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# Political flip-flopping puts long-term investment at risk – Partridge
- URL: https://goodoil.news/political-flip-flopping-puts-long-term-investment-at-risk-partridge/
- Published: 2025-05-07T08:24:16.000Z
- Updated: 2025-05-07T23:21:51.000Z
- Description: “Even ministers now recognise that policy unpredictability has become a genuine investment risk.”
- Author: Centrist
- Tags: News

Summarised by [Centrist](https://www.centrist.nz/?ref=goodoil.news)

**Policy instability is becoming a serious threat to New Zealand’s long-term prosperity, argues New Zealand Initiative chair Roger Partridge.** 

**Partridge warns that repeated U-turns on major regulations are eroding investor confidence and fuelling a homegrown version of sovereign risk – not through debt defaults or nationalisation, but via policy reversals, judicial activism, and weak protections for long-term projects.**

“Even ministers now recognise that policy unpredictability has become a genuine investment risk,” Partridge writes. “A New Zealand minister is contemplating taxpayer-funded insurance to compensate companies against … the decisions of future New Zealand Governments.”

While the current coalition has moved to restore confidence by repealing Labour’s resource laws, creating a Ministry of Regulation, and backing property rights, Partridge says mixed signals remain. 

Nicola Willis’s comments about potentially breaking up supermarket duopolies, and the sudden MBIE review of Auckland Airport’s $6.6b upgrade plan, have not helped. 

“If large, long-term infrastructure investments can suddenly find their regulatory environment reopened, what certainty does any project have?” Partridge asks. 

He lists the offshore oil and gas exploration ban in 2018 as a turning point: “announced without consultation, \[it\] upended a sector built on long investment horizons.” 

That decision led companies to quietly withdraw from New Zealand, re-routing capital to more stable jurisdictions.

He warns that New Zealand’s broader regulatory credibility is now on the line: “New Zealand’s prosperity was built on a reputation for good governance, secure property rights, fiscal prudence, and regulatory stability. That reputation remains an invaluable national asset – but it is not immune to erosion.”

“What matters most is not stasis, but discipline: recognising that how policies are changed can matter as much as what policies are changed,” he argues. 

[**Read more over at The NZ Herald**](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/economy/political-flip-flopping-is-threatening-nzs-ability-to-build-long-term-infrastructure-roger-partridge/BCUGIKTCTBAWTOHY6R2ZMQUFAU/?utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=email) **(paywalled)**

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