Published in The Australian (Sydney), 28 September 2026
When law firms advise foreign clients on investing in New Zealand, they usually include some version of the same paragraph. It describes the country as a stable democracy with independent courts, secure property rights and predictable politics, and for decades nobody had to think twice before writing it.
Last week, a lawyer at one of the leading firms told me his team is advising an overseas client on an investment here. They have just toned that paragraph down, he said, because it is no longer true. That is not because the law has changed, but because promises made by various parties during the campaign for the 7 November election would undermine property rights.
This should interest Australians, whose companies own all four of New Zealand’s big banks and one of its two big supermarket groups.
A country’s reputation for the rule of law does not depend solely on current law itself. It can be damaged be political signalling alone.
On 23 September, The New Zealand Initiative, the think tank I run, published an open letter from 51 business leaders asking every party to respect private property and freedom of contract. We wrote that “threats can discourage investment before any law changes”. I had not expected a law firm to echo our concerns so directly.
National, the largest party in the governing coalition, wants to break up Foodstuffs, the locally owned grocery co-operatives. It would put Foodstuff’s New World supermarkets and Four Square corner stores into one company and its Pak’nSave discount warehouses into another.
Labour prefers to split the co-operatives’ wholesale business from their stores, while the Greens would buy 120 supermarkets, compulsorily, and run them as a state chain.
The Greens and New Zealand First also want to restructure the power companies, which both generate and sell electricity. The Greens would cancel mining permits already granted. Labour will not rule out cancelling exploration permits. Of the main parties, only the free-market ACT party wants none of this.
Older New Zealanders will find all this familiar.
As prime minister until 1984, Rob Muldoon froze wages, prices and rents, and never hesitated to intervene in a market he did not like. The reforms after his defeat made New Zealand famous for giving up interventionism. Now the old toolkit is back, with more support across parliament than Muldoon ever had.
Awkwardly, this is happening under a government that appointed New Zealand’s first minister for foreign direct investment. Last year it set up Invest New Zealand, modelled on Ireland’s investment agency, to tell the world that New Zealand would be “saying yes to investment”.
Two of its three coalition parties are now campaigning on a rather different message.
Investors are used to rules changing. They can live with a new tax or a tougher regulation because they can factor it in. But a government prepared to reach back into what people already own is a different matter, because nobody can put a price on that.
The government’s new retirement village rules, announced in September, will force operators to repay departing residents within nine months, but only under contracts signed a year after the law takes effect.
Labour wants three months, and it wants the rule to cover all 56,000 existing residents as well. It is a popular promise: more than 41,000 people signed a Consumer NZ petition for a three-month limit. Operators say repayments currently take seven to eight months on average.
Existing contracts were priced on terms both sides agreed, with operators repaying a departing resident once the next one had moved in and paid. Rewriting them retrospectively would force operators to find the money before a unit is resold, and they warn that residents would end up paying for it.
A mine or a power station takes decades to pay for itself, so investors in a country that votes every three years have to trust that the rules will survive many changes of government.
For Australian investors, the signals are confusing. Australian companies own all four of New Zealand’s big banks and one of its two big supermarket groups.
New Zealand First wants to buy one of those banks, BNZ, from National Australia Bank and merge it with the state-owned Kiwibank. The party’s leader, Winston Peters, puts the price at more than $7.5 billion. Never mind that NAB has said BNZ is not for sale.
Chris Bishop, one of National’s most senior ministers, called the idea a “fantastical proposition”. That may be so. But it is New Zealand First policy, and National may depend on the party to form the next government. Peters, whose party is in cabinet, insists: “This is not nationalisation – this is taking back our country.”
With supermarkets, it is the other way round. Neither National’s plan nor Labour’s would touch the Australian-owned Woolworths. Both are aimed at the local co-operatives.
And so, in banking, being Australian makes you a target, while in supermarkets it makes you a bystander.
Far more people were asked to sign our letter than eventually did, and several of those who signed gave their names but not their employers’. In some industries, nobody was willing to sign at all.
Many of those who declined told me: “I couldn’t agree more, but I can’t sign this.”
In a country of five million people, the minister whose policy you have just criticised is someone you will deal with again soon, possibly when they are deciding how next to intervene in your industry. The same goes for the opposition spokesperson, who could be the minister after 7 November. You cannot run away from politicians here.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis complains that she has “felt the full force” of supermarket lobbying. In this campaign, though, the pressure runs the other way. It is politicians who are picking out individual companies, because attacking supermarkets and banks wins votes when grocery bills and mortgage payments hurt. Anyone who argues back risks becoming the next target.
That is the backdrop against which New Zealand law firms must now advise foreign clients on how safe it is to invest here. That advice is less reassuring than it used to be. It will not improve on 7 November, whoever wins, because most of the parties have already told investors the lines they are willing to cross.
