Solution thinking for Nz

New Zealand Is Not “Too Small” or “Too Poor” - It Is Captured. But in our capture lie the keys to our free prosperity.

New Zealand’s political class keeps telling us the same fairy tale: there’s no money, we must be careful, markets know best, government should get out of the way.

And yet, year after year, the cost of living rises faster than wages, infrastructure rots, housing becomes unreachable, and young New Zealanders leave in waves.

This is not misfortune.

It is not incompetence.

It is not inevitability.

It is capture.

The Great Lie: That This Is “Classical Economics”

ACT, much of National, and large parts of Treasury wrap themselves in the language of “classical economics” and “free markets”. This is intellectual fraud.

Adam Smith did not defend monopoly.

David Ricardo did not celebrate rent extraction.

John Stuart Mill explicitly warned that land rents and inherited privilege would hollow out society.

Classical political economy was concerned with one thing above all: productive economies that lowered the cost of living and the cost of doing business. That meant:

• Suppressing monopoly and cartel behaviour

• Preventing rent-seeking (especially from land and natural monopolies)

• Building public works the market cannot or will not provide

• Ensuring finance serves production, not extraction

That is the opposite of what New Zealand now does.

What We Actually Have: Rentier Economics with a Smile

Let’s be blunt. Let’s be honest.

ACT is not a “free market” party. It is a rent-defence party — defending landlords, privatised monopolies, financial intermediaries, and regulatory loopholes, while pretending this is liberty. Thats why its founder, Roger Douglas, denounced and renounced it as a “a party for the wealthy”.

National knows better, but governs as if it doesn’t - outsourcing strategy to Treasury, treating infrastructure as a liability, and calling asset sales “prudence”. If betrayal had a brand, it would be national.

Labour, when in power, talks left and governs right - preserving the same financial architecture while sprinkling redistribution on top and “wondering”(?) why nothing structurally improves. Until they talk investment and call out treasury’s trap, they are no option either.

Treasury functions as an unelected ideological priesthood, enforcing a model that treats public investment as dangerous, while private leverage and foreign ownership balloon unchecked.

While their priesthood celebrates and demands more of the same medicine it prescribes; treasury also says our economic trajectory is unsustainable. Incoherently demanding more of the same poisonous remedies based on its deliberately miswritten economic cook book

The result is not a market economy.

It is a rentier economy.

Land prices inflate.

Debt expands.

Infrastructure lags.

Productivity stalls.

Young people leave.

And then politicians look puzzled and say: “global headwinds.”

We deserve better.

Housing Is Not a Market Failure - It Is a Policy Choice

If you want one proof that the current model is fraudulent, look at housing.

Housing is excluded from the CPI in any meaningful way.

Land - the single biggest driver of household cost stress - is treated as a speculative asset rather than a common foundation.

This is not accidental.

Land rent is the oldest monopoly rent known to political economy. Smith, Ricardo, Mill — all understood it. New Zealand ignores it, because confronting land rent would mean confronting the wealth base of Parliament itself.

So instead, we get:

• Immigration used as a demand lever

• Infrastructure lagging behind population growth

• Credit poured into existing assets instead of new capacity

• Families told they are “lucky” to be indebted for life

• “Jobs” instead of proper royalties for our nations assets and resources.

That is not economics.

That is feudalism with spreadsheets.

“There Is No Money” - The Most Dangerous Myth

New Zealand is monetarily sovereign. It issues its own currency. It does not need to “find” money before investing in productive capacity.

Every serious development success of the modern era understood this:

• The US built rail, power, industry, and housing with public credit.

• Japan and South Korea used directed credit and public investment to build export capacity.

• Even China’s hybrid model rests on sovereign control of finance and infrastructure.

They did not do this by “letting the market decide”.

They did it by disciplining markets in the public interest.

It’s called prudential regulation. As in, ‘prudent’. As in Adam Smiths “virtue and prudence”, his keystone of political economy.

New Zealand, by contrast, treats private banks as sacred and public investment as suspect. We’ve been advised, and discouraged, from taking responsibility for meeting our own needs.

In a very real sense, we have been pumped out to ‘the market’ by those entrusted with our nations care.

That inversion is the core of our decline.

The Security Dimension Politicians Refuse to Acknowledge

This is not just about prosperity. It is about national security.

A country that cannot house its people, maintain infrastructure, or retain skilled citizens is not secure.

A country dependent on foreign capital for essential assets is not sovereign.

A country that allows natural monopolies to be privatised without discipline is strategically reckless.

We are entering an era of geopolitical fragmentation, supply-chain stress, climate volatility, and energy constraint - and New Zealand is governed as if it’s still 1995 and the party will never end.

That is negligence. At best.

A Credible Path Forward (No Utopias Required)

This does not require revolution. It requires remembering what works.

1. Rebuild public investment capacity. Treat infrastructure, housing services, energy, human capital and water as nation-building assets, not balance-sheet annoyances.

2. Discipline monopoly and rent extraction Especially land, utilities, banking margins, and vertically integrated sectors.

3. Redirect credit toward productivity Less mortgage churn, more investment in skills, manufacturing, energy, and innovation, engineering.

4. Integrate fiscal and monetary policy.

   The artificial separation imposed since the 1980s serves finance, not the public. 90% of money created in nzs economy is bank created; snd unproductively used for speculation in housing. successful countries invest in themselves.

5. Tell the truth About money creation. About land. About who benefits from the status quo.

The Choice in Front of Us

New Zealand can continue down the current path:

high rents, low productivity, social fracture, youth flight, and strategic weakness - all wrapped in comforting blanket of Lies.

Or it can reclaim a tradition older and wiser than today’s dogmas:

an economy that serves life, not rent.

That is not socialism.

That is not extremism.

That is classical political economy, applied honestly. It’s also civic virtue, civic duty, public service, responsibility, applied Christianity. It’s not performative. It’s real and vital and needed.

And the longer our leaders pretend otherwise, the more obvious it becomes that the problem is not complexity - it is courage.

Knowledge is power. Together we should demand better. Because by their own metrics, our Treasury has failed us; and its policies have been rejected by the IMF, BIS, and Bank of England. Yet still they push their poison.

Let’s improve things.

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Happy Christmas