National won't campaign on asset sales after earlier leaving door open

National won’t be campaigning on asset sales at this election, the party’s campaign chair Simeon Brown says.

Brown, also the State-Owned Enterprises (SOE) Minister, told the Herald today that National is ”not going to the election campaigning on asset sales”, although no formal policy has been released.

“Our focus is how do we make sure that we get good value out of our assets,” he said.

Brown and National leader Christopher Luxon this morning appeared to keep the door open to a policy on asset sales.

When asked whether National could campaign on that, Luxon told the Herald: “We haven’t announced any policies on that”.

Treasury has been considering the ownership purpose of state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

After the Government came to power, officials advised that there would be merit in considering the benefits and costs to the Crown of owning the entities and recommended the development of purpose statements that set out “the public policy reasons why the Crown owns that company”.

The Herald understands the minister has received no advice explicitly on the sale of any assets. But while the Government may not have received advice to sell assets, it may have been told there is no clear purpose to owning some.

Brown has not answered whether that is the case, twice speaking around the question today.

When asked in the morning whether Treasury had advised there was no need for the Government to own some assets, Brown responded: “They’ve provided advice on how we can make sure we’re getting good value for money and that’s been my focus”.

In the afternoon, he confirmed there had been no advice around asset sales, but didn’t address whether Treasury found there was no purpose in the Government owning them.

“So they’ve been through a piece of work looking at what the ownership purpose of pieces of assets should be. There’s been no advice around asset sales. My focus has been on how we can get the best out of our assets.”

National's Simeon Brown is the State-Owned Enterprises Minister. Photo / Anna Heath

David Seymour, the Act leader and associate Finance Minister who has previously spoken in favour of considering privatisation of some assets, told the Herald he was privy to the advice and said there needed to be a good reason to own the assets.

“If the Government is going to pay billions of dollars in interest on debt in order to own these businesses, it better have a good reason to own them,” he said.

“I think people have become far too precious about asking which things should the Government own. If it’s going to be paying debt and these companies don’t pay any kind of dividend to make up the debt, and they don’t actually have a clear public purpose for being owned by the Government, why are we paying the interest on the debt?”

He said there were a “number of state-owned enterprises” where “nobody can work out what the public interest in owning them is”.

“The Treasury has attempted to identify the public interest in owning many of these companies and there is no clear public interest in owning them.”

He said there needed to be a “mature conversation” about this.

“I think we should be asking ourselves, would we better to sell something that makes no money and actually use it to build a road, for example, that might actually help people get around, have new homes and have new jobs?”

Seymour said Treasury had identified “about a dozen” assets that had no public interest for ownership, but he couldn’t recall them off the top of his head.

The Herald asked Brown about Seymour’s comments, with the minister responding he had “received a range of advice around the purpose of different assets”. He didn’t say if he had received advice that there was no interest in the Government owning them.

“If you look around the world, most countries which have state-owned enterprises will have a purpose statement around what is the purpose of that asset, because that’s really important for the board to understand how it’s intending to operate, and how it’s intending to provide a benefit to the public of New Zealand who own those assets.”

Jamie Ensor is the NZ Herald’s chief political reporter, based in the press gallery at Parliament. He was previously a TV reporter and digital producer in the Newshub press gallery office. He was a finalist in 2025 for Political Journalist of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards.