{"id":100833,"date":"2025-10-25T19:06:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-25T19:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/100833\/"},"modified":"2025-10-25T19:06:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-25T19:06:08","slug":"labours-future-fund-has-kiwibuild-vibes-heather-du-plessis-allan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/100833\/","title":{"rendered":"Labour\u2019s Future Fund has KiwiBuild vibes – Heather du Plessis-Allan"},"content":{"rendered":"

The story goes that Labour originally planned to announce 50,000 new houses but that wasn\u2019t sexy enough. So, they doubled it. And that\u2019s how 100,000 houses were promised. It became one of the big policies that Jacinda Ardern took to Government<\/a> in 2017.<\/p>\n

But \u2013 you know how the story goes \u2013 as with most numbers plucked out of the air, it didn\u2019t work. Turns out deciding 100,000 is not the same as delivering 100,000.<\/p>\n

This new Future Fund policy<\/a> has similar imaginary vibes about it.<\/p>\n

Labour\u2019s idea here is to ring-fence a bunch of Crown assets into a fund. <\/p>\n

They\u2019re refusing to name which assets but if you\u2019re thinking about the three partially floated energy companies, I feel like you might be about right. <\/p>\n

The dividends from those assets would then be used by the fund to invest into infrastructure and Kiwi businesses.<\/p>\n

But somewhere between Labour emailing out the Future Fund policy document, jumping in the taxi and heading off to announce it all to the media, they seem to have realised they had forgotten to include seed funding.<\/p>\n

And suddenly there was a figure of $200m. There is no $200m in the documents. But there was $200m in the announcement.<\/p>\n

Would it be crazy to suggest that they plucked it out of thin air? Been done before.<\/p>\n

To quote my BusinessDesk colleague Pattrick Smellie: Labour will have to do a whole lot better than this.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t 2017, Dr Ropata. I suspect voters aren\u2019t going to fall for made-up numbers and half-baked ideas quite so easily again. Especially not when it\u2019s the same smiling face of Chris Hipkins in the line-up of the salesmen again.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think it\u2019s unfair to say Labour got an easier ride in 2017<\/a> than they will in 2025.<\/p>\n

Eight years ago, the Nats had already been given the traditional fair suck of the sav with three terms. The economy was good. We could afford to take a bit of a risk on the Government. And that Jacinda was just so lovely.<\/p>\n

In 2025, none of that is the case. It\u2019s too early to have forgotten six years of a Labour Government over-promising and under-delivering. Life is not as cheap. There is not as much room for risk. The Government is broke. The numbers better add up, and the ideas better be good.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say National gets an easy ride. No one does.<\/p>\n

Labour\u2019s done a good job on the Future Fund policy\u2019s slogans. Backing New Zealand\u2019s potential.<\/a> Investing in our future. Giving people a reason to stay. But 100,000 new homes was a great slogan too.<\/p>\n

There are still some gnarly questions to answer. Like, where is Labour going to find about half a billion dollars a year? Because that\u2019s roughly the value of the power companies\u2019 dividends. If that money is going into the fund, then it\u2019s not going into the government coffers to pay for hospitals and classrooms.<\/p>\n

Is it the dreaded capital gains tax? Let\u2019s see how voters like that idea.<\/p>\n

Like I say, it was easy to promise 100,000 KiwiBuild houses, but they were never built. It\u2019s also easy to promise that putting $200m into the Future Fund will make NZ rich. It probably won\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Catch up on the debates that dominated the week by signing up to our Opinion newsletter<\/a> \u2013 a weekly round-up of our best commentary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The story goes that Labour originally planned to announce 50,000 new houses but that wasn\u2019t sexy enough. So,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100834,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6630,3278,295,3273,6871,10900,73733,27699,111,43,139,69,10901,53839],"class_list":["post-100833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-du","tag-facts","tag-fund","tag-future","tag-has","tag-heather","tag-kiwibuild","tag-labours","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-plessisallan","tag-vibes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}