Labour’s Future Fund has KiwiBuild vibes - Heather du Plessis-Allan

Labour Leader Chris Hipkins. Photo / Anna Heath

THE FACTS

• Labour’s new Future Fund policy has been criticised for being rushed and lacking detail.
• The policy involves using Crown asset dividends for infrastructure and business investment.
• Labour has said there will be an upfront capital contribution of $200 million.

Labour’s shiny new policy announced this week has distinct KiwiBuild vibes about it.

It’s in the sense the thing has been rushed. Not properly thought through. Almost as if it’s been dreamt up in the backseat of a car. Which is pretty much how KiwiBuild came to be.

KiwiBuild, famously, came from a car ride Annette King took with someone from the Sallies. Labour needed a policy for the 2012 conference in a few months. The guy from the Salvation Army had an idea. He shared it. When he next looked, his idea had become The Big Announcement at the conference.

The story goes that Labour originally planned to announce 50,000 new houses but that wasn’t sexy enough. So, they doubled it. And that’s how 100,000 houses were promised. It became one of the big policies that Jacinda Ardern took to Government in 2017.

But – you know how the story goes – as with most numbers plucked out of the air, it didn’t work. Turns out deciding 100,000 is not the same as delivering 100,000.

This new Future Fund policy has similar imaginary vibes about it.

Labour’s idea here is to ring-fence a bunch of Crown assets into a fund.

They’re refusing to name which assets but if you’re thinking about the three partially floated energy companies, I feel like you might be about right.

The dividends from those assets would then be used by the fund to invest into infrastructure and Kiwi businesses.

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.

And suddenly there was a figure of $200m. There is no $200m in the documents. But there was $200m in the announcement.

Would it be crazy to suggest that they plucked it out of thin air? Been done before.

To quote my BusinessDesk colleague Pattrick Smellie: Labour will have to do a whole lot better than this.

This isn’t 2017, Dr Ropata. I suspect voters aren’t going to fall for made-up numbers and half-baked ideas quite so easily again. Especially not when it’s the same smiling face of Chris Hipkins in the line-up of the salesmen again.

I don’t think it’s unfair to say Labour got an easier ride in 2017 than they will in 2025.

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.

In 2025, none of that is the case. It’s 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.

That’s not to say National gets an easy ride. No one does.

Labour’s done a good job on the Future Fund policy’s slogans. Backing New Zealand’s potential. Investing in our future. Giving people a reason to stay. But 100,000 new homes was a great slogan too.

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

Is it the dreaded capital gains tax? Let’s see how voters like that idea.

Like I say, it was easy to promise 100,000 KiwiBuild houses, but they were never built. It’s also easy to promise that putting $200m into the Future Fund will make NZ rich. It probably won’t.

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