“Labours Future Fund: A Neoliberal Con Job Dressed Up As Economic Patriotism” - 21 October 2025

Or How To Sell Public Assets To Private Interests While Pretending Youre Helping Kiwis

Kia ora whānau,

Heres the truth straight up: Labour’s so-called “Future Fund” is nothing but another chapter in the same tired neoliberal playbook that’s been bleeding this country dry for forty years. Chris Hipkins and Barbara Edmonds want you to believe their $200 million fund will “back New Zealands potential” and keep wealth in Kiwi hands, but this is the same Labour Party that brought us KiwiBuild - promising 100,000 homes and delivering a pathetic 258 in the first year - and the Green Investment Fund that just flushed $115 million of taxpayer money down the toilet through SolarZero’s collapse.

This isnt about building national wealth for everyday New Zealanders. Its about providing corporate welfare to private businesses while our people struggle to put kai on the table. Labour wont even tell us which Crown assets theyll seed this fund with, hiding behind “commercial sensitivity” like theyre running a corporate boardroom instead of a democracy. When Winston Peters launched his $100 billion infrastructure fund last year, at least he was honest about the scale needed. Labour’s offering pocket change and expecting us to believe it’s transformational.

Meanwhile, the real wealth fund New Zealand already has - the Super Fund - invests 89% of its $85.6 billion offshore, enriching foreign shareholders while Kiwis can’t afford rent. This new fund is just more of the same neoliberal trickery: socialise the risks, privatise the profits, and leave working whānau to pick up the pieces.

Background: Forty Years Of Neoliberal Betrayal

To understand why Labour’s Future Fund reeks of deception, you need to understand that Labour wrote the neoliberal playbook in this country. In 1984, Roger Douglas - Labours finance minister - launched Rogernomics, a devastating package of free-market reforms that destroyed working-class communities, gutted unions, and transferred massive wealth to the already wealthy. Douglas removed subsidies, floated the dollar, deregulated financial markets, slashed the top tax rate from 66% to 48%, and introduced GST - all in the name of “efficiency” and “growth.”

The results? Māori unemployment hit 25% by 1992 compared to 10% overall. Māori home ownership, which had reached over 50% in 1991, collapsed to 37% by 2013 while Pākehā rates dropped only slightly. The neoliberal reforms widened inequality within Māori society itself, creating a small wealthy elite while locking the majority into intergenerational poverty, benefit dependence, and all the trauma that comes with it.

Forty years later, both Labour and National still worship at the altar of neoliberalism, just with different branding. Chris Hipkins himself admitted Labour tried to do “too much, too fast” last term, a tacit confession that they over-promised and under-delivered. But the real problem wasn’t the pace - it was that their policies were fundamentally designed to serve capital, not community.

Barbara Edmonds, Labour’s finance spokesperson and the architect of this fund, has actually defended Rogernomics, saying there were “good things that happened” from those reforms. This tells you everything you need to know about where Labour’s head is at. They’re not interested in dismantling neoliberalism - they’re interested in managing it more “responsibly.”

The Issue: Labours Track Record Is A Graveyard Of Broken Promises

KiwiBuild’s catastrophic first-year failure: Labour promised 1,000 homes by July 2019 but delivered only 258 - a 74% shortfall that foreshadowed the programme’s eventual collapse

Labour promised 1,000 KiwiBuild homes by July 2019 and delivered only 258 - a catastrophic 74% failure rate. The programme was eventually reset and the 100,000 homes target abandoned entirely, replaced with the meaningless pledge to build “as many as possible.” Labour built the wrong houses in the wrong places at the wrong prices, then sold 461 of them on the open market when they couldn’t find buyers. This wasn’t just policy failure - it was policy malpractice that left thousands of whānau without hope of homeownership.

The Green Investment Fund’s spectacular failure: $115 million in taxpayer funds lost to SolarZero’s collapse under BlackRock’s ownership, with workers and contractors left unpaid

The Green Investment Fund - established by Labour in 2018 with $100 million to invest in emissions reduction - just spectacularly imploded. The fund lent $115 million to SolarZero, which was then bought by BlackRock, the world’s largest investment firm. When SolarZero went into liquidation in December 2024, it left nearly 200 workers unpaid, owed contractors and suppliers close to $40 million, and left taxpayers on the hook for $115 million. The fund’s chair Cecilia Tarrant stepped down amid the scandal, and the government announced in April 2025 it was shutting down the entire Green Investment Finance operation.

This is the pattern: Labour announces big, bold initiatives with patriotic branding. They promise transformation. They deliver disaster. Then they blame “commercial realities” or “global factors” and move on, leaving communities to deal with the wreckage.

The Super Fund’s offshore focus: 89% of New Zealand’s $85.6 billion retirement savings fund invested overseas, leaving only 11% to benefit the local economy

And lets talk about the Super Fund - the one Labour loves to cite as proof they can manage money. The Super Fund has $85.6 billion in assets and has been hugely successful at generating returns. But only 11% of that massive fund is invested in New Zealand. The other 89% is offshore, enriching foreign tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla and Nvidia. The fund’s returns were boosted by holdings in the “magnificent seven” technology stocks. So New Zealanders’ retirement savings are being used to fund Silicon Valley billionaires while our own infrastructure crumbles and our people leave for Australia in droves.

Analysis: Follow The Money And The Ideology

This Future Fund isn’t about helping ordinary New Zealanders - its about Labour trying to outflank National on economic patriotism while the coalition government openly floats asset sales. Christopher Luxon has hinted National will campaign on privatising state assets in 2026, with ACT’s David Seymour aggressively pushing for sell-offs, saying New Zealanders need to “get past their squeamishness about privatisation.” Winston Peters opposes asset sales, creating tension in the coalition.

So Labour’s strategy is clever: announce a fund that takes Crown asset dividends and “protects” them from sale, positioning themselves as the defenders of public ownership. As political analyst Jenée Tibshraeny wrote, “the real purpose of the Future Fund may be political rather than economic... creating an opportunity for Labour to attack National for its willingness, and Act for its eagerness, to sell SOEs”.

But here’s what they’re not telling you: Labours fund will engage in “corporate welfare” - using taxpayer money to subsidise private businesses with no guarantee of returns. The fund is designed to take riskier investments in New Zealand companies, which means when these businesses fail - and they will, based on Labour’s track record - the public bears the loss while private shareholders walk away. If they succeed, the profits flow to private owners, not back to the communities who funded the risk.

This is neoliberalism 101: socialise the risks, privatise the gains.

The lack of detail in Labour’s announcement is telling. They won’t say which assets will seed the fund, how much it will eventually hold, or what the criteria for investment will be. Christopher Luxon called it “twelve pages of total fluff” and an “absolute bunch of drivel” - and for once, he’s not wrong. When Hipkins was challenged on the missing details, he told reporters “don’t be so lazy” and said a full fiscal plan would come before the election. Translation: trust us, we’ll figure it out later.

Heres the deeper truth: both Labour and National are committed to the same fundamental neoliberal framework. As academic Toby Boraman wrote, beneath the policy differences “lies a tacit consensus on fundamental economic settings”. Both parties agreed with the Reserve Bank’s decision to crush inflation through interest rate rises - a “blunt market tool” guaranteed to cause job losses, suppress wages, and increase inequality. Other countries used wealth taxes, rent controls, and windfall taxes on excess profits. New Zealand chose austerity, because that’s what neoliberalism demands.

The connection to Māori disenfranchisement is direct and deliberate. Neoliberalism widened inequality not just between Māori and Pākehā, but within Māori communities. A small Māori elite benefited from Treaty settlements and the “Māori economy” now valued at $50 billion, while the majority of Māori remain locked in poverty, with Māori still overrepresented in unemployment, imprisonment, and negative health outcomes. This is by design. Neoliberalism requires a permanent underclass to suppress wages and maintain the disciplinary power of unemployment. Māori have been deliberately positioned in that role since Rogernomics.

New Zealand Parliament buildings in Wellington with gardens and blue sky

Implications: What This Means For Māori And Working New Zealanders

If Labour’s Future Fund becomes reality, here’s what will happen: taxpayer money will flow to politically connected businesses. Some will succeed and their private shareholders will profit handsomely. Most will fail, and the losses will be borne by the public. Meanwhile, the real infrastructure New Zealanders need - affordable housing, functioning health care, climate-resilient communities - will continue to deteriorate because the neoliberal consensus says governments shouldn’t directly provide these things.

For Māori specifically, this fund represents another mechanism for extracting wealth from our communities while offering nothing in return. Labour talks about “partnership” with iwi, but partnership under neoliberalism means being invited to collaborate in your own exploitation. It means Māori capital being absorbed into corporate structures that prioritise profit over people, whakapapa over whānau.

The broader implication is that New Zealand remains trapped in a political system where the two major parties offer false choices. National wants to openly sell assets and privatise services. Labour wants to dress up the same wealth extraction in progressive language. Either way, the neoliberal project continues, inequality grows, and Māori bear the brunt.

This connects to larger patterns of colonisation. The 1987 Lands Case established that the Crown couldn’t sell state assets without consulting Māori because of Treaty obligations. But what Labour’s proposing is more insidious - not outright asset sales, but the financialisation of public assets, turning them into investment vehicles for corporate benefit. It’s colonisation by financial engineering rather than military force, but the result is the same: dispossession of Māori from collective wealth and resources.

The Same Old Con, Just Newer Packaging

The Māori Green Lantern Fighting Misinformation And Disinformation From The Far Right

Heres the bottom line: Labour’s Future Fund is political theatre designed to make them look economically credible and patriotic without challenging the neoliberal system that’s failing most New Zealanders. After their KiwiBuild disaster and Green Investment Fund catastrophe, they’re asking us to trust them with more public money to “invest” in private businesses. They won’t tell us which assets, won’t guarantee returns, won’t protect workers, and won’t challenge the fundamental inequality baked into our economic system.

This isn’t transformation - it’s the same corporate welfare and financialisation that’s been hollowing out this country since Roger Douglas launched Rogernomics forty years ago. Labour helped create this mess. They’ve had multiple chances to fix it. Instead, they keep doubling down on the same failed ideology while expecting different results.

New Zealand needs real economic transformation: wealth taxes, public housing, free healthcare, climate action, and genuine partnership with Māori based on Te Tiriti. What we’re getting instead is a $200 million slush fund with nice branding.

Ka kite anō.

For those who find value in this analysis and wish to tautoko the mahi of exposing these power structures, please consider a koha to: HTDM: 03-1546-0415173-000. These are tough economic times for whānau, so only contribute if you have the capacity and wish to do so.

Nāku noa, nā
The Māori Green Lanternv