It later advised the Government that it should complete purpose statements on all the commercial assets that it owned which would force ministers to consider whether it was prudent for the Government to continue owning assets.
Some assets, for example, might remain in Crown ownership as they provided an important public service, such as maintaining the rail network, in the case of KiwiRail.
In other cases, there might be no good reason for the Government to own an asset, in which case ministers could decide whether to sell the asset off and invest the sale proceeds in something else.
The idea is controversial, not least because NZ First has been extremely critical of the idea.
National has ruled out asset sales this term but has strongly suggested it will campaign on a mandate to sell assets if it wins a second term.
Treasury secretary Iain Rennie said the overall exercise was called the “Crown ownership purpose exercise” and it meant going through “entity-by-entity”.
Snowden said once all the reviews were completed, State-owned Enterprises Minister Simeon Brown would take a collective paper through Cabinet.
Green co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick asked whether there was contemplation of selling the assets.
Rennie said that Treasury would not be making recommendations to sell or keep an asset, but it would give advice on whether the Crown had a firm rationale for continuing to own an asset.
“Decisions about retaining assets, selling assets, carving up part of assets… that sits with ministers,” Rennie said.
Snowden added that Treasury could conclude that the Crown doesn’t have an explicit purpose for owning an asset, but ministers would decide whether it should actually be sold.
He said the exercise was designed to ask whether the Crown had an interest in a particular area, if so, is that interest best served by owning an asset or regulating that sector.
“One option from that is you may conclude the Crown doesn’t have an ownership purpose and it’s up to ministers to decide what they want to do with that asset.”
He added the exercise wasn’t driven by deciding whether to hold or sell the asset.
“We initiated it so that we could be clear from a monitoring perspective, what does the Government want out of the entity that we’re owning, so we’re using it far more to be able to target our monitoring efforts.
“What you might keep or drop is almost an offshoot from that,” Snowden said.
He said Treasury had not done any work on actually selling the assets if that is what ministers wanted to do.
“That’s a follow-up piece of work,” he said.
National is likely to take a policy on selling asset sales to the election. Edmonds pressed Rennie on the line between helping the Government formulate government policy and assisting National in writing party policy to take to an election.
“The test I have is, ‘is there a reasonable expectation of any work that we do that it is going through a Government process that ultimately ends up in the Cabinet?’,” Rennie said.
He said there was a “grey area” where Treasury helped on work commissioned in good faith “but for whatever set of reasons it will shift on to a party track and that is for good and sensible reasons”.
He said Finance Minister Nicola Willis was “very good about defending the integrity of the Treasury”.