Christchurch City Council has appointed Australian investment bank Macquarie to conduct an ownership review of Enable Networks, the council-owned fibre broadband company valued at approximately $900 million. The backlash was immediate and entirely predictable. Critics say the review lacks democratic mandate. Supporters say the council cannot keep deferring a serious question about capital allocation while debt piles up and rates keep climbing.
This is not a new debate. It is the same debate, running for its third or fourth lap, and the pattern is now so entrenched it should be studied as a case in municipal governance paralysis.
A regulated utility sitting on ratepayer balance sheets
Enable Networks provides fibre broadband across Christchurch, Waimakariri and Selwyn. It was built substantially on the Government’s Ultra-Fast Broadband initiative, with Crown Fibre Holdings funding approximately 67% of network construction costs. The company operates under Commerce Commission regulation, with a determined vanilla WACC of 7.87% for disclosure year 2024. It is, in other words, a regulated utility with predictable but capped returns, exactly the kind of asset institutional infrastructure investors pay top dollar for.
The council holds 100% of it. That means ratepayers carry 100% of the residual risk on a $900 million asset in a sector the council has no particular expertise in, in a city sitting above a major fault line.
The debt problem nobody wants to connect
Christchurch City Council’s gross debt has reached $2.66 billion, with debt repayments consuming $138 million annually, or 20 cents of every dollar of rates collected. The council’s own 2025 Annual Report shows it missed its balanced budget benchmark in 2021, 2024 and 2025, and breached its debt servicing benchmark in 2020, 2024 and 2025, primarily due to interest costs on borrowing for onlending to its holding company CCHL.
The council’s self-imposed limit for net debt to total revenue is 285%. It is not there yet. The trajectory is not comforting.
Mayor Phil Mauger himself made the case for asset recycling in 2023, suggesting the council should “sell down half of something and recycle that money and put it into other assets that’s somewhere else, say like Tauranga port” to reduce geographic concentration risk. The Northington Partners review he commissioned warned about almost all CCHL assets being concentrated in Christchurch.
The cycle that never breaks
The history is worth recounting because the pattern is the point.
In the early 2010s, the council voted to place Enable on its strategic assets list, requiring public consultation before any sale. The council also had a policy to sell $600 million of assets but only attempted to sell City Care, which failed to find a buyer.
Mauger won the 2022 mayoralty on an explicit promise: “I wouldn’t sell the family silver, which is our Christchurch companies.” Within two months, he and nine councillors voted to develop detailed business cases for potentially selling down assets. When asked directly if he would rule out sales, Mauger said: “Probably not.”
In November 2023, councillors were called to a closed-door workshop and asked for a show of hands on their preferred options, with briefing documents provided just before the meeting. Councillor Yani Johanson called for “as much transparency as possible given the significant public interest”. By December, after the CEO and CFO both resigned, councillors voted 8-7 against ceding control of assets to CCHL. The push collapsed.
Now Macquarie is at the table and the democratic mandate objection is back.
Democratic mandate as permanent deferral
The objection is not frivolous. Mauger did campaign against sales and then pivoted. Former mayoral candidate John Minto says “the majority of people in Christchurch have repeatedly opposed asset sales at every turn”. That is probably true.
But the democratic mandate argument, as currently deployed, does not just block sales. It blocks the review. It blocks the question. Kevin Lamb’s point is blunt: “Councils aren’t in the business of providing that service. This is 100 percent ownership with 100 percent risk to ratepayers.”
Mauger’s own framing is revealing. He has invoked Alpine Fault resilience as the reason to retain the port, airport and Orion: “We’re going to need control of our port. We’re going to need control of our airport. We’re going to need control of Orion because they are the things that are going to keep us going.” Enable does not appear in that list.
What this means for Christchurch businesses
The Canterbury Chamber of Commerce has called for the council to review asset ownership and investigate whether strategic partners could improve returns. That is not a radical position. It is basic portfolio management.
Every year the council avoids answering the Enable question is another year of rates rising to service $2.66 billion in debt, with $900 million in capital locked up in a regulated broadband utility that an institutional investor would happily pay a premium for. The democratic mandate argument has become a mechanism for indefinite deferral, and the people paying for that deferral are Christchurch ratepayers and the businesses that depend on a council capable of investing in the infrastructure the city actually needs.
Sources
- Newsroom: Review of $900m council-owned firm ‘lacks democratic mandate’ (2026-04-13)
- RNZ: Chch Council moves to protect broadband company from sale
- Newsroom: Christchurch mayor backtracks on asset sales (2023-08-16)
- Newsroom: ‘Flip and flop’ mayor gives latest take on asset sales (2025-09-12)
- Newsroom: Christchurch councillors’ secret show of hands on selling city assets (2023-11-14)
- Commerce Commission: Cost of capital determination for Enable Networks Limited (2023-08-01)
- Commerce Commission: Enable LFC initial ID RAB response (2022-12-09)
- Christchurch City Council: Annual Report 2025 Volume 2 (2025)
- BusinessDesk: Christchurch council-commissioned review suggests asset sales