The final week of the campaign has produced an unusual consensus. Financial advisers, independent economists, the business lobby and the mainstream business press are all saying the same thing without coordinating: the promises on offer are built for the next six months, while New Zealand’s problems are measured in decades.
In a 1News analysis of the campaign, Kernel CEO Dean Anderson put it bluntly: “We’re having a lot of conversation about the here and now, who’s got the right solution for the next six months and next twelve months, but nobody’s actually just presenting what is the vision for New Zealand.” The NZ Herald has called low productivity the economic elephant in the room that election pledges mostly avoid.
For business, the question is not who offers the sweetest rebate. It is who has a plan for the settings that actually determine whether firms invest here.
KiwiSaver shows what tinkering costs
KiwiSaver turns 20 next year. Nearly every party has proposed changes this election, yet none has proposed a comprehensive review. The cost of piecemeal policy is already visible: since the $1000 kickstart for new members was scrapped, youth membership among under-18s has halved from roughly 30% to 15%. Massey University’s Professor Claire Matthews told the same outlet that constant change is itself the problem: “Every time it gets tinkered with, it undermines the public’s confidence in it.”
That matters beyond retirement savings. As property loses its lustre as the default wealth vehicle, household capital is drifting toward managed funds and shares. A well-designed, stable KiwiSaver system is one of the few tools New Zealand has to deepen its notoriously shallow capital markets. Treating it as a vote-winning dial undermines that.
Relief now, bill later
Asked what politicians can actually do about the cost of living, Infometrics’ Brad Olsen told the Waikato Times: “Not easily. If it was that easy, surely we would have done it by now.” Independent economist Shamubeel Eaqub warned of a “fiscal cul-de-sac” in which governments borrow for relief with no repayment plan: “We just do the giving part. We don’t do the taking back part.” NZIER’s Ting Huang likened unfunded relief to a credit card and cautioned that poorly designed subsidies can feed the very inflation the Reserve Bank is fighting.
The credit card is not empty, but it is not paid off either. Treasury’s accounts for the year to June 2026 show an OBEGALx deficit of $8.7 billion, or 1.9% of GDP, with net core Crown debt at 40.9% of GDP and $186.8 billion in dollar terms. The longer view is worse. Treasury’s 2025 long-term fiscal statement projected that under unchanged policy debt would climb toward roughly 200% of GDP by 2065, as the ratio of working-age people to retirees falls from 4:1 to 2:1. Every rebate announced this month is being written against that backdrop.
Productivity is the issue nobody is campaigning on
The Herald’s list of structural weaknesses reads like a business owner’s frustrations: low wages, weak competition, slipping education results, slow technology uptake, high energy costs and planning barriers to investment.
Treasury has already diagnosed the core of it. In February 2026, then-Treasury Secretary Iain Rennie said New Zealand’s capital intensity sits at roughly 50% of OECD comparators, and that the problem is concentrated in frontier firms, the top 10% of companies, which lag their OECD peers. Returns to skills have been declining since 2015 despite heavy education spending. That is not a problem a fuel subsidy touches.
BusinessNZ has written the scorecard
The most useful document of the campaign may be BusinessNZ’s. Chief economist John Pask frames it around a simple reality: “Capital is mobile. Highly skilled workers are mobile.” Businesses choosing where to build their next factory, data centre or lab have options.
His asks are specific. A staged cut in the 28% company tax rate toward the OECD average of 24.1%, alongside Overseas Investment Act reform. A lift to the 15% R&D Tax Incentive, with business R&D at 0.98% of GDP against an OECD average of 2%, a gap Pask estimates would take about 75 years to close at current rates. And an energy strategy that delivers affordable, reliable power.
Pask’s test is the right one: “does this make New Zealand a more attractive place to invest, work and create?” Run the current crop of promises through it and very few pass.
What business should be voting on
None of the long-horizon fixes economists keep pointing to, stronger competition law, more generation, a competitive tax and R&D regime, a stable savings system, will deliver within a single term. That is precisely why they get crowded out by cash-in-hand pledges.
Business owners should judge the parties on medium-term settings, not the size of the cheque. Whoever forms the next government will inherit a 20-year productivity problem and a deteriorating long-run fiscal outlook. The rebate will be spent by Christmas. The investment decisions made because of, or despite, the next three years of policy will last a generation.
Sources
- 1News: Are NZ politicians taking a quick-fix approach to an economy with deeper problems? (2026-10-31)
- NZ Herald: Low productivity is New Zealand’s economic elephant in the room. Election pledges mostly avoid it (2026-11-01)
- Waikato Times: ‘Let’s get real for a second’: Economists on what, if anything, politicians can do to tackle cost of living pressures (2026-10-26)
- Treasury: He Tirohanga Mokopuna – Long-term Fiscal Statement 2025 (2025-09)
- Treasury: Choices for the next term, pathways for the next decade – Keynote address by Iain Rennie (2026-02-13)
- BusinessNZ: NZ’s window to build a more competitive economy (2026-11-01)
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