Paul Newfield, the Sydney-based CEO of Morrison – a New Zealand global investment firm with more than US$25 billion in assets under management – is also on the Prime Minister’s speed dial: “He’s been really generous with his time.”
Newfield joined the Prime Minister at investor roundtables during Luxon’s visits to Southeast Asia and Japan last year. He also played a pivotal role in ensuring that global investment players came down to Auckland for the Prime Minister’s inaugural New Zealand Infrastructure Investment Summit in March, pulling in the New Zealand Superannuation Fund and KiwiSaver funds to advise them on the local environment before the event.
“I’m wanting to make sure that we have Kiwis like Paul and Mark involved,” says Luxon. “These are New Zealanders that are really plugged in. They are well-respected across the world.”
Labelling the coalition Government’s quest to increase foreign direct investment the “hunt for equity” is not a misnomer.
As the Prime Minister puts it, the kind of people his Government wants to attract to staff up Invest New Zealand – a new standalone agency – are “actual hunters”. “It’s people who want to go hunting for deals. They know how to build relationships. It’s a sales role that’s quite a different reality from what we’ve historically had in the government sector.”
He wants to find people who are very passionate about New Zealand and are “happy to come and work at Invest NZ”. For his part, he plans to continue building relationships and connections to powerful sovereign wealth funds which can pony up sufficient investment for big-ticket infrastructure.
He also wants to engage a different mindset at the board of Invest New Zealand. “I want that to be a very different profile of people who are deeply committed and have connections to those sovereign wealth funds, in particular in different parts of the world.
“So it wouldn’t just be New Zealanders that would be domiciled here in New Zealand, but New Zealanders that have access to the Australian funds and to the UAE and Middle Eastern markets, and obviously into Asia as well.”
Luxon is in his forte when it comes to talking to representatives from other governments whose political leaders come from typically executive backgrounds – such as Singapore’s Lawrence Wong, an economist turned CEO before entering politics, or, Canada’s Mark Carney who, after leaving a central banking career which saw him rise to serve as Governor of the Bank of England from 2013-2020, went on to become chair and head of impact investing at Brookfield Asset Management, and chair of the board of directors for Bloomberg L.P.
He told the Herald he had found that when he sat down with an investment fund or investment minister in the United Arab Emirates, “we can talk the same language”.
“It is unique language and we’ve tended to focus so much on the commercial language on exports, but actually deal-making and finance and funding is different.
“So, having these kinds of people who are well-connected and well-respected by sovereign wealth funds internationally, and understand that world well, is what we really need, rather than just some of the generic, general commercial orientations.”
NZ Infrastructure Investment Summit
Luxon is chuffed that the Infrastructure Investment summit was a success. The invitation-only event brought together global investors worth a combined $6 trillion with more than 100 senior executives including domestic infrastructure investors, financiers, construction, asset management and consultancy companies – alongside major political parties and iwi.
“I was really proud to have had the idea nine months ago to execute and put on a world-class summit,” Luxon says.
“We got outstanding feedback and I was proud of my ministers, that we were all very aligned.
“I’d asked them deliberately to be very focused over the two days to talk to the investors, to build those relationships and I thought they all did an exceptionally good job.”
Moving beyond the summit
As the Prime Minister’s attention turns to leveraging the summit connections to bring investment into New Zealand and fuel growth, he is focused on the nature of our capital markets which he believes are seriously undercooked.
“Yes, we want to double exports. But yes, we also want to seriously step-change our foreign direct investment into New Zealand, particularly in productivity enhancing infrastructure projects.
“From my perspective, you’re seeing things like the British funds, in particular, investing in solar for renewable energy projects here in New Zealand as part of that green energy. There’s data centres and a whole bunch of other things as well.
“Certainly the pipeline of projects that we talked about at the summit, whether it’s the toll roading situation, or hospitals or schools, there’s a real package of that.
“So, I really want to be focused on accessing those big sovereign wealth funds for investment in core infrastructure in New Zealand.”
The Prime Minister says a secondary focus will be on the Active Investor Visa for high net worth individuals and likely to be much more smaller scale projects.
He says they will be concierged – basically on the Irish and Singaporean model.
