Winston Peters’ infrastructure fund must be ‘depoliticised’ – investment expert

A proposal to introduce a $100 billion infrastructure fund is getting the thumbs up from a major KiwiSaver provider.

New Zealand First leader Winston Peters revealed his wishes for the “Future Fund” over the weekend, targeting multi-decade investment in infrastructure, ring-fenced to prevent political interference.

Simplicity managing director Sam Stubbs said the fund “fundamentally is a good idea”.

Peters referenced the Republic of Ireland and Singapore as examples where similar funds were in place, and Stubbs believed they were good examples to follow.

Sam Stubbs
Photo: Supplied / Simplicity

“Effectively, what they have done is they’ve taken a lot of their key infrastructure assets and rolled them into a big fund, and they’ve raised additional money to do more,” Stubbs said.

“The really important thing about that is you have a completely separate layer of governance over that fund, which means it’s effectively depoliticised,” he said.

In particular, Stubbs highlighted Singaporean government-owned investment firm Temasek, which invested in equities and also outright owned key infrastructure, including Singapore’s Changi Airport.

Stubbs said New Zealand could follow a similar model.

“It should be done here … by really rolling in a combination of the existing assets we already have, and the example might be the power companies.”

Stubbs said the fund could then raise money to invest in long-term infrastructure decisions.

He said for it to be successful, politicians would have to stay out of decision-making.

Stubbs added KiwiSaver fund managers, such as Simplicity, would be interested in partnering with a fund if the government chose to go down that path.

“We’re also long-term investors, so we would be ideal investment partners for the Future Fund,” he said.