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\nLabour leader Chris Hipkins launching the party’s first key election policy this term.
\nPhoto: RNZ \/ Marika Khabazi\n<\/p>\n
Analysis – Labour’s new Future Fund proposal<\/a> is as much about optics as economics – a bid to claw back some credibility and to seize control of the looming tax debate.<\/p>\n But the distinct lack of detail has left Labour somewhat exposed, evoking echoes of other ambitious projects that fizzled, like KiwiBuild or the Green Investment Fund.<\/p>\n The proposed fund would be seeded with the dividends of selected state-owned assets and a $200 million Crown capital injection, mandated to invest only in New Zealand businesses and infrastructure.<\/p>\n Party strategists are alert to the outsized significance of the policy, aware it would attract more attention and scrutiny given Labour’s policy vacuum this term<\/a>.<\/p>\n It seeks to tap into a sense of national pride and long-term stewardship at a time of economic pessimism: “Our future should be built by us, for us.”<\/p>\n Politically, it gives Labour something to point to as a sort of economic vision, after a long stretch of being accused of lacking one, and draws a comparison with National which is more open to asset sales or growth through foreign investment.<\/p>\n Note also the deliberate pitch to business – that promise of “partnership” – as it seeks to rebuild credibility in the boardrooms it lost before last election. Infrastructure NZ has offered early support to the plan.<\/p>\n Labour leader Chris Hipkins has not shied from his party’s flawed record but rather tried to draw a line under it.<\/p>\n “We’ve heard the lesson of last term: too much, too fast, not enough finished,” the policy document concedes. “The next Labour Government will be different.”<\/p>\n Hipkins hopes to recast Labour as a builder rather than a spender – a party focused on growing the economy, not just taxing and redistributing it.<\/p>\n And there is the other objective: preparing the ground for Labour’s long-awaited tax policy, expected later this month.<\/p>\n The document makes it explicit: “Tax can’t be the government’s only source of income. It’s time to build new ways of generating national wealth for the benefit of everyone.”<\/p>\n That’s deliberate framing and a signal Labour wants to talk about growing the pie, not just slicing it differently.<\/p>\n Of course, the coalition parties would far rather talk about Labour’s plan to gobble it up – and no amount of groundwork will stop that.<\/p>\n All three have been scathing in their response to the “Future Fund” proposal, but for different reasons.<\/p>\n National rubbished it as “twelve pages of total fluff,” describing the lack of costings as a “total joke”. Party attack dog Chris Bishop quipped he put more effort into his Uber Eats orders.<\/p>\n ACT labelled it a “boondoggle” and pointed to the Green Investment Fund’s failed backing of Solar Zero.<\/p>\n