The good news is that this is a choice, and choices can be changed.
Every year we send approximately $7 billion to $10 billion offshore to buy petroleum. That money builds no New Zealand jobs, no New Zealand assets, no New Zealand wealth. We operate more than 40 government departments on thousands of IT systems that cannot talk to each other, almost all built by foreign contractors. Our defence spending buys equipment built in Europe and maintained in the United States. When New Zealand needs something built, we buy it from someone else.
The result is an economy that works hard but does not compound.
New Zealand already generates 85% to 90% of its electricity from renewable sources; one of the cleanest grids in the world. Filling a petrol tank for a 500-kilometre trip in a typical family SUV costs $130 to $150. The same journey in an electric vehicle charged from our own renewable grid costs only $30 (if charged at home) or around $70 (if charged at a public charging station).
Multiply that across every household and business, accelerate renewable generation at 3% above demand growth for 20 years, and the economics of the entire country shift. By year nine, conservative modelling suggests $1.5 to $2.5 billion per year stays in New Zealand. Over the full programme, that grows toward $5 billion per year into New Zealand jobs, infrastructure, and capability.
That is the single most powerful cost-of-living policy any government can implement. It just stops the flow of money out the door.
We closed our last oil refinery in 2022 and now import 100% of our refined petroleum. New Zealand’s international data connection runs through four undersea cables, none of them majority New Zealand-owned. Ninety-three per cent of our goods, by volume, move by truck. These are structural exposures, and they compound with every year we choose not to act.
A country with distributed renewable energy and local storage keeps functioning when supply chains are disrupted. A country with sovereign digital infrastructure keeps its government, health system, and financial networks operational regardless of what happens offshore. Building at home is about resilience, not protectionism. Resilience is the foundation of long-term wealth.
SYOS Aerospace, a Tauranga company with around 100 engineers across New Zealand and the UK, has won more than NZ$67 million in UK Ministry of Defence contracts supplying autonomous surveillance technology, and is shortlisted for a further £100 million UK programme. In late June, the UK confirmed it is scrapping its planned new destroyers and frigates in favour of hybrid warships built to operate fleets of drones, the kind of autonomous capability SYOS supplies. That is a New Zealand company winning at the frontier of global defence technology.
Rocket Lab launches from Māhia Peninsula and is already the world’s second most prolific small-launch provider, validated by a series of US Department of Defence contracts. A New Zealand-operated satellite network built on Rocket Lab platforms gives us persistent awareness across our region and data infrastructure no foreign government can switch off.
Rocket Lab founder and CEO Sir Peter Beck with General Stephen Whiting, Commander of the US Department of Defense’s Space Command.
Estonia built a sovereign digital government platform two decades ago that is now used in more than 20 countries, cutting the cost of government while keeping national data on infrastructure it controls. New Zealand has the launch site, the engineering talent, and dozens of fragmented government departments that could anchor the same transformation.
The question is why our own government procurement agencies are not the first customer, and why we are not backing more companies like these at scale.
New Zealand has a diaspora of world-class engineers and founders who left because the opportunity did not exist here. Our choice is whether to build that opportunity or keep renting it from someone else.
Every dollar spent with a New Zealand firm creates a job today, builds long-term sovereign capability, and grows the kind of company that future New Zealand engineers stay for. A dollar sent to a US cloud provider, a European defence contractor, or a foreign IT platform builds their capability, not ours.
Ireland built a technology sector worth tens of billions in export revenue through deliberate policy: an Innovation Box tax structure that made Ireland the rational choice for IP location. New Zealand can make the same deliberate choice to be the place where the next generation of deep-tech companies is built and stays.
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It is time for government procurement to adopt one clear rule: invest in New Zealand first. Use public spending to grow New Zealand capability, not foreign capability. Back local energy, technology, manufacturing, and digital infrastructure, so every dollar builds skills, firms, and resilience that compound here.
Because this must endure beyond one Budget cycle, New Zealand needs a Sovereign Investment Bank to channel long-term capital into strategic assets, an institutional structure that backs the SYOS Aerospaces and Rocket Labs of the next generation before they incorporate somewhere else.
Every generation of New Zealanders inherits a country shaped by the decisions of the generation before. The choices made in 1950 put us third in the world. The decisions of the past 75 years have sent us drifting to 34th.
The next 25 years belong to us. Let’s invest in ourselves again.
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