government supports businesses to thrive and get more people into work. Not with make work schemes and inventing unproductive jobs on the state teat that are effectively better paid welfare.
New Zealand First wants to unleash the potential of our country and like the most prosperous nations around the world, that means making the most of our natural resources. In these challenging times, in particular, growth begins with what lies under our feet and off our coasts.
We have mountains of coal in the ground and still import it from Indonesia. Why Chloe Swarbrick and her merry band of tree huggers think it is better for the environment if we ship it in rather than dig it up I don’t know.
We have long lamented Labour’s captain’s call to shut the door on new offshore oil and gas exploration. You have probably seen the now infamous photo of me with my face in my hands as Jacinda Ardern made that grave, grave error of judgement.
Well, New Zealand First is not willing to sacrifice the prosperity of our great nation in order to get pats on the back at a climate conference that has two hundred private jets parked outside of it.
That is why we will invest an initial $1 billion over the next term in a National Subsurface Development Survey, so that investors have modern data to bid against and New Zealand finally knows what it owns.
The potential for immense sovereign wealth is there and the proceeds generated would go into a Norwegian-style sovereign fund and into regional industry, so that a discovery becomes permanent national wealth rather than a one-off windfall.
What does that look like in reality? It looks like our superannuation woes sorted, high paying jobs in our regions, and proper resilience against global economic shocks.
And the regions where these resources originate deserve a fair share of the proceeds.
It is our policy that 50% of mining royalties should go to the regions in which they are generated. Northland, the West Coast, and Southland should see the benefit of what comes out of their ground rather than watching it vanish into a Wellington spreadsheet.
We want every provincial voter to hear these messages of hope and of a future of shared prosperity, but it only reaches them if we can pay for it.
Radio, print, and online advertising in the electorates where this election will be decided is how we turn a policy into a conversation at the kitchen table.
We have a real plan for doubling New Zealand’s economy. Forget the tinkering around the edges that red and blue engage in as they pass New Zealand back and forth like pass-the-parcel at one of the Greens’ gang pads when the police are on the way.
We are talking about meaningful action because it is what is best for New Zealand. Economic nationalism that is based on common sense.
Because the future of this country will not be secured by another symposium on the evils of economic activity, nor by a collection of politicians who regard every excavator, fishing vessel, factory, and mine as an affront to their ideological sensibilities.
It will be secured by people prepared to invest, produce, develop, and build.
New Zealand has spent long enough managing our own decline. It is time we rediscovered the appetite to become wealthy.
Party vote New Zealand First on 7 November, and let’s stop apologising for having an economy and start bloody well growing it.
Shane Jones
