Wise Counsel of a Palliative Care Nurse: Living an Authentic Life

Article #467

Australian palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware spent eight years at the bedside of the dying, sitting with people through the last weeks of their lives. She recorded what she heard; first in a 2009 blog post, later in a book read by millions in more than 30 languages. The most common regret? "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."

As someone who has spent decades stewarding Hawke's Bay families through business succession and long-term planning, it’s a familiar refrain. We build empires of assets, careers and obligations, and somewhere along the way we drift from the authentic life we once envisioned.

The dying don't speak of missed promotions, bigger houses or the perfect investment return. They speak of roads not taken because they followed someone else's script - years spent chasing approval from parents, peers and society, or the expectations that attach themselves to a "successful" professional life. In our community and line of work, that pressure is real. Family businesses carry generational weight. Clients arrive burdened with keeping up appearances, maintaining the farm, the firm, or the lifestyle their circle demands.

Ware had a patient called Grace. Grace felt pressured to remain in an unhappy marriage; when freedom finally arrived, terminal illness arrived with it. She regretted not finding the courage sooner. It’s not so different to tales of the local farmer who poured decades into the land his father expected him to inherit, and never pursued the enterprise he truly dreamed of. Authenticity isn't rebellion for its own sake. It is the quiet courage to choose what endures.

Ware’s patients often realised too late that even close family members had little idea of their innermost dreams. The same disconnect can appear in professional relationships. Many assume their advisers fully understand their plans and values – typically, that isn't the case. It’s one thing to know a client's balance sheet, and quite another to know what they are building it for.

“I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”

According to Ware, this second came from every male patient she nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. We tell ourselves the long hours are for the family, the security, the future. Yet when time is running low, we realise time itself is the one asset we cannot replenish or reallocate.

Here in Hawke's Bay – after cyclones, economic pressures and rates burdens – many of us have doubled down on work as a form of control. But true stewardship requires balance. Succession planning isn't as simple as handing over the keys. It's ensuring the next generation inherits not just wealth, but the example of a life well-lived. My own son’s interest in commerce is encouraging, yet he needs space to find his own path, including time overseas, before stepping into any role. The same goes for our daughter as she gains independence.

"I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings."

Many of Ware’s patients had suppressed their feelings simply to keep the peace, settling for an existence they didn’t love as a result. In family enterprises and marriages alike, unspoken truths fester. Those who found peace reconciled old hurts while there was still time. The same holds in teams, partnerships and advisory relationships: address misalignments early, not once the damage is done.

“Friends slip away.”

Ware recalled a patient called Doris, all alone in a nursing home with her daughter living far away. Ware tracked down an old friend and arranged a phone call - it lifted Doris's spirits in her final days. Busy lives and distance make friendship easy to neglect, yet old mates anchor us. In our Scottish-heritage household, with its Royal Stewart tartan, we see the value of connection. The same applies in business: relationships built on trust and shared values outlast any transactional deal.

“I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

Happiness wasn't something that happened to them; it was a choice they postponed, waiting for the perfect conditions - retirement, the next milestone, the kids leaving home - only to find joy lives in ordinary moments and the gratitude for health while it lasts. As one of the sayings I live by puts it: if you think wellness is expensive, try illness.

It's amazing how many people can tell you the market numbers and bond ratings, but can't tell you their cholesterol or their calcium heart score.

The lessons we can apply in financial planning

This aligns with what we observe in sound financial planning. The best portfolios aren't those chasing the highest returns at all costs, but those built on disciplined, values-aligned decisions that weather volatility. The same holds for a life. Authenticity compounds. When your daily actions reflect your core beliefs around integrity, family, community, stewardship - regret finds little room to grow. Decisions get easier.

We are, ultimately, in the goal-achievement business. What use is beating the market if you achieve none of your goals?

None of this means abandoning responsibility. It’s quite the opposite: living authentically demands discipline. It requires clear priorities, the courage to say no, and planning for money and time to serve your goals rather than dictating them. It means protecting family time as fiercely as you protect the balance sheet – and mentoring the next generation not just in business acumen, but in character.

If someone in your advisory circle doesn't gel with your plans and values, it's okay to stop the bus and let them off. There's always another person who shares your vision and will carry it forward. I could sit comfortably and avoid telling clients what they don't want to hear, but that isn't the job. Our fiduciary responsibility is to lead, and to speak the unspoken truth.

As we navigate an uncertain world - policy shifts, economic headwinds, rates and infrastructure - the palliative nurse's counsel offers a north star. Build wealth, yes. Grow the enterprise, absolutely. But never at the expense of the life you were meant to lead.

The good news is we don't need a terminal diagnosis to change course. Start today. Revisit what truly matters to you and your whānau. Have you ever had a genuinely authentic discussion with your advisers - one about your values, not just your numbers? Surround yourself with like-minded folk who will carry your ideals forward long after you've gone: trusted trustees, key team members and professional stewards who understand the bigger picture.

In the end, true success isn't measured in dollars or status. It's measured in a life lived true to yourself - with courage, presence and heart. Often, Ward’s patients understood this only when it was too late. The living can seek wise counsel while they still have the time to act on it.

---

Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

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REFERENCES

• Bronnie Ware, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing (2011); originally the 2009 blog post "Regrets of the Dying," bronnieware.com

• The Top Five Regrets of the Dying review, National Center for Biotechnology Information (PMC), pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

• "No Regrets" interview with Bronnie Ware, Mindful, mindful.org

• Shortform book guide, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, shortform.com

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When the Process Becomes the Cover

Article #466

Two stories crossed my desk last month, half a world apart, joined by the same affliction: institutions so wedded to their own process that they lose sight of the people it should serve, and then reach for that process as a shield. The pattern is worth naming, because it is far more common than outright wrongdoing and far harder to spot. Nobody sets out to fail. They simply follow the steps, tick the boxes, and assume the machine will catch what they did not.

Our first story comes courtesy of former MP Rick Barker. Starbucks South Korea launched a promotion for “Tank Day” on 18 May, the anniversary of the 1980 Gwangju massacre, when the military rolled tanks over pro-democracy protesters and killed hundreds [1].

It did not land well.

The Korea CEO was sacked and weekly sales fell more than a quarter [2]. What makes the episode instructive is not that a mistake was made, but how it was made. Reports suggest the marketing team asked an AI tool for suggestions, the approving officials never opened the design file, and the legal review was skipped entirely [3]. Every gate that should have stopped it was either delegated or waved through. Not malice, but blindness – the particular blindness of people who trusted the process to do their looking for them.

In story two, we return to Hastings. Council consulted on an Annual Plan offering a 5.9 or 9.1 percent rates rise, and businesses across the district budgeted accordingly [4]. Then Quotable Value’s revaluation landed. Commercial and industrial land values had risen sharply while residential values fell close to 20 percent. Because rates are apportioned by property value, that swing shifted a far larger share of the burden onto commercial owners – not through any decision to target them, but as an automatic consequence of the arithmetic. One inner-city operator told the Herald his rates were jumping almost 30 percent, a rise he believed could end his business [4]. The certified figures arrived only two working days before submissions closed, creating an extremely limited window for the very people most affected to respond.

The official line was that Council did not have the numbers until early May. Under questioning, that account became more complicated. The mayor acknowledged she had received an indication that there could be a significant shift [5]. A councillor has since stated that officers held a pre-audit valuation report in February and March showing commercial values rising and residential values falling, yet ratepayers were given no warning [6]. The distinction matters. There is a difference between not having a certified, audited, signed-off figure and having no idea at all which way the wind was blowing.

That admission raises a fair question: whether earlier, plainer communication could have helped affected ratepayers prepare, even without the final numbers in hand. You do not need certified figures to the last decimal to tell a café owner a storm may be coming. Not knowing the final number is not the same as knowing nothing. A warning that a material shift was likely – caveated, provisional, honest about its uncertainty – would have cost the Council nothing and given businesses time to plan, to model their exposure, to organise a considered submission rather than a scramble.

Then, after a second round of consultation and 233 submissions seeking relief, Council retained the differentials in full and deferred the rating review to the 2027 Long Term Plan [7]. A pause on the Hastings CBD targeted rate was offered as the consolation; Havelock North businesses did not receive the same relief [7]. And the decision was posted immediately before a long weekend – a timing that, whatever the intention behind it, did little to foster the perception of an open and confident process. Institutions that are proud of a decision tend to announce it in daylight.

With amalgamation now looming [8], the deferral carries a further risk. A review pushed out to a future Long Term Plan may ultimately be inherited by an entity that never made the promise. A commitment made by one council to revisit its rating approach is only as durable as that council; restructure the furniture and the promise can quietly fall down the back of it.

There was, it turns out, an alternative on the table. A councillor had proposed a different differential before consultation opened, one that eased the commercial burden while nudging the rural villages toward parity. He and four colleagues voted against the status quo; ten voted to retain it. His alternative could not proceed, he says, because the modelling had not been completed [6]. Whatever the merits of his particular proposal, the sequence is telling: an option existed, and the process – not a debate on its substance – was the reason it went no further. When process appears to foreclose the consideration of alternatives rather than enable it, confidence in the process itself begins to suffer.

Let me be clear about what this is and is not. The rates were never the real issue. Revaluations happen; they are an independent statutory exercise the Council does not control, and this one at least spared many households the worst by loading the swing onto commercial property instead. The more significant issue is confidence in the process that surrounds the numbers: whether people were given timely information, whether options were genuinely explored, and whether the concerns of those affected received meaningful consideration before the die was cast.

Starbucks lost a quarter of its sales because nobody thought to examine the impact of what they were about to do. Hastings’ ratepayers risk losing something slower to rebuild: the confidence that important information will be shared with them while there is still time to act on it. Trust is the one asset a council cannot borrow against. It does not appear on any balance sheet, it cannot be levied, and once it is spent it cannot be refinanced.

As Hawke’s Bay considers significant structural change through possible amalgamation, the lesson extends well beyond one year’s rates. Public institutions do not earn trust because every decision they make is popular – that is an impossible standard and not a sensible one. They earn it when people feel informed, heard and treated fairly throughout the process, win or lose. Consultation, transparency and candour are not administrative box-ticking to be completed and filed; they are the foundation upon which public confidence actually rests. Once that confidence begins to erode, rebuilding it is far harder, and far more expensive, than preserving it in the first place. That is a lesson worth learning before the machinery of local government is rebuilt, not after.

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Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

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REFERENCES

1. “Starbucks Apologizes After Ad Campaign Evokes Massacre,” Associated Press, May 2026; Branding in Asia, “Shinsegae Chairman Issues Apology Over Starbucks Korea ‘Tank Day’ Campaign,” May 2026.

2. “Starbucks’ Korea sales plunge after Tank Day marketing backlash,” Reuters, May 2026; CEO Sohn Jeong-hyun dismissed per CNN.

3. “Foreign Media Spotlight Starbucks Korea’s ‘Tank Day’ Backlash and Sales Plunge,” Seoul Economic Daily / Yonhap, 27 May 2026.

4. “Hastings business says rate hike of almost 30% could end them, mayor ‘beyond livid’ with situation,” NZ Herald / Hawke’s Bay Today, June 2026.

5. Public meeting convened by the Hastings and Havelock North Business Associations, 4 June 2026.

6. Cr Steve Gibson, public statement on the 2026/27 Annual Plan decision, July 2026: pre-audit valuation report in February/March, 25–75 percent impact estimate, alternative rating differential proposal, and 10–5 vote to retain the existing differentials. Facebook.

7. “Council adopts 2026/27 Annual Plan,” Hastings District Council, July 2026 (differentials retained; rating review deferred to the 2027 Long Term Plan; Hastings CBD targeted rate pause).

8. “Majority of Hawke’s Bay submitters favour amalgamation into one council,” Hawke’s Bay Today, 14 July 2026.

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The Walls That Fall: What Hadrian Teaches Us about a Financial Plan

Article #465

Hadrian's Wall has fascinated me since I was a kid. As you read this, I will have just finished cycling part of it with my family and a good friend who’s also a client.

It’s the kind of trip where you spend your evenings in a pub working out the next day's ride, and your days quietly humbled by what people built two thousand years ago. I've been reading up on the wall for months, as one does before such a trip. And - hazard of the job - the more I read, more I noticed a story that financial advisers, and the people who rely on them, should pay attention to.

The Wall, as it stood

Hadrian's Wall was begun in AD 122 under the emperor of the same name. It ran 73 miles coast to coast, from Wallsend on the River Tyne in the east to Bowness-on-Solway in the west. Around 15 feet high, originally 10 feet thick (later narrowed to 8 in places to speed construction), fronted by a wide ditch, with a fortlet known as a milecastle every Roman mile, and two observation turrets in between each one. It took the legions roughly six years to build, and it was manned in some form for nearly three centuries.

To put the scale of it in New Zealand terms: Picture a stone wall from Tauranga to Raglan. Every mile of it manned, every milecastle stocked, every turret garrisoned, around the clock. Then think about how hard it has proved in modern times to commit to a second Auckland Harbour crossing. Decades of debate, billions in costings, and we still haven't put a spade in the ground for what is essentially a few kilometres of road and tunnel.

The Romans put up that wall in six years and manned it for nearly three centuries. The quantum of capital, the legionary labour, the supply lines, the stone, the timber, the ongoing garrison: it boggles the mind. It was the state of the art. The frontier, literally and figuratively, of what was possible.

But, that’s not the part I found most instructive. This is.

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The upgrade that didn't hold

When Hadrian died in AD 138, his successor Antoninus Pius made a different call.

He decided the wall wasn't enough, or wasn't far enough north, and he pushed the frontier deeper into what is now central Scotland. He ordered a new wall built between the Firth of Forth and the Clyde, on the orders of his governor Quintus Lollius Urbicus. The Antonine Wall, as we now call it, was 39 miles of turf on a stone base. It had 16 forts and a road called the Military Way running behind it. It was the next-generation solution. The bold reposition. The upgrade.

It was also abandoned within about a generation.

The legions pulled back to Hadrian's Wall. The Antonine Wall, the most ambitious frontier project of its day, became a curiosity in the Scottish landscape.

Two of the most expensive military engineering projects of the ancient world. Both built by the best engineers of their age. Both, in their way, overtaken by circumstance. We use neither Antionine nor Hadrian’s Wall in this modern age. We don’t need to.

The parallel

Reading about this, I couldn’t help but think of when I sit down with people who tell me their financial plan is bulletproof.

The plan is usually built around a single conviction. A favoured stock that has done well for the last decade. A fund the adviser recommended at a long lunch in 2019. A single asset class, often residential property, sometimes a concentrated equity portfolio. The numbers add up on a spreadsheet. The projections look tidy. The client signs off and feels secure.

It’s state of the art... for its day.

The trouble is that any day eventually ends. Markets shift, and they shift in ways that are obvious only in hindsight. Sectors that looked unassailable five years ago are nursing real wounds now.

The growing effectiveness of AI is reshaping how per-seat software businesses get valued, because if one person and an agent can do the work of nine, the per-seat model starts looking thin. GLP-1 drugs are reshaping assumptions about big pharma earnings. The post-Covid environment has changed everything from vaccination rates to office occupancy to commodity flows. Plenty of concentrated bets that looked clever in 2021 are no longer looking quite so clever in 2026.

The wall that was bold and bulletproof becomes a museum piece, and very often the people standing inside it are the last to notice.

What the Romans got right and what they got wrong

The Romans weren't stupid. They were the best engineers of their age, and Hadrian's Wall is, in its own right, an extraordinary achievement. It didn't fail because the design was poor. It became irrelevant because the world around it changed: the politics of Rome, threats to the Empire, economics. The circumstances that called for the Wall no longer existed.

Walls, by their nature, do not change.

Plans, by their nature, should.

This is the thing I keep coming back to: A good financial plan isn't a wall. It's a garrison. It must be broadly spread, regularly reviewed, regularly rotated, grounded in the evidence rather than in one manager's conviction about the next big thing. The factors that drove returns in the last cycle are not the factors that will drive them in the next. Tax settings, the regulatory landscape your family, your goals – the world changes with time. A plan that doesn't change with them isn't a plan; it's a monument, and a fairly expensive one at that.

For savvy investors, the discipline isn't picking the right wall once. It's seeking wise counsel often enough that you notice when the frontier has shifted, and you can adjust before you find yourself defending ground that no longer matters.

This is also why we are an evidence-based firm. We don't try to pick the next winning stock or guess which active manager will sit in the top quartile in five years' time, because the academic record on that is settled and it isn't kind. Most active managers don't beat their benchmark over long periods. The few who do can't reliably be picked in advance. The path that has actually compounded for clients over the decades is something far less glamorous: broad diversification, disciplined exposure to the factors that drive long-term returns, low costs, and the patience to stay the course. We use Dimensional funds for that reason. The foundation is fifty years of academic research, not someone's conviction about the next big thing.

In practice, the work is unglamorous. It's an annual review with hard questions of last year's plan. It's rebalancing when a position has run further than the strategy intended. It's saying no to the new shiny thing because it doesn't fit the wider picture. It's sitting down again when life changes, because the plan needs to change with it. None of it makes a great story at a barbecue. All of it compounds quietly, and it is the whole point.

Fifty years in

So I've been out there this week, marking my 50th; watching the moors roll past and thinking about the Roman soldiers who walked that wall for 300 years and the ones who walked away from the Antonine Wall after thirty. And thinking, with gratitude, about the clients we've walked alongside over the years. The conversations that have moved plans forward, the times we've changed direction together, and the times we've held firm.

The world keeps moving. The job is to move with it, thoughtfully, with discipline, and with help.

Here's to the next fifty.

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Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

• We do not hold or advise on any private credit or private equity investments.

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REFERENCES

1. English Heritage, "History of Hadrian's Wall", english-heritage.org.uk

2. Britannica, "Hadrian's Wall" and "Antonine Wall" entries, britannica.com

3. Historic Environment Scotland, "Antonine Wall", historicenvironment.scot

4. North East Museums (Segedunum Roman Fort), "The building and development of Hadrian's Wall", northeastmuseums.org.uk

5. World History Encyclopedia, "Hadrian's Wall" and "Antonine Wall", worldhistory.org

6. UNESCO World Heritage listings, Frontiers of the Roman Empire (Hadrian's Wall designated 1987; Antonine Wall designated 2008)

7. Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People (8th century), early historical description of Hadrian's Wall as "eight feet in breadth, and twelve in height"

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Scotland the Brave - The Darien Scheme That Worked

Feature Article

A Canny View reader asked an excellent question after last month's column: what was the alternative? What would have happened if the Darien project had been successful?

Whilst I don't hold myself out to be a historian, I do find alternative history enjoyable reading, with its endless what-ifs.

Last month's piece (If you missed it, read here) took up Scotland's catastrophic 1698 bet on a trading colony in Panama, the one that bankrupted the nation and led, within a decade, to its loss of sovereignty to England. The lesson, plainly, was about concentration risk: bet a fifth of your wealth on one thing, and you had better be ready for the day it doesn't work.

But what if it had worked? Indulge me a moment.

It is 1698. William Paterson's vision holds. Disease is mastered through better drainage and stricter quarantine. The Spanish, having sized up Caledonia's defences, choose negotiation over assault. The English, sensing they cannot beat the Scots to the Isthmus, partner instead of obstruct.

Within a decade, Caledonia is the trading hub of the Americas. Goods from Canton and Manila are landed on the Atlantic side, hauled across a few miles of jungle, and reloaded onto ships bound for Edinburgh and Amsterdam. The Company of Scotland pays a 40% dividend in 1710. It pays one again in 1715.

Scotland enters the 18th century rich. There is no bankruptcy. No loss of sovereignty. Edinburgh, not London, becomes northern Europe's financial centre. Adam Smith, born in 1723, writes The Wealth of Nations in a country that does not need to borrow England's economic theory; it has its own.

The story doesn't stop there. The Acts of Union, in our real history, were the price Scotland paid for the Darien bankruptcy. Take the bankruptcy away, and the union never happens. So when Queen Anne dies in 1714 and the English Parliament invites George of Hanover to take the throne, the Scottish Parliament is free to make its own choice, and reaffirms the Stuart line. James Francis Edward becomes James VIII of Scotland. His son Charles Edward never has to invade in 1745, because his father is already sitting in Edinburgh.

Which means no Battle of Culloden in 1746. No Disarming Act. No proscription of Highland dress, no systematic dismantling of clan structures. Which means no Highland Clearances. Which means the great Scottish diaspora of the 19th century, the one that founded Dunedin in 1848 and put Scottish names on half the farms in Hawke's Bay, never happens, or happens at a fraction of the scale.

A successful Darien does not just save Scotland's sovereignty. It rewrites the demographic map of New Zealand.

And by the late 19th century, when the world's powers turn their attention to cutting a canal through the Isthmus, the Scots have been there for two hundred years. They have the local knowledge, the capital, and the political will. The canal opens, somewhere between 1890 and 1905, under Scottish ownership. One of the world's great chokepoints, the gate between the Atlantic and the Pacific, is not American. It is Scottish.

Speaking for myself, I highly doubt either my maternal or paternal ancestors would have made the journey from Perthshire, Scotland.

Paterson gets a statue on Princes Street. And every Scot who didn't subscribe is haunted, for the rest of their life, by what they missed.

This is the harder lesson.

The bet that pays off gets remembered as vision. The same bet that fails gets remembered as folly. The two bets were identical.

Imagine two funds in 2020. Both concentrate. Both bet on a small basket of high-conviction names. Five years later, one is celebrated as a genius and the other is torn apart in print. The portfolios looked identical at the start. The strategies were the same. What differed was which way the dice landed.

This is survivorship bias, and it is the great mischief-maker of finance. We study Buffett, not the thousand value managers who concentrated and lost. We celebrate the founder who bet the company and won, not the ten who bet and quietly disappeared. The lesson taught is that conviction beats prudence. The lesson untaught is that survival beats both.

When concentration works, you don't learn the right thing. You learn that the rules don't apply to you, and you bet bigger next time. The next Darien is always larger than the last.

What does this mean for a Canny investor at the kitchen table?

It means diversification is not, as the fund manager class sometimes implies, a strategy for the meek. It is the structure that lets you stay in the game on the day the dice land wrong. And sooner or later, they will.

The business owner whose company is 80% of their wealth is not bold; they are exposed. The retiree leveraged into a single Hawke's Bay property is not bold; they are exposed. The investor who has refused to trim a winner that now dominates the portfolio is not bold; they have simply been right so far. That is all.

The Scots who didn't subscribe in 1698 missed a fortune in the world I just imagined. In the world we actually got, they kept theirs.

Across enough rolls of the dice, the second outcome is the one that matters. The first is the one you read about.

We always enjoy the dialogue with our Canny View followers, so please keep up the great feedback, and we'll do our best to accommodate.

Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

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Turning Fifty: The Inflection Point

Article #464

I turned 50 on the second of July. That includes nearly 30 in the workforce, 26 years as a financial adviser, 20 as a husband and 18 as a father. Do the maths and I'm roughly two-thirds through my optimal earning window, if we call 65 the end of the innings. It’s made me stop and do the thing I always ask of clients: take an honest look at where I am now, and where the next 15 years are heading.

Most of us never think about the shape of our earning life, but it follows a pattern. The 20s are for learning a trade, finding your feet in a profession, perhaps marrying, often still paying off the student loan. The 30s bring children, a mortgage and the long grind of deepening a career. By the 40s the income finally lifts and a little pressure comes off. Then the 50s and 60s arrive, and many people start thinking about the golden years to come. Here’s the rub: a fit and healthy 65-year-old has not just finished their best earning years; for many, the earning stream has stopped altogether. The way we’re living these days, those earnings now need to carry us all the way through to our 90s. That’s three decades of withdrawals from a jar you stopped filling, so you need to put a lot of cookies in that jar to sustain yourself for 30 years.

For most of human existence, 50 was the end of the road. In 1900, life expectancy for men in New Zealand sat in the late fifties [1]. A man of 50 in those days really was winding down, because he was nearly done. The Victorians built their whole idea of a life stage around it - you worked until your body gave out, and the gap between the two was mercifully short. Today, a healthy 50-year-old can reasonably expect another 35 years or more, and an increasing number of us will see ninety [1]. We’ve held on to the old instinct that 50 is the beginning of the end, while living an entirely different reality. The body tells us we have arrived. The maths tells us we are barely halfway.

Source data: New Zealand cohort life tables: March 2025 update | Stats NZ

This is where I see good people stumble, though rarely through recklessness. The kids are nearly gone, the mortgage is finally in retreat, and “finally” becomes the word of the moment. Finally, we can do a few things for ourselves! The bucket list, the holidays, the trips deferred for 20 years while school fees and braces and first cars ate every spare dollar. It feels earned, and it feels good, because it is and it does. Behavioural research calls this ‘present bias’; a hard-wired habit of overweighting the reward we can have today against the one we must wait for [2]. But that freed-up cash flow is being enjoyed at the precise moment it should be doing its hardest work. The next 15 years from 50 are prime accumulation time, not the victory lap people imagine them to be.

Most balance sheets tend to be the same at 50: top-heavy with lifestyle assets. The house, the cars, the bach with its rates, maintenance and insurance quietly eroding spare cash or savings each year. It has been the Kiwi dream for as long as I can remember, and there is nothing wrong with wanting that dream. But while the numbers look perfectly reasonable on the surface, the cash flow underneath is poor. The assets that produce real income and liquidity - the ones that will still pay you when your salary stops - are too small to move the needle in this scenario. You’re carrying a great deal of weight that does not work for you, and worse – it's costing you to hold it.

This is where knowing values is crucial. At 50, you need to be clear on what matters and what you must build over the next fifteen years – because every goal is built on cash flow, and cash flow comes from the assets you have accumulated. Get the values right and the rest follows in a straight line. Leave them vague and you’ll inevitably keep spending on what feels good now, instead of what carries you through your 70s, 80s and 90s. The order in which your returns arrive in the early retirement years can make or break a 30-year drawdown, and a poor first few years while you are drawing down does damage that a good average return never quite repairs [3].

It can feel uncomfortable to take such a frank look at your present and future, but it’s fairly straightforward. Do your lifestyle assets fit what you are trying to build? Are you protecting your peak earning stream as the engine that funds everything else? Is your cash flow working backwards, servicing debt on things that do not compound, or forwards, building assets that do?

The gap between what New Zealanders expect to retire on and what they have set aside remains stubbornly wide. It widens fastest for those who assume there is still plenty of time [4]. At 50, most people can still materially change their later years by engaging and making a few incremental course adjustments. These changes don’t have to be dramatic, but they do need to be early. A small correction to a flight path early in the journey lands you in a completely different place.

Often, the best co-pilot on such a journey is a professional financial advisor. And if you think professional advice is expensive, try using an amateur – see what it costs you. Unfortunately, the most expensive amateur you can ever hire is usually yourself; timing the market with optimism and a spreadsheet doesn’t tend to get the same results as methodical, proven strategies and a steady pair of hands at the wheel. Time in the market is the one advantage you cannot buy back later at any price [5].

This is the fiduciary truth of it, and it is the part I care about most after 26 years. Seeking wise counsel at 50 is not an admission of weakness. It’s the best way to understand your own position; we’re all the worst judges of our own blind spots, but an unbiased third party can see the whole scene with clarity.

A good adviser is not there to take the holidays away. They are there to make sure the holidays at 70 are still possible.

50 is the inflection point where you can still move the dial in a way you simply cannot at 65. The runway is shorter than it was, but you’ve got a good bit of tarmac left before earnings come to a stop. The question is not whether the time for preparation has passed (it hasn’t), but whether you will use what remains of it. A burden shared is a burden halved.

---

Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

• We do not hold or advise on any private credit or private equity investments.

---

REFERENCES

1. Stats NZ. (n.d.). Life expectancy. https://www.stats.govt.nz/information-releases/new-zealand-cohort-life-tables-march-2025-update/

2. ScienceInsights. (n.d.). What is present bias? How it shapes your decisions. https://scienceinsights.org/what-is-present-bias-how-it-shapes-your-decisions/

3. Sequence of returns risk: Why the order of returns matters in retirement. The Long Math. https://www.thelongmath.com/articles/investing-and-financial-literacy/sequence-of-returns-risk/

4. Te Ara Ahunga Ora. (2022). Annual report 2022. https://assets.retirement.govt.nz/public/Uploads/Annual-Report/TAAO-RC-Annual-Report-2022.pdf

5. Dai, W., & Dong, A. (2023, October 31). We found 30 timing strategies that “worked”—and 690 that didn't. Dimensional Fund Advisors. https://www.dimensional.com/sg-en/insights/we-found-30-timing-strategies-that-worked-and-690-that-didnt

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Private Assets: You're Not Joining the Club, You're Funding It

Article # 463

Private. Special. Exclusive. Three words that do a lot of heavy lifting in finance. They frame private equity and private credit as access and privilege. Yet beneath the velvet-rope marketing sits a familiar set of trade-offs: high fees, illiquidity, and a lack of transparency. For decades that rope kept ordinary investors out. It was quietly removed, and nobody sent a memo.

Historically, these markets belonged to pension funds, endowments and family offices with eight figures to commit and twelve years to wait. Ordinary investors didn't get a seat at the table. They are now being offered one, through KiwiSaver growth funds, UK Long-Term Asset Funds dropped inside tax-advantaged ISAs, and the family trust portfolios they signed off on last year [1]. The FMA confirmed in April that most KiwiSaver providers expect to materially lift their private asset allocations over the next three years, aligning with global investment trends [2]. The industry calls it democratisation. Governments call it unlocking growth.

This week the trend turned local and concrete. Simplicity committed $30 million to a new Kiwi deep tech and health sciences venture fund, becoming a cornerstone investor [3]. The fund holds a small number of early-stage companies, including pre-revenue biotech automating cancer-cell therapy manufacturing. It is not fully funded on day one; it is a capital-call vehicle, drawn down over the life of the fund. The parent is US-headquartered, and the capital base includes migrant investors using it as a pathway to residency. None of that is hidden, and backing clever Kiwi innovation is a perfectly defensible thing to do. But it is a useful reminder of what this asset class is once you look inside the wrapper: a long-dated, illiquid, concentrated bet that you cannot easily value or exit.

About that 40-year outperformance

In January, Tony Robbins told millions of viewers on The Diary of a CEO that private equity has outperformed every stock market globally for 40 years, and that ordinary investors have been locked out [4]. He is right on the data. The data, however, deserves a closer look before you remortgage the bach.

First, it has been cherry-picked by survivorship. The funds that blew up quietly drop out of the long-run series, so what you are shown is the record of the survivors, a bit like judging parachutes by interviewing the people who landed. Second, much of the return is leverage, not skill; borrow heavily against a stable business and you amplify the good years, and the bad. Third, and least discussed, is the illiquidity premium. You are tying your money up for a decade or more in a speculative bet on a handful of companies you cannot sell when you want to. You would expect to be paid more for taking on more risk and less liquidity. That extra return is not evidence of genius; it is the rent on your patience. Strip out dead funds, borrowed money and locked-up capital, and the heroic outperformance narrows sharply, and that is before fees [5].

What Robbins is less keen to dwell on is that he co-owns CAZ Investments, which buys stakes in private equity management companies, and that he personally holds stakes in 95 PE firms; the firms themselves, not the funds [6]. He collects the "2 and 20" on each: two percent of assets every year, plus twenty percent of profits above a hurdle [4]. Draw your own conclusions about the shape of those incentives.

The cycle, and the cautionary tale

On the credit side, JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon used his April shareholder letter to flag what the more enthusiastic salespeople tend to leave in the bag: the credit cycle still exists [7]. Lending standards loosened during the boom. Covenant-lite deals became common in private credit too [8]. When the cycle turns, losses will not stay gated.

In August 2024, the Government placed Du Val Group, an Auckland property developer, into statutory management. This is only the third time that lever has ever been pulled, following Equiticorp in 1989 and Allan Hubbard's vehicles in 2010 [9].

The Du Val Mortgage Fund had been marketed as wholesale-only at around 10% per annum, pitched as comparing favourably to bank term deposits. That label is not a marketing flourish but a regulatory category: an offer made only to wholesale investors is excluded from the disclosure regime built to protect ordinary investors, so there is no product disclosure statement and no entry on the public Disclose register [9]. Roughly 120 to 150 investors are now owed close to $306 million [9]. When investors tried to sue the FMA for failing to protect them, the High Court ruled in Lindeman Investments v FMA that the regulator owes no duty of care to individual wholesale investors [10]. The safety net does not stretch that far, and by design: the wholesale regime switches off most of the retail protections long before any loss is incurred.

Every newborn, a private asset owner

Fisher Funds has committed more than $1 billion of KiwiSaver money to private equity, the largest publicly announced commitment to date [11]. Most other major providers also carry exposure, and per the FMA report most plan to lift those allocations over the next three years [2]. On Sunday, Christopher Luxon announced that, if re-elected, KiwiSaver would become compulsory from 2028, every newborn would be auto-enrolled with a $1,500 Baby Boost defaulted into a high-growth fund, and the combined contribution rate would reach 12% by 2032 [12]. Every newborn New Zealander would begin their financial life with a private asset exposure they did not choose, in a vehicle they cannot exit until at least 2090.

Structure is not the same as transparency

None of this makes private assets an inherently bad asset class. The issue is the layering, the marketing, and the question of who benefits from the door opening now. Where the exposure is plainly structured, a named partnership backing identifiable businesses with disclosed allocations, the picture is more straightforward than where it runs through layered offshore fund-of-funds with opaque manager economics. But structure on paper is not the same as transparency in practice. Diligent managers have tried to look through some of the better-regarded local vehicles and come up short on what is actually held and how it is valued. If the people whose job is to see inside cannot, the ordinary member certainly cannot. We do not invest our own clients in this asset class, for precisely these reasons. It would be premature to suggest New Zealand has quietly cracked private assets when the same transparency, valuation and liquidity questions remain.

Here is what matters most, and what the marketing almost never spells out: understand whether your commitment is fully funded on day one or subject to future capital calls. Some private equity is paid up front, with no further obligation, clean and simple. Much of it is not. A commitment of thirty cents on the dollar today can trigger calls for the remaining seventy cents in the years ahead. Your disclosed allocation now will not reflect your actual exposure tomorrow; as the calls arrive, your percentage holding and your real risk are multiplied. A trustee who signs off on what looks like a modest five percent allocation can find the true commitment is several times that once the fund draws down. I have watched exactly this happen to a community trust, where a decision made by earlier trustees carried obligations that only became visible years later.

For trustees, this is not simply an investment preference; it is a governance question.

Under the Trusts Act 2019, trustees of family and charitable trusts inherit a look-through duty [13]. Few today can name the private asset exposures they are responsible for, let alone the unfunded commitments sitting behind them. Asking the question is the first part of discharging the duty.

Four questions for any provider, adviser, or co-trustee:

1. What are the all-in fees across every layer?

2. How are the underlying assets valued: how often, and by whom?

3. Is the commitment fully funded, or subject to future capital calls?

4. In whose interest is the allocation being recommended?

The answers should be plain and confident. If they aren't, that itself is a flag you shouldn't ignore.

Robbins is right that private equity has outperformed historically. Dimon is right that the credit cycle still exists. What is less often spoken about is who benefits from unlocking the door now, and why.

Private. Special. Exclusive. Useful words for the fee machine; less useful for the person handing over their money. You are not joining the club; you are funding it.

---

Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

• We do not hold or advise on any private credit or private equity investments.

---

REFERENCES

1. Financial Conduct Authority (UK). Long-Term Asset Fund regime, FCA Handbook COLL 15. HM Treasury (2025). Inclusion of LTAFs in stocks and shares ISAs. gov.uk.

2. Financial Markets Authority (2026, 15 April). Private assets in managed funds: Investment landscape and valuation practices. Accompanying media release: “FMA anticipates KiwiSaver providers will increase investment in private assets.” Source: FMA.

3. Simplicity (2026, 24 June). “Simplicity backs ambitious Kiwi innovators with $30m investment.” Details: $30m cornerstone commitment to Bridgewest Venture Fund I (Deep Tech and Health Sciences Fund). Provider disclosure context: Booster, Milford, Generate, Pathfinder, ANZ Investments and others carry private asset allocations across growth and high-growth options.

4. The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett (2026, 15 January). “Tony Robbins: No One Is Ready For What’s Coming.” Details: transcript references Robbins’ stakes in 95 private equity firms, the firms, not the funds, receiving the “2 and 20” on each.

5. Bain & Company (2025). Global Private Equity Report 2025. Details: fee conventions of 1–1.5% management plus 10–20% carry above a preferred return. Supporting context: MSCI, Chicago Booth Review and NBER research on buyout outperformance of roughly 3–5% per year over public market equivalents, with debate over the role of leverage, survivorship bias and the illiquidity premium.

6. CAZ Investments. Firm overview and GP-stakes strategy. Robbins, T., Zook, C. and Mallouk, P. (2024). The Holy Grail of Investing. Simon & Schuster.

7. JPMorgan Chase & Co. (2026). Annual Letter to Shareholders 2025. Author: Jamie Dimon. Released April 2026. Source: JPMorgan Chase & Co.

8. Reserve Bank of New Zealand (2026, May). Financial Stability Report. Details: private credit market concerns. Source: Reserve Bank of New Zealand.

9. Financial Markets Authority (2024, 21 August). “Du Val Group: statutory management ordered.” Source: FMA. Supporting coverage: BusinessDesk (2025, 4 August), “A year since raids, FMA yet to prosecute over Du Val collapse.”

10. Lindeman Investments Limited v Financial Markets Authority [2025] NZHC. Judgment date: 11 July 2025. Summary source: Cooney Lees Morgan, “The FMA safety net has limits when it comes to wholesale investor groups.”

11. NZ Herald, The Prosperity Project (2025, 4 August). “The rise of KiwiSaver investing in private equity and what it means for you.” Details: Fisher Funds committing more than $1 billion of KiwiSaver funds to private equity.

12. New Zealand National Party (2026, 21 June). “National To Further Boost Kiwis’ Financial Security.” Details: press release, annual conference, Lower Hutt. Coverage: NZ Herald, RNZ, 1News, Newsroom and Scoop (21–22 June 2026). Estimated fiscal cost: $1.1 billion over four years.

13. New Zealand Parliament (2019). Trusts Act 2019, ss 30–31.

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We Need to Talk About Envy

When a newspaper tells you how to hate someone, it reveals more about itself than its target.

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Article #462

“Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, ‘social justice’.”

Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice (1999) [1]

Last week the New Zealand Herald reported, plainly, that Elon Musk had become the world’s first trillionaire after shares in SpaceX leapt as much as 30% on debut, the largest initial public offering in history. [2,3] That is the news. What happened next is the story.

Canada’s Globe and Mail ran an opinion piece under the headline: ‘SpaceX IPO makes Elon Musk the first trillionaire. Here’s how to properly hate him.’ After a day of ridicule, the paper swapped it for the more respectable ‘Is that a bad look for capitalism?’ and tacked on a note conceding the original ‘did not meet The Globe’s editorial standard.’ [4] The mask slipped, then was hastily refitted. But we all saw the face beneath.

Closer to home, the chorus is familiar. Oxfam Aotearoa tells us four New Zealand billionaires hold more wealth than 1.8 million of their countrymen, and calls it ‘obscene.’ [5] Academics line up on talkback to lament inequality. Polls are cited showing most New Zealanders want the ultra-rich taxed more, and we are reminded that Musk alone is worth almost as much as every New Zealander combined [6,7]. The sentiment is always the same: someone has too much, and that is a problem to be corrected rather than a phenomenon to be understood.

Musk is not, in fact, the first trillionaire. Under Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's central bank printed a hundred-trillion-dollar note that on its first day was worth about US$30, and within weeks nothing at all; at the peak, prices doubled every day [8]. In that sense, many Zimbabweans became trillionaires on paper yet still could not buy a loaf of bread. That is the distinction worth dwelling on.

A trillion earned by building what people want is the opposite of a trillion conjured by a collapsing state: one is value created, the other value destroyed.

I want to make the unfashionable case. Not for Musk the man, he hardly needs my help, but for what the exception represents: the rare individual who turns the stuff of science fiction into things we use every day without a second thought, the smartphone in your pocket, the satellite that carries your call, the online payment that clears in seconds, the electric car at the lights, the cloud software that runs the small business down the road.

Consider the funnel. Many people have ideas. Fewer act on them. Fewer still build something that turns a profit. And a vanishingly small number, statistical outliers, take an idea and deliver it at scale. New Zealand has produced our own precious few: the Mowbray siblings, whose toy and consumer-goods firm Zuru, started in a shed in 2003, now tops the Rich List at an estimated $20 billion; Trade Me, Xero, Rocket Lab, the family-owned Gallagher Group, which grew from a Waikato farm shed and the world's first electric fence into a security firm operating in some 160 countries, and Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, built and headquartered here and exporting respiratory care to around 120 countries [9,10,11].

And the same pattern holds inside the companies we reduce too easily to a single famous name. Gwynne Shotwell joined SpaceX as its eleventh employee in 2002 and helped build it, as president, into the company that just floated; she now sits, according to Forbes, among the richest self-made women in the world, with a stake estimated at around US$2.5 billion [12]. The builders are plural, and the rewards often follow competence more than celebrity.

Here is the part the zero-sum brigade often misses: the same SpaceX listing that minted the world's first trillionaire also turned more than 4,400 current and former staff into millionaires, by the New York Times' reckoning – some 400 of them past the $100 million mark. The reach went a long way down the org chart. One was a welder who joined in 2015 on about US$28 an hour and took part of his pay in stock; his holding is now worth close to a million dollars [13]. The trillionaire headline and the newly wealthy welder came from the very same event. The pie did not get carved up. It got bigger.

The question for New Zealand is whether we are willing to learn from that. The NBR Rich List has swelled 23-fold in forty years to a record $129 billion, with Rocket Lab's Sir Peter Beck alone leaping from about $650 million to $11 billion in a single year as his company's shares soared [14]. And yet our productivity has barely moved in thirty years. We are very good at debating how to carve the pie, and strangely uninterested in baking a larger one.

None of this is new. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were the titans of their age, reviled in their time as robber barons, cartoonish villains of the popular press. The cartoonists drew them as bloated octopuses with the nation in their tentacles. Carnegie ground out his fortune in steel and, in his later years, gave most of it away, seeding free public libraries across the world, more than 2,500 of them, eighteen in New Zealand alone [15]. Rockefeller's money built the University of Chicago and funded the medical research that helped tame yellow fever and hookworm [16]. The resentment faded. The libraries, the universities, the cures remain. That is the part the wreckers never see: the wealth was temporary, but the institutions it built endured, and we are still drawing on them a century later.

Great fortunes gather, they crest, and in time they disperse through families, philanthropy, taxation and the simple passage of generations. Marriages fail and children inherit and quarrel; fortunes fracture along fault lines no one planned for. Jeff Bezos parted with roughly a quarter of his Amazon stake in a single divorce [17]. Wealth scatters faster than any succession plan can contain it. No one takes it with them. They are only ever the custodian of their wealth for the span of their life, and perhaps a generation or two beyond, if they are fortunate.

I make the same point to those who fret about foreigners buying New Zealand farms and businesses. A buyer cannot pack up a farm, or a company, and carry it home in a box to their country of origin. The land stays. The business stays. The jobs, the buildings and the economic activity all remain here, in New Zealand. The buyer is a custodian, nothing more. So too with the great fortunes: the enterprises outlast the individual, and we are the beneficiaries.

And here is what the envious rarely pause to weigh: the cost of building any of it. The outlier does not arrive at scale by working office hours. Musk's own biographers record the toll: Walter Isaacson, who shadowed him for years, documents a leader hands-on in redesigning rocket components and welding design to production, while Ashlee Vance describes the hundred-hour weeks and nights spent sleeping on factory floors [18,19]. He risked ruin, repeatedly; Tesla and SpaceX both came within weeks of collapse in 2008, and he poured in his own money to keep them breathing. For every founder who makes it, a great many do not: they mortgage the house, burn the savings, lose the marriage, and end up with nothing but the lesson. Most of us, honestly, would not want that life if it were handed to us, and that is no shame. But it ought to buy a little humility before we throw stones over the fence at grass we have decided, from a distance, must be greener.

Some will say the fortune was really built on government largesse: the contracts, the green credits [20]. But the credits were no handout. Every carmaker operated under the same zero-emission rules; the money came from rival manufacturers who lagged on electric cars, not from the taxpayer; and Tesla profited simply because it built cleaner cars faster than anyone else. The same scheme runs in Europe and China. That is not a subsidy. That is winning the game everyone was playing.

As for the calls to tax such people into their place, success is already taxed, and handsomely. That is how it works. But a culture that treats achievement as a crime to be punished rather than a feat to be studied will get less of it. The numbers bear it out: resentment is not a growth strategy.

There is a fiduciary truth in all of this, the same one I return to with clients. Tearing others down builds nothing. The job, mine, yours, the nation’s, is stewardship: to grow what we are given, to think in decades rather than headlines, and to leave more behind than we found. A country that celebrates its builders is a healthier place than one that polices its winners. Glass half full beats glass half empty, every time.

So before we are told, yet again, how to properly hate someone for the sin of succeeding, it is worth asking the more useful question. Not how do we cut them down to size, but what will we leave standing when we are gone?

Winter never lasts; the snows always melt.

---

Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

---

REFERENCES

1. Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice (1999), source of the epigraph.

2. New Zealand Herald, ‘Elon Musk becomes world’s first trillionaire as SpaceX shares jump’ (June 2026).

3. RNZ, ‘SpaceX launches US$2 trillion market debut, the largest IPO in history’ (June 2026).

4. The Globe and Mail, Chris Gay, ‘SpaceX IPO makes Elon Musk the first trillionaire. Here’s how to properly hate him’ (headline since amended with editor’s note, June 2026).

5. Oxfam Aotearoa, statement on billionaire wealth concentration in New Zealand (2026).

6. RNZ / Talbot Mills poll, ‘New Zealanders support more taxes on ultra-rich, new poll shows’ (Wellbeing Economy Alliance Aotearoa; 68% backed higher taxes on the ultra-rich, 2026).

7. RNZ, ‘Elon Musk only marginally less wealthy than all New Zealanders combined’ (June 2026).

8. Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe / BBC, the Z$100 trillion note, issued 16 January 2009, worth about US$30 on its first day; one of history’s worst hyperinflations, with prices doubling daily at the November 2008 peak.

9. Zuru / NBR Rich List 2026, founded by Nick, Mat and Anna Mowbray in 2003; estimated at $20b, the top spot on the 2026 NBR Rich List.

10. Gallagher Group, Hamilton-based, family-owned; from the world’s first electric fence (1938) to integrated security solutions in around 160 countries.

11. Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, New Zealand-headquartered respiratory-care manufacturer; sells in around 120 countries, with roughly 1% of revenue from domestic sales (publicly listed; majority institutional ownership).

12. Forbes, ‘America’s Richest Self-Made Women’ (2026 list), featuring SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell.

13. The New York Times, reporting via Hill.com analysis that SpaceX’s IPO would turn more than 4,400 employees into millionaires, including a welder hired in 2015 (June 2026).

14. NBR Rich List 2026, 40th edition; total listed wealth a record $129b (up from $102.1b), a 23-fold rise in 40 years; Rocket Lab’s Sir Peter Beck up from ~$650m to ~$11b (reported via RNZ / NZ Herald / Scoop, June 2026).

15. Carnegie Corporation of New York, historical record of Carnegie free public library endowments.

16. Rockefeller Foundation / University of Chicago, record of Rockefeller’s ~$36m founding gift to the University of Chicago and Foundation-led campaigns against hookworm and yellow fever (first yellow-fever vaccine, 1935).

17. Bezos / Scott divorce (2019), widely reported transfer of roughly a quarter of Jeff Bezos’ Amazon stake to MacKenzie Scott.

18. Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk (2023), on Musk’s hands-on engineering role across his companies.

19. Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (2015), on the 100-hour weeks and factory-floor work ethic.

20. RNZ, ‘How much of Elon Musk’s wealth comes from government help? Virtually all of it’ (June 2026), cited here as the claim being answered; on ZEV regulatory credits, see the Union of Concerned Scientists and CNBC explainers (credits are traded between automakers, not paid by the taxpayer).

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IMAGE CREDITS

• John D. Rockefeller depicted in the political cartoon 'The Trust Giant's Point of View' by Horace Taylor in 'The Verdict, ' 1900

• “Standard Oil Octopus” - Keppler, Udo J., 1872-1956, artist. Published September 1904

• Carnegie Free Library, Thames - Coromandel Heritage Trust. Photograph by David Wilton.

• Auckland City Libraries – Tāmaki Pātaka Kōrero, Sir George Grey Special Collections (AWNS-19080716-13-6)

The Era of the Colossal IPO, and the Small Investor

Article #461

In August 1602, the Dutch East India Company pinned up posters in Amsterdam announcing that any resident of the Low Countries could buy a share in their new venture. By month's end, 1143 investors had put in roughly 6.4 million guilders. One was a maid named Neeltgen Cornelis. She put in 100 guilders, around half a guilder a day in wages, more than half a year's earnings. The world's first IPO had its first ordinary shareholder.

Four centuries later the dance is the same, but the music is louder. Within 12 months we'll likely see the three largest technology listings in history, landing one after another.

SpaceX lists on the Nasdaq today under SPCX, in what is set to be the largest IPO in history. The company has raised USD 75 billion, pricing 555.6 million shares at USD 135 each, at a valuation approaching USD 2 trillion. For context, the previous record-holder, Saudi Aramco in 2019, raised USD 29.4 billion. Retail orders alone reportedly exceeded USD 100 billion. Elon Musk retains 85 percent of the voting control and stands on the verge of becoming the world's first trillionaire. Roughly 30 percent of the offer has been earmarked for retail through Robinhood, Schwab, Fidelity, E*Trade and SoFi, an unusually generous allocation designed to put ordinary investors at the front of the queue from day one.

https://www.statista.com/chart/36315/largest-ipos-of-all-time/

The mechanics deserve a look. The raise implies a free float in the low single digits, perhaps three to four percent of the company. The retail offer is distributed through institutions including Goldman Sachs as lead, with Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan in support. Musk's 85 percent voting control comes through a dual-class structure that the New York and California state pension funds have publicly criticised as 'extreme'.

The numbers behind the headline are sobering. SpaceX posted a Q1 2026 net loss of USD 4.3 billion on revenue of USD 4.69 billion. The Connectivity unit (Starlink) made USD 1.19 billion, while the Space unit lost USD 619 million and the AI unit lost USD 2.5 billion.

Starlink is single-handedly carrying the company.

The S-1 also claims a USD 28.5 trillion total addressable market, and includes a vesting condition for 1 billion of Musk's performance shares that requires SpaceX to establish a permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1 million inhabitants. This is a remuneration trigger.

OpenAI is queueing up directly behind. The ChatGPT maker confidentially filed in late May at a USD 852 billion valuation, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading, targeting a September quarter listing. But there is a tell. The Wall Street Journal reports CFO Sarah Friar has told colleagues the company may need more time, while CEO Sam Altman has been eager to push ahead. The CFO, the person responsible for the numbers, is the one urging caution. OpenAI has reportedly missed multiple internal revenue and user targets, and its lead is now under threat from Anthropic, whose tools are being adopted across the workforce at pace. OpenAI is going public partly because it needs to, having committed more than USD 1.4 trillion to physical infrastructure. The phrase 'stolen a charity', used by Musk in the recently dismissed trial alleging OpenAI improperly converted from a nonprofit research lab, will hang over the prospectus regardless of the verdict. Anthropic is preparing its own listing.

Three deals, perhaps USD 200 billion of equity issuance, in a single year. As a fiduciary, not as a fan of rockets or large language models, my answer is the same as it would have been to a client asking about the South Sea Company in 1720. Probably not, and almost certainly not at the open.

The unromantic data

Jay Ritter at the University of Florida, known in finance circles as 'Mr IPO', has been cataloguing initial public offerings since 1980. US IPOs have, on average, trailed the broader market by roughly two percentage points a year over the three years after listing. Almost two thirds underperform.

Dimensional Fund Advisors found the same in a study of more than 6,000 US IPOs from 1991 to 2018. Dimensional's response is instructive. Their funds deliberately wait, sitting out the first year or so after a listing so that the early froth settles, the lock-ups expire, and at least one to two years of audited public-company financials accumulate before they buy. Dull, patient, and on the evidence, profitable.

Read Dimensional’s study HERE.

Two New Zealand parables

We do not have to travel to Starbase, Texas for the lesson. Two recent local listings sit at opposite ends of the IPO spectrum.

Napier Port listed in August 2019 at $2.60 a share, rose sharply on debut, touched $4.28 by year-end, and today trades in the low $3 range with a steady dividend stream. Not spectacular, but it is what a 150-year-old infrastructure business with predictable cargo volumes is supposed to look like. Decades of audited accounts. A board that knew what it owned. A business you can model on the back of an envelope.

My Food Bag tells the other story. It listed in March 2021 at $1.85, the largest New Zealand IPO by amount raised since 2014. The prospectus glittered. Retail investors, including many existing customers, were warmly invited. The shares fell on day one and kept falling. Today they trade around 29 cents, an 85 percent loss for anyone who bought at issue. A classic private equity exit, with the existing owners taking $51 million in repaid shareholder loans and a $7.1 million pre-listing dividend off the table on the way out. The question not asked loudly enough was the only one that mattered: who is selling, and why now?

The fiduciary filter

Three principles we keep returning to when a client asks about a hot IPO. First, wait for the audited financials. The Dimensional approach of holding off until at least two years of statutory accounts exist as a listed entity is not market timing, it is risk management. Pre-IPO numbers are produced under different incentives.

Second, read who is selling. Founders and venture funds with five-year-old positions do not list out of generosity. Lock-up provisions and use of proceeds tell you more than the forward revenue projection. Third, recognise the window. Ritter's research shows IPOs cluster in optimistic markets and underperform most when issued in those hot windows. Three trillion-dollar AI and aerospace deals queued up in a single year is the textbook definition.

And so, to Amsterdam

Neeltgen Cornelis did rather well. The VOC paid its first dividend in 1610, mostly in spices, and continued paying for the better part of two centuries. But she bought into a business with existing ships, warehouses, a 21-year charter and a recognisable revenue model.

She was not buying a million Martians.

The colossal IPOs of 2026 may yet reward their early shareholders handsomely. Some will. Most, on the historical evidence, will not. When the noise gets loud, seek advice and wise counsel.

Or, if you prefer the older formulation - ask the person who has read the prospectus three times and is still not buying.

---

Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

---

REFERENCES

1. Bloomberg Evening Briefing Americas, 11 June 2026, 'The world's first almost-trillionaire'. SpaceX priced 555.6 million shares at USD 135 each, raising USD 75 billion. Retail orders reportedly exceeded USD 100 billion.

2. Bloomberg Evening Briefing Americas, 20 May 2026, 'SpaceX Files Publicly for Nasdaq IPO Under Symbol SPCX'.

3. The Economist, World in Brief, 21 May 2026, 'SpaceX reaches for the stars'.

4. Morning Brew, 21 May 2026, 'SpaceX shows its finances and future in IPO filing'. SpaceX S-1 prospectus, 20 May 2026: Q1 2026 revenue USD 4.69 billion, net loss USD 4.3 billion; Musk 85 percent voting control; Mars 1 million inhabitants vesting condition; total addressable market claim USD 28.5 trillion; retail distribution via Robinhood, Schwab, Fidelity, E*Trade, SoFi.

5. BusinessDesk (WSJ syndication), 21 May 2026, 'OpenAI is preparing to file for an IPO very soon'. CFO Sarah Friar reportedly told colleagues OpenAI may need more time; Anthropic growing faster on workforce tool adoption.

6. CNBC and Wall Street Journal, 20 May 2026, 'OpenAI to confidentially file for IPO as soon as Friday', valuation USD 852 billion.

7. Ritter, J.R., 'Initial Public Offerings: Underpricing', 1980 to 2025 dataset, University of Florida, Warrington College of Business.

8. Black, S. and Green, K., 'IPOs: Profiles Are High. What About Returns?', Dimensional Fund Advisors, 2019, study of 6,000+ US IPOs 1991 to 2018.

9. RNZ, 'Will your My Food Bag investment ever recover?', May 2025.

10. NZX disclosures, Napier Port Holdings (NPH) and My Food Bag Group (MFB), historical share data.

11. Worldsfirststockexchange.com, Dutch National Archives, VOC charter 20 March 1602, Article 10.

No Taxation Without Representation: The CCO Accountability Gap

Article #460

Last weekend we marked King's Birthday - the official birthday of a man none of us voted for, none of us can remove, and most of us will never meet. The monarchy survives on charm, inertia, and a constitutional bargain held for centuries: the King reigns on the condition he does not rule.

The same cannot be said of our Council-Controlled Organisations. In three weeks' time, that contrast becomes expensive.

Last October, New Zealanders voted in 42 simultaneous referendums on Māori wards. 24 councils voted to remove them and 18 to keep them. Nationally, more than 542,000 voters supported retaining Māori wards against around 468,000 who opposed them. Whatever your view, the principle was clear: how local democratic representation is structured is important enough for voters to decide directly.

Now apply the same lens to CCOs. These organisations sit at the intersection of three conditions that create a serious accountability vacuum:

1. They run monopolies or near-monopolies - no competitor can offer cheaper water, public transport, or port services.

2. Their boards are appointed, not elected. Voters do not choose the directors, and the councillors who appoint them do not manage them day-to-day.

3. Directors are almost impossible to remove when ratepayers are unhappy. CCOs continue unchanged no matter who wins council elections. The democratic feedback loop never closes.

No market discipline. No democratic discipline. Ratepayers pay regardless.

Fuel price hikes annoy us because they flow into the cost of everything. But fuel still operates in a competitive market: you can switch brands, go electric, take the bus, or drive less. Water has no such substitute. You cannot switch providers, install a cheaper pipe, or easily opt out. If fuel prices trouble you, water should give you nightmares - because the entity setting the price answers to no one you can vote out.

If "no taxation without representation" means anything in 2026, any body with the power to compel payment must answer to those who pay. That principle is the foundation of legitimate government.

On 1 July, IAWAI - Flowing Waters Ltd takes over water and wastewater services across Hamilton City and Waikato District. Owned 50:50 by the two councils and in partnership with Waikato-Tainui, its board is appointed by a nine-member Forum: three Hamilton representatives, three Waikato District representatives, and three Waikato-Tainui representatives - all with equal voting rights. Ratepayers will be legally required to buy from an entity whose governance includes voices no voter ever elected.

The Auditor-General warned in 2022 of "a serious diminution in accountability to the public for a critical service". The structural problem remains.

This week, Local Government Minister Simon Watts announced an amendment to the Local Government Act 2002 to restrict voting at council committee meetings to elected councillors only. "Councillors are directly accountable to voters for their decisions," he said. "That's not democratic, so we're fixing it." A welcome principle - but the reform applies only to council committees. The new water CCOs going live in three weeks sit outside the Local Government Act, governed instead under Local Water Done Well. The Forums that select their boards - the very arrangements that breach Watts' own principle - will keep their voting rights intact.

If it is not democratic at council level, it cannot be democratic at the water entity level either.

This is not just a water issue. The same governance model applies to Auckland Transport, port companies, and other major CCOs.

In Wellington, Tiaki Wai - also launching on 1 July - has confirmed a $645,000 CEO salary (more than the Prime Minister) and doubled director fees to $60,000, while households face average bills of $2,418 this year, potentially rising to $6,831 by 2036. Mayor Andrew Little called the salaries "generous". The Commerce Commission is now scrutinising pricing - proof that the only meaningful check is regulatory, not democratic.

The model is heading to Hawke's Bay. From 1 July 2027, water services for Hastings, Napier, and Central Hawke's Bay will transfer to a new joint CCO.

Two practical reforms would close the gap.

First, CCO directors should be either directly elected by ratepayers or appointed exclusively from sitting councillors. Either option creates a direct line of sight from voter to board. The former is more democratic; the latter is cheaper and integrates CCO governance into existing council accountability.

Second, directorships should be term-limited to the electoral cycle. A change in council should automatically refresh CCO boards. At present, voters can throw out a council only to discover the bodies actually running their water, transport, and ports remain untouched.

Critics will object that elected or councillor-appointed directors would be parochial and unqualified. Perhaps. But the current system produces unaccountable parochialism dressed up as professional governance. The ability to vote them out is worth more than the illusion of expertise from people who answer to no one.

We tolerate an unelected sovereign because he sets no rates, signs no major contracts, and cannot raise the price of your shower. He is a constitutional ornament. Our CCO directors are not.

New Zealanders take representation seriously – so why is there exception for organisations that can send us bills we cannot refuse?

No taxation without representation. It is not a slogan. It is the bargain.

Watts has now agreed with the principle - for councils. In three weeks, water entities operating on the very arrangements he has just rejected go live in Wellington and the Waikato. Hawke's Bay follows a year later. Either the democratic principle applies everywhere, or it applies nowhere.

The King, at least, had the decency to stay out of it.

---

Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

---

SOURCES

• Maori ward referendums (Oct 2025): RNZ; final national tally per Wikipedia (Keep 542,134 / Remove 467,923 / margin 74,211).

• IAWAI - Flowing Waters Ltd (Hamilton/Waikato water CCO, operational 1 July 2026): Hamilton City Council governance page.

• Local Water Done Well overview: Bell Gully briefing.

• Auditor-General, "Submission on the Water Services Entities Bill" (8 August 2022): oag.parliament.nz.

• Local Government Act amendment announcement (Hon Simon Watts, 2 June 2026): Stuff; press release reproduced at Mirage News, "Council Voting Limited To Elected Officials".

• Tiaki Wai pay and pricing (April-May 2026): NZ Taxpayers' Union release; NZ Herald, "New Wellington water entity Tiaki Wai defends salary spend for top officials" (13 April 2026); NZ Herald, "Tiaki Wai opens books, warns of higher costs to households" (24 March 2026); RNZ, "Mounting confusion over new water bills looming for Wellington region residents" (22 May 2026).

• Hawke's Bay joint water CCO (operational 1 July 2027): Napier City Council news release.

Budget 2026: A better story, if you believe the assumptions

Article #459

For decades I have written about the Budget from the outside. This year, I was fortunate enough to be there in person – in the lockup, with the Treasury’s forecasts and supplementary documents in front of me before the Minister rose to speak. There is value in having the source material itself, rather than seeing headlines that come after. What follows is my read.

The Budget Economic and Fiscal Update released on 28 May tells a more reassuring story than the Half Year Update did back in December.¹ Deficits narrow earlier. The cyclically adjusted OBEGALx, the operating-balance measure favoured by Finance Minister Nicola Willis as it strips ACC’s volatile revenue and expenses out of the historical OBEGAL, returns to surplus in 2028/29; a full year sooner than previously forecast.² Tax revenue holds up better than feared. And on the Treasury’s fiscal-balance measure, which tracks the actual cash impact of government on the economy, policy keeps supporting demand through 2026/27 before tightening from 2027/28 onwards.³

On the surface it is a better-than-expected set of numbers. As always, the trouble is what sits underneath them.

The forecasts assume real GDP growth lifts from 1.2% this year to a peak of 3.2% by 2028. This would be a sharp acceleration after three years of contraction or near-zero growth.⁴ They assume unemployment peaks at 5.5% and then drifts back down to 4.3%, and that net migration recovers towards its long-run average having run at barely a quarter of that recently. Each assumption is plausible on its own. The sticking point is that the recovery needs most of them to arrive together, and roughly on schedule.

Inflation is the assumption that should give readers the most pause. In these forecasts, it takes a less-than-linear, lurching path: CPI surges to 4.0% this year, driven in part by higher fuel prices flowing from offshore conflict, before the forecast has it dropping abruptly to 1.6% in 2027, then settling around 2%.⁵ That near-halving in twelve months is a heroic call. It looks more heroic still when you separate out domestic, non-tradeable inflation, the prices generated here at home, in services, rates and rents – which Stats NZ measured at 3.5% in the year to March, with electricity up 12.5% and council rates up 8.8%.⁵

Ask any local who has just opened a new rates letter, renewed an insurance policy, or braced for yet another ramp-up in winter power prices. The cost-of-living squeeze people are actually feeling is not the tidy headline figure the forecast leans on. And a great deal does rest on that figure, because inflation feeds wage expectations, interest costs and the tax take all at once. If domestic prices prove stickier than assumed, the path back to surplus gets harder.

The forecasts also assume the Government will deliver on ambitious savings tracks at Health New Zealand, Kāinga Ora and the Ministry of Social Development – all organisations that have run material operating deficits.⁶ Every line of the recovery requires for something to land more or less perfectly. The Treasury’s own statement of specific fiscal risks runs to dozens of substantial items; a catalogue of expensive surprises waiting to happen.⁶

Meanwhile, the wave of cost coming our way is neither theoretical nor distant. It is here now.

Defence capability needs roughly $6 billion in new funding over the next two Budgets just to deliver the existing plan. The Health Infrastructure Plan identifies more than $20 billion over the next decade. The school property pipeline signals a significant uplift. Treaty relativity payments and pay equity settlements remain live cross-portfolio risks.⁶

Nowhere is the pressure clearer New Zealand Superannuation. NZ Super payments are forecast to climb from $24.7 billion in 2025/26 to $31.2 billion by 2029/30, an average increase of about $1.6 billion every year. This is the single largest driver of core Crown expense growth, with roughly half of that uplift simply more people turning 65.⁹ Against that backdrop, the decision to recommence contributions to the Super Fund is genuinely welcome – but light on detail for what is, on any honest reading, the largest looming fiscal pressure of the next two decades.

That’s the sobering side. There is a more encouraging side too, and parts of it land particularly well for our Hawke’s Bay region.

The tax package is sensibly targeted rather than flashy. Lifting the Foreign Investment Fund de minimis threshold from $50,000 to $100,000 of shareholdings is a solid, practical move. Combined with allowing the revenue account method for unlisted shares held by any New Zealand resident, it removes a barrier to migration for skilled people and cuts compliance costs for ordinary investors – who should never have been tangled in rules built for complex international structures.⁷ The accompanying changes to charities and not-for-profit settings, including a $100,000 annual cap on individuals’ rebate claims, tidy up a system that had drifted from its purpose.⁷

But, not everything in the package is so easily defended. One such outlier is the Emerging Managers’ Programme, a scheme backing first-time and emerging fund managers who invest in startup companies, with the aim of helping those funds build capacity, scale and a track record.⁸ No, you’re not reading that wrong: the Crown is effectively backing unproven managers who are backing unproven companies, stacking emerging-manager risk on top of early-stage venture risk. The mind boggles slightly.

There is somewhat of a rationale behind it – New Zealand’s venture ecosystem is thin, exits like Xero and Rocket Lab show what is possible, and the next generation of managers has to come from somewhere. But it sits oddly in a Budget otherwise sold on discipline and rebuilding buffers, and it will be worth watching closely how the guardrails are drawn.

Closer to home, the Budget delivers tangible benefits to Hawke’s Bay. Cash-strapped, debt-laden councils such as Hastings stand to benefit from changes giving them a share of consents value, a scaling mechanism that better matches revenue to the growth that creates the work. Funds have been earmarked for design and enabling works at Hawke’s Bay Hospital, alongside the wider Regional Hospital Redevelopment Programme.⁶ There’s also a $400 million reserve fund for state highway resilience projects aimed at keeping critical routes open during severe weather – something Hawke’s Bay residents understand the importance of more than most. Cyclone Gabrielle is not yet three and a half years behind us, and the Treasury itself rates comparable events as reasonably possible, at least once every four years, within the forecast period.⁶

The bottom line? This is a Budget Update that asks New Zealanders to take a fair amount on faith: that growth returns on cue, that inflation halves to target while domestic prices still bite, that savings targets are met, and that the events outside the Government’s control stay kind to us. The genuine wins for investors, charities, regional councils, hospital patients and motorists on vulnerable routes, deserve acknowledgement.

The risks deserve to be taken just as seriously.

The Treasury has done its job. It has shown us the figures and, in the supplementary information, told us plainly what could go wrong. The question is whether the rest of us are reading both halves of the document, so there aren’t surprises down the road if certain elements don’t stick the landing.

---

Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

---

REFERENCES

[1] The Treasury (2026). Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update 2025. Wellington: New Zealand Government, 16 December 2025.

[2] The Treasury (2026). Budget Economic and Fiscal Update 2026: Supplementary Information: Underlying Fiscal Performance (Cyclically-adjusted and Structural Balance Indicators), B.3, pp. 47–49. Wellington: New Zealand Government, 28 May 2026.

[3] The Treasury (2026). Budget Economic and Fiscal Update 2026: Supplementary Information: Fiscal Stance (Fiscal Balance and Total Fiscal Impulse Indicators), B.3, pp. 42–46.

[4] The Treasury (2026). Budget Economic and Fiscal Update 2026. Wellington: New Zealand Government, 28 May 2026; see also ‘Budget 2026: 10 things you need to know’, NZ Herald, 28 May 2026.

[5] The Treasury (2026). Budget Economic and Fiscal Update 2026: Supplementary Information: Detailed Economic Forecast Information, Table 2 (CPI) and Table 6 (Labour Market Indicators), B.3, pp. 33, 37; non-tradeable inflation of 3.5% from Stats NZ (2026), Consumers Price Index: March 2026 quarter, 21 April 2026.

[6] The Treasury (2026). Budget Economic and Fiscal Update 2026: Supplementary Information: Unchanged Specific Fiscal Risks and Contingent Liabilities, B.3, pp. 6–30.

[7] The Treasury (2026). Budget Economic and Fiscal Update 2026 — Supplementary Information: Tax Policy Changes, B.3, pp. 39–40; and Inland Revenue / The Treasury (2026), 2026 Tax Expenditure Statement, 28 May 2026.

[8] The Treasury (2026). Summary of Initiatives in Budget 2026, B.19, p. 9: Emerging Managers’ Programme. Wellington: New Zealand Government, 28 May 2026.

[9] The Treasury (2026). Budget Economic and Fiscal Update 2026, Fiscal Outlook — drivers of New Zealand Superannuation expense growth. Wellington: New Zealand Government, 28 May 2026.

Death and Taxes

Article #458

This Thursday, Nicola Willis will deliver Budget 2026. The headlines will be familiar: tight control of spending, focus on health, education, defence and law and order, a return to surplus.[1] To her credit, the Finance Minister has shown discipline.

On Tuesday, in her pre-Budget speech to Business North Harbour, she announced 8,700 public service job cuts over the next three years, $2.4 billion in savings, the merger of agencies, and AI as “a basic expectation” across government systems.[2] The public service had grown from roughly 48,000 in 2017 to over 63,000 by the end of 2024, a 33 percent expansion in six years against largely flat productivity growth. Trimming it back toward 1 percent of population is overdue.

The harder question is timing. The coalition has been in office for two and a half years. The electoral mandate was fresh in late 2023. Decisions of this magnitude, with this kind of political cost, are easier early in a term and almost impossible to deliver in election year without the optics looking opportunistic. The reforms should have been made then.

That delay matters because the bond market is a fickle lover when a country is carrying heavy debt and producing little productivity growth. Fitch has placed New Zealand’s AA+ rating on negative outlook, citing rising challenges in reducing debt after years of delayed fiscal consolidation; debt to GDP is projected to reach 56 percent by 2027.[3] The 10-year government bond yield is sitting near 4.7 percent. Every basis point on that yield translates into real money in interest costs. Markets are watching, and they are no longer giving New Zealand the benefit of the doubt.

This is the fiscal context in which the campaign begins.

Budget Day on the 28th is not really the main event. It is the starting gun for the election campaign that ends on 7 November. And the backdrop against which that campaign will be fought is grim.

The NZX 50 touched fresh lows this week. The Gross Index, which includes reinvested dividends, has delivered a total return of around 3 percent over the past five years.[4] That is less than 1 percent per year in nominal terms. Strip out dividends, and the price-only index is in negative territory. Once you factor in cumulative inflation of around 20 percent, New Zealand investors have gone backwards by close to 17 percent in real purchasing power. No other major Western bourse can claim that distinction. The S&P 500 has roughly doubled. The ASX 200 is up around a third. The FTSE, long the laggard of major markets, has still delivered around 30 percent. Even the Nikkei, dormant for two decades, has delivered roughly 70 percent.

This matters because when the stock market is not creating wealth, politicians look for ways to redistribute existing wealth. That is the genuine political logic of the moment, and it is amplified by the mechanics of MMP. Labour cannot govern alone. To form a government, it will need the Greens and almost certainly Te Pāti Māori. Whatever Labour campaigns on, the coalition partners will demand more.

Labour has confirmed it will campaign on a capital gains tax targeted at residential and commercial property, with revenue ringfenced for free GP visits.[5] The Greens have gone further, proposing a 2.5 percent annual wealth tax on net assets above $2 million, and a 33 percent inheritance tax on lifetime gifts and estates above a $1 million threshold.[6] Te Pāti Māori has signalled wealth taxes as a coalition bottom line.[7] Fitch has reportedly been briefed on tax measures beyond what Labour has publicly disclosed.[8]

The Greens’ inheritance tax proposal is the one to pay closest attention to. It is, in everything but name, the return of estate duty. And it is worth remembering, on the eve of a Budget that opens an election year, why New Zealand abandoned that tax in 1992.

Estate duty was sold as a tool of equity. In practice, it became a destroyer of family legacies. By the early 1970s, rates had climbed as high as 40 percent, with thresholds catching far more than just the wealthy.[9] For families whose wealth was tied up in illiquid assets, the death of a patriarch or matriarch triggered financial catastrophe.

The Hawke’s Bay orcharding sector provides stark examples. Local orchardists who had spent decades developing pipfruit operations found their estates assessed at development values rather than agricultural income values. Families faced duty bills exceeding several years of profit. The choice was bleak: sell blocks to developers, or take on crippling loans.[10] Many spent thirty years or more servicing that debt, an entire generation lost to a single tax assessment. A block of land that had taken a grandfather forty years to develop into productive orchard could be lost to an unexpected death and an Inland Revenue assessment within eighteen months.

The Waikato dairy sector tells the same story. Multi-generational farms were forced to sell down herds and land to meet duty bills. The remaining operations often lacked the scale needed to remain viable, and some families saw their children leave farming altogether.[11] It was not incompetence that ended these legacies. It was a tax code that demanded immediate liquidity from operations that simply do not generate it.

Rural service businesses, the stock and station agents, transport firms, processing contractors, faced the same pressure. Many took on outside investors to meet duty bills, and those investors eventually engineered buyouts. The consolidation of New Zealand’s agricultural service sector during the 1980s owed much to estate duty’s destabilising effect.[12]

Defenders argued at the time, and will argue again, that proper planning could avoid these outcomes. Two things are worth saying about that. First, the planning itself was a deadweight cost. Families spent thousands on lawyers and accountants navigating frequently changing rules rather than reinvesting in their enterprises.[13] Second, deaths do not arrive on schedule.

What does prudence look like in practice? It looks like reviewing trust structures that may have been set up two decades ago under different rules. It looks like understanding which assets sit where, who owns what, and what the liquidity profile of an estate actually is on any given day. It looks like considering whether life insurance has a role to play in funding potential tax liabilities. It looks like beginning the conversations between generations that families instinctively defer.

The lesson from estate duty is not that all tax is bad. It is that taxes on illiquid family assets transfer productive wealth from those who built it to whoever has the ready cash to buy at distress prices. That is not redistribution. It is destruction. And it is being proposed at a moment when fewer families have the financial cushion to weather it, against a stock market that has produced no real wealth for half a decade.

Thursday’s Budget will not settle this debate. It opens it. Families with farm, orchard, or business assets ought to be reviewing their structures now, seeking wise counsel from advisers who understand both the tax architecture and the fiduciary weight of decisions made under pressure. None of this argues for selling out of New Zealand equities at the lows: capitulation at the bottom is the parallel mistake, the same wealth destruction by another route. The answer is diversification and counsel, not retreat. The families who recovered from estate duty were almost always those who took advice early. The ones who lost everything were those who waited until the tax was already in force.

History rhymes. It does not, thankfully, repeat. But only if we are paying attention.

---

Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

---

REFERENCES

[1] The Treasury, Budget 2026, 28 May 2026, treasury.govt.nz/publications/budgets/budget-2026

[2] NZ Herald, Nicola Willis’ public service cuts to save $2.4b, 8700 jobs to go, 19 May 2026; 1News, Thousands of public service jobs to go, major Govt shake-up announced, 19 May 2026

[3] Fitch Ratings, New Zealand AA+ outlook revised to negative, March 2026; Trading Economics, New Zealand 10-Year Government Bond Yield

[4] S&P/NZX 50 Gross Index, 5-year return data to 20 May 2026, NZX and Yahoo Finance

[5] NZ Herald, Labour’s capital gains tax: Chris Hipkins celebrates ‘progressive’ policy, 28 October 2025

[6] Become Wealth, Wealth Tax NZ: What It Means and Who Would Pay, April 2026; Green Party Alternative Budget 2025

[7] RNZ, Te Pāti Māori proposes suite of changes in new tax policies

[8] Scoop News, Fitch Report Exposes Labour’s Secret Tax Agenda, 29 April 2026

[9] Inland Revenue Department, Annual Report 1975 (Wellington: Government Printer, 1976), 23-25

[10] P.J. Skellerup, “Estate Duty and the New Zealand Horticultural Sector,” NZ Journal of Agricultural Economics 3, no. 2 (1979): 45-52

[11] Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, Agricultural Statistics 1980 (Wellington: Government Printer, 1981), 67-89

[12] R.M. Sandrey and S.R. Reynolds, “Structural Change in New Zealand Agriculture 1972-1987,” Review of Marketing and Agricultural Economics 58, no. 1 (1990): 15-28

[13] NZ Law Society, Submission on Estate and Gift Duties Amendment Bill (Wellington: NZLS, 1983), 8-12

The GDP Trap: Why Technology Sceptics Keep Getting It Wrong

Article #457 - A Canny View on Capital, Productivity and the AI Moment

I was in Wellington last month, watching my son play rugby. Between the lineouts, the bagpipes, and the cheering crowds, I found myself deep in conversation with some of the opposing team's parents (as you do). One of them, it turned out, reads this column. She'd been listening to a podcast during the week and wanted to pick my brain on something that had been bothering her: the idea that technology, the internet, and now AI doesn't move the needle on GDP. Was I convinced? Did I think AI would go the same way?

I told her I'd think about it properly and write it up. So here we are.

The argument is that the internet failed to shift GDP. Productivity growth stayed stubbornly flat through the digital revolution, and AI will likely disappoint in the same way.

Tidy. Plausible. But - wrong.

Start with the measure itself. GDP is the bluntest instrument in the economist's toolkit. It counts what gets transacted, not what gets created. It captures the volume of economic activity, but not the quality of the decisions that drive it. It has no mechanism for measuring time saved, stress reduced, options expanded or freedom gained. Judging technological progress through GDP alone guarantees you miss the point entirely.

Economist Robert Solow noticed this as far back as 1987, when he observed that the computer age appeared everywhere except in the productivity statistics – a phenomenon that became known as the Solow Productivity Paradox.¹ History eventually proved him right, just on a longer lag than the critics expected. Technology hadn’t failed. GDP was simply a poor timekeeper.

Technology is an enabler, not a product

Take the motor vehicle. The combustion engine restructured how people moved, how goods flowed, and how entire societies organised themselves. The GDP figures didn't move immediately in response to this technological feat. Infrastructure had to be built. Habits had to change. Supply chains had to be reimagined, and entirely new industries – fuel, insurance, hospitality, suburban housing – had to emerge. But once those conditions were in place, the uplift was extraordinary. We produced and shipped volumes of goods that would have been incomprehensible to the previous generation. The technology compressed time, distance and cost simultaneously, and returned something more valuable than efficiency: freedom. Freedom of movement, of choice, of attention. We enjoy freedoms our grandparents couldn't have imagined, and GDP only partially accounts for why.² The full value of what technology returns to human life has always been larger than what the national accounts can see.

The internet followed the same pattern: in its infancy, productivity statistics disappointed. Critics pointed to flat lines - exactly the lines we hear cited about AI today. Sceptics declared the revolution oversold. Then, suddenly, everything changed.

Amazon didn't just create a retail channel. It rewrote the rules of commerce, warehousing, logistics and consumer expectation. Google didn't just organise information, it fundamentally altered how knowledge was accessed and shared. The internet became the incubation platform for industries that couldn't previously exist: the gig economy, streaming, fintech, e-commerce, social media, and the vast ecosystem of software-as-a-service that now underpins nearly every business on the planet.³

GDP followed. It always does, eventually - the error is expecting it to lead.

Which brings us to AI, and the real question…

Transformation, or novelty?

The evidence points firmly to the former. AI is not an application. It is infrastructure. Just as the internet built a platform beneath entire industries, AI is now embedding itself beneath every workflow, every decision, every process across every sector simultaneously. Its speed of adoption is faster than any previous general-purpose technology, reaching 100 million users in months rather than the decades it took electricity or the telephone to achieve comparable penetration. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates AI could add between $13 and $22 trillion to the global economy annually by 2030, with generative AI alone contributing $2.6 to $4.4 trillion across industries each year.⁴

Businesses dismissing it as a "nice to have" remind me of Spencer Johnson's parable, “Who Moved My Cheese?”⁵ It describes how those who refuse to adapt are left behind not through any single dramatic moment, but through the slow, steady movement of the world around them. The cheese has moved. It is moving right now. Yet, some are still debating whether it will move at all.

For those of us who allocate capital on behalf of clients, this is not an abstract debate. It is a practical and urgent one, and it cuts to the heart of how we should think about investment discipline in a period of structural change.

History will likely repeat… eventually.

The data clearly tells us that active managers – those who believe they can outthink the market, pick winners and time the turns – have a consistently poor record of doing so. The SPIVA Scorecard, published by S&P Dow Jones Indices, shows that over a 15-year period, nearly 90% of active fund managers underperform their benchmark index.⁶

Across global markets, including Australia and New Zealand, the findings are consistent. The crystal ball is no clearer in professional hands than in the layman's. The complexity of markets, the speed of information and the weight of costs conspire to make consistent outperformance not merely difficult but statistically improbable.

A robust, evidence-based framework protects clients from the most persistent and costly mistakes in investing: reacting to noise, chasing narratives, and confusing confidence with competence.

Understanding AI and its long-term implications is not about picking technology stocks or timing a wave – that’s where you can get into trouble, à la NFTs and other failed hype stocks.

It is instead about recognising when the world is changing structurally, and ensuring that clients are positioned to participate in the full arc of that change over time – through diversified, low-cost and disciplined portfolios. The opportunity is not in predicting which companies win, but in making sure clients are in the game when the GDP finally catches up – because eventually, it will.

The woman I spoke with in Wellington already sensed this. She wasn't asking whether AI was real. She was asking whether the people managing her money understood it well enough to make sound decisions on her behalf – which is exactly the right question to be asking.

Technology enables. Capital follows. The data has never told us otherwise. The sceptics may be right on timing, but history suggests they are wrong on direction.

---

Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

---

REFERENCES

1. Solow, R. (1987). We'd better watch out. New York Times Book Review. The observation, "you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics", gave rise to what economists termed the Solow Productivity Paradox.

2. Crafts, N. (2004). Steam as a General Purpose Technology: A Growth Accounting Perspective. Economic Journal. Documents the long lag between transformative technology adoption and measurable economic uplift, a pattern repeated across industrial revolutions.

3. Brynjolfsson, E. & McAfee, A. (2014). The Second Machine Age. W.W. Norton & Company. Argues that digital technology's economic impact was systematically underestimated because GDP fails to capture consumer surplus and free digital goods.

4. McKinsey Global Institute (2023). The Economic Potential of Generative AI. McKinsey & Company. Estimates generative AI could add $2.6 to $4.4 trillion annually across industries, with broader AI contributing $13–$22 trillion by 2030.

5. Johnson, S. (1998). Who Moved the Cheese? G.P. Putnam's Sons. A business parable on adaptability and the cost of resisting inevitable change.

6. S&P Dow Jones Indices (2026). SPIVA U.S. Scorecard, Year-End 2025. Over a 15-year horizon, 90% of large-cap active managers underperformed the S&P 500. Consistent findings are reported across global markets including Australia and New Zealand.

The Red Baron's Dicta: Timeless Lessons in Discipline and Risk

Article #453

April 21st marks the anniversary of Manfred von Richthofen's death: the legendary Red Baron who claimed 80 aerial victories before falling at just 25 years old.

Since childhood, I've been captivated by his story. Here was an aerial combat pioneer and crack shot hunter since his youth, who transformed the chaos of dogfighting into a disciplined science. What makes his story relevant for investors isn't his success, but how he achieved it through disciplined adherence to proven principles – and ultimately, how he lost everything by abandoning them in a single moment of exuberance.

From Hunter to Ace

Von Richthofen's foundation as a hunter shaped everything that followed. Before he ever climbed into a cockpit, he'd spent years stalking game on his family's Silesian estate, learning patience, precision, and the critical importance of positioning. A hunter doesn't charge blindly at prey; he studies wind direction, uses terrain for cover, and waits for the perfect shot. Honed since boyhood, these instincts would prove invaluable in the skies above the Western Front.

He brought this hunter’s mentality with him when he transferred to the Imperial German Air Service in 1915. He learnt his craft from Oswald Boelcke, the era's preeminent fighter tactician, whose maxims established fundamental rules for air combat. But von Richthofen didn't simply follow his mentor's teachings; he refined them through his own experience into his own dicta – an effective combat manual that became the foundation for his legendary Flying Circus.

The Dicta: A Hunter's Discipline Applied to Combat

The Baron's rules were precise and probabilistic, each designed to stack advantages systematically.

• Secure advantages before attacking: altitude, sun position, numerical superiority. Like a hunter choosing his ground, never engage until the odds favour you.

• Attack from behind where opponents can't see you, just as a hunter approaches game from downwind.

• Fire only at close range when your target is properly in your sights – ammunition is limited, and wild shots achieve nothing.

• Always carry through an attack once started. Half-measures waste the advantage you've worked to secure.

• Keep your eye on your opponent; never let them trick you into looking away. A hunter who loses focus on his quarry finds himself suddenly the hunted.

• When threatened, don't evade—turn and face the attack. Running reveals your vulnerability; confronting the threat keeps you in control.

• Over enemy lines, always remember your line of retreat. Know where safety lies, just as a hunter always knows the path back to camp.

He drilled his pilots in these tactics as they flew, pairing them as leader and wingman, spaced 60 metres abreast to allow room for manoeuvre without collision. They flew in tight formation, massing their power for coordinated strikes. This ensured every engagement began with probability tilted in their favour.

The Flying Circus became legendary for systematic execution. Von Richthofen applied that hunter's patience to aerial warfare, refusing to engage unless conditions favoured him. His bright red Fokker Dr.I triplane was essentially psychological warfare, announcing his presence and unnerving opponents before the first shot was fired.

Manfred von Richthofen (centred) with his mentor Hauptmann Oswald Boelcke (left) and Reserve Lieutenant Max Immelmann (right)

From Nick Stewart’s personal collection

Stacking Structural Advantages in Investing

Just as von Richthofen never attacked without multiple advantages working simultaneously, successful investing requires layering structural advantages that compound over time:

Numerical superiority: Broad diversification reduces unsystematic risk. Rather than betting everything on a single stock or sector, spread exposure across asset classes, geographies, and market capitalisations. You're not dependent on any single position succeeding, giving you better odds overall.

Securing altitude advantage: Tilts towards factors like value and small-cap, which decades of academic research show provide systematic return premiums over time. This means you begin each engagement from a position of structural strength backed by empirical evidence.

Additionally, low costs prevent silent erosion of returns. Every percentage point in fees is altitude surrendered before the engagement begins. Index and enhanced index funds that minimise expenses ensure more of your capital remains invested and compounding rather than being siphoned off.

Remembering your retreat: Liquidity enables repositioning when needed. Like von Richthofen’s strategy, portfolios need the ability to adapt without being trapped in unfavourable positions. Illiquid investments might offer higher returns, but they remove flexibility precisely when you might need it most.

Always see things through: Tax efficiency keeps more capital compounding. In New Zealand's relatively benign capital gains environment, this means strategic timing of realisations, thoughtful use of portfolio investment entities, and attention to income versus capital return characteristics.

Like securing altitude and sun position before attacking, proper asset allocation and positioning come first. Like firing only at close range with targets in your sights, investment decisions require clear conviction based on evidence, not speculation. Like the Flying Circus's coordinated attacks, diversification across asset classes works more effectively than concentrated bets.

Oil painting by Max Ordinall, from Nick’s personal collection

Constant Awareness: The Discipline of Waiting and Watching

Von Richthofen's rule about keeping your eye on your opponent and never being tricked into looking away speaks directly to behavioural finance. The greatest threat to individual investment success isn't market volatility. It's our own behavioural biases, causing us to look away at critical moments.

In investing, maintaining awareness means monitoring what you can control whilst ignoring what you can’t - AKA the noise designed to distract:

• Portfolio drift from target allocations matters. Daily market movements don't.

• Rebalancing opportunities when asset classes diverge significantly from targets matter. Quarterly earnings reports for individual companies within diversified index funds don't.

• Changes in personal circumstances requiring plan adjustments matter. Predictions about where markets are headed next month don't.

Discipline is harder in practice than in abstract. The retail investment industry generates an overwhelming torrent of information, most of it designed to make you feel you're missing something critical if you're not constantly trading. But as von Richthofen ignored enemy aircraft that didn't present advantageous engagement opportunities, investors must ignore much of market commentary and focus solely on what affects their systematic advantages.

Systematic Execution: Rebalancing as Tactical Discipline

Disciplined rebalancing is your “always carry through an attack once started” parallel. When equity markets surge beyond target allocations, trim them back to target. When they fall and fear is highest, rebalance back into them. Half-measures, like trimming only slightly or delaying rebalancing in case of a better opportunity later, waste the systematic advantage you’ve built.

This is extraordinarily difficult psychologically. Trimming equities after they've surged feels like selling winners. Adding to equities after they've fallen feels like catching a falling knife. But this mechanical adherence removes emotion from decision-making and ensures you're systematically buying low and selling high without attempting to time markets.

Von Richthofen's pilots didn't abort attacks halfway through if conditions looked momentarily unfavourable. They committed fully, trusting their systematic advantages would prevail. The same discipline applies to rebalancing: execute completely. Trust the process.

When Threatened, Face the Attack

When markets plunge, and portfolios decline, every instinct screams to sell, to "preserve what's left”, or to flee to cash.

This is precisely when systematic discipline matters most. Loss aversion—the behavioural bias where losses feel roughly twice as painful as equivalent gains—drives panic selling at market bottoms. Recency bias makes recent volatility feel like the new permanent reality. These biases trick investors into looking away from their long-term objectives and focusing on short-term pain.

Facing the attack means maintaining perspective. Your goals—retirement security, educational funding, legacy objectives—haven't changed because markets had a volatile quarter or year. Your systematic advantages—diversification, factor tilts, low costs—still function. The evidence supporting long-term equity returns hasn't evaporated.

Avoiding Fatal Deviation

The Baron's final flight on April 21, 1918, illustrates what happens when principles are abandoned. Engaging Canadian pilot Wilfrid May in a prolonged dogfight, von Richthofen broke multiple cardinal rules. The wind that day blew from an unusual direction—not the prevailing westerlies favouring German pilots. The extended engagement pushed him progressively deeper over Allied lines near the ridgeline at Corby.

He forgot his line of retreat. Flying low in pursuit of a relatively inexperienced opponent, he'd surrendered altitude advantage for the thrill of another victory. No wingman accompanied him. No formation support protected him. Every systematic advantage that had kept him alive through 80 victories had evaporated in the heat of pursuit.

A single, well-timed shot from Australian ground troops ended the legend—despite the aerial victory subsequently claimed by Canadian RAF pilot Roy Brown. One bullet. One moment of losing sight of position, probability, and principles.

Investors make remarkably similar mistakes constantly. Prolonged bull markets create overconfidence, and carefully constructed asset allocations drift unchecked because "equities always go up" or "bricks and mortar never lose value." A colleague's cryptocurrency windfall makes disciplined portfolios feel inadequate, tempting abandonment of evidence-based strategies for speculation. Market corrections trigger panic selling despite decades until retirement, abandoning the systematic discipline that would mean buying at depressed prices.

These are precisely the moments when abandoning proven principles feels most justified—and when probability turns decisively against us. We're pursuing that one more gain, chasing performance, abandoning our line of retreat.

Von Richthofen's legacy is defined by the systematic, probabilistic approach that made him exceptional – and his demise shows the value in sticking with what works.

His manual endures because it improves probability in combat. Markets require a similarly disciplined approach: following proven principles not just when conditions are favourable, but especially when every instinct says otherwise. 

Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

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REFERENCES

1. Franks, N. & Bennett, A. (1995). The Red Baron's Last Flight. Grub Street Publishing.

2. Kilduff, P. (2007). Red Baron: The Life and Death of an Ace. David & Charles.

3. Fama, E.F. & French, K.R. (1992). "The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns." Journal of Finance, 47(2), 427-465.

4. Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1979). "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk." Econometrica, 47(2), 263-291.

Air New Zealand: The Worst of Both Worlds

Article #452

Fifty percent government-owned, operating like a budget carrier, charging premium prices, Air New Zealand occupies the most uncomfortable position in aviation. It’s neither fish nor fowl: not quite private, not quite public, delivering neither the efficiency of true competition nor the service standards of genuine public ownership.¹

Welcome to the warm embrace of collectivism. It’s getting warmer, and not in a good way.

The Flightless National Carrier

The symbolism writes itself. Air New Zealand, like the kiwi, has become a flightless bird, grounded by contradictions, unable to soar because it refuses to commit. Government ownership was supposed to protect the national interest. Instead, it has created an airline that enjoys privileges without facing consequences: government contracts, preferential treatment, implicit bailout guarantees, all without the full discipline of the market or the scrutiny of complete public accountability.¹

When things go wrong, taxpayers are on the hook. When things go right, shareholders collect the dividends.

New Zealanders know this intimately: the airline received NZ$2.3 billion in Crown support during COVID-19.² The structural trap was set long before the current crisis.

The World is on Fire. Air NZ has a Newsletter.

On 8 April 2026, CEO Nikhil Ravishankar sent customers a carefully worded email. “Kia ora Nick,” it began warmly. He wanted to update customers on jet fuel prices. Fuel had surged from around US$85–90 a barrel to above US$200, effectively doubling Air New Zealand’s daily fuel bill from NZ$4 million to NZ$8.5 million. Schedule cuts for May and June were confirmed. More were promised to be “deliberate and carefully considered.”³

Warm. Reassuring. Human, even, which is ironic, given what you encounter when you actually try to contact the airline.

This crisis is not Air New Zealand’s alone. Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which over 20% of global seaborne jet fuel normally flows, has sent shockwaves through the entire industry.⁴ More than 14,000 flights globally have been cancelled since late February 2026.⁵

Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary has predicted summer cancellations of 5–10% across Europe.⁶ United Airlines’ CEO Scott Kirby has warned his carrier’s fuel bill could double to US$20 billion.⁷ Lufthansa’s CEO has assigned teams to contingency planning.⁸ SAS has cancelled over 1,000 flights in April alone.⁹ Energy analysts at Kpler warn that even if the Strait reopened tomorrow, prices would not fall quickly: production has been taken offline, and the market hangover could last well into 2027.¹⁰

The difference between Air New Zealand and those carriers is structural. Most are pure private enterprises; they face consequences. Air New Zealand faces a shareholder with a printing press.

The Numbers are Brutal

Forsyth Barr’s March 2026 report is stark: Air New Zealand could book a net loss of $226 million in FY2026, and $148 million in FY2027 if fuel costs remain elevated.¹¹ Macquarie analysts warn that capacity cuts will fall primarily on domestic and Tasman routes.¹² The share price has reflected the outlook, trading near its 52-week low at $0.48, down sharply from $0.64.¹³

The airline has already trimmed near-term capacity by 5%, with more reductions almost certain.

Watch for the Capital Raise

Here is what the CEO’s warm email does not say: if losses of this magnitude materialise over two financial years, Air New Zealand will need to raise capital. When it does, the New Zealand government, as 50.1% shareholder, faces an unavoidable choice. Participate, and write another substantial cheque from the public purse to protect its stake. Or decline, dilute, and begin the slow retreat from an ownership position it has held for decades.

Either outcome implicates taxpayers. Either outcome exposes the central absurdity of the current arrangement. Budget 2026… hold your breath.

Chatbots and Contempt

Try contacting Air New Zealand’s customer service, and you will discover the true face of modern collectivist enterprise: woeful service, declining standards, and a corporate structure that treats human interaction as an inconvenience to be automated away.

You are more likely to engage with a chatbot than a human, and the human, when you eventually find one, operates like a chatbot anyway—scripted, bounded, unable to resolve anything of substance. The airline’s answer to its service failures is not better people or better training, but better systems for apologising for the absence of both.

The Hospital Pass

That’s what recommending Air New Zealand has become, and nowhere is the gap between price and product more vivid than in business class, where Air New Zealand’s structural contradictions are most expensive to observe firsthand.

The airline’s new Business Premier cabin, rolling out across its Boeing 787 fleet through 2026, retains a herringbone configuration. Passengers sit angled toward the aisle rather than toward the window, the opposite of the reverse herringbone suites now standard on Qatar Airways, Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific.¹⁴ Standard Business Premier seats come equipped with a sliding privacy screen. Not a door: a screen.

A door costs extra. Specifically, NZ$820 (approximately US$487) extra on long-haul.¹⁵ There are four of them on the entire retrofitted aircraft.¹⁶ Aviation analysts reviewing the product have described the standard offering as “fairly underwhelming” compared to what the competition offers.¹⁷

You’d book Qantas if you could, but with Emirates disrupted by Iranian airspace closures, rerouting flights away from Gulf hubs, alternatives from New Zealand are thinner than they have been in years.¹⁸

Choose

New Zealand deserves better than this muddled middle ground. Our national carrier should be either a source of genuine pride (fully public, properly accountable, serving citizens) or a true competitor, privately owned and driven to excel.

Full public ownership means genuine accountability: real service obligations, routes chosen for public benefit, consequences for failure. Full privatisation means real competition, no bailouts, market discipline for a product that currently charges a premium for the privilege of facing a stranger across a narrow aisle.

What we have instead is the comfortable middle ground that serves nobody.

Make a choice. Commit to something. Because right now, our national carrier charges like Singapore Airlines, seats you in a layout from 2005, asks NZ$820 extra for a door, deploys a chatbot when you complain, and may shortly be asking the government for more money.

That’s not the warm embrace of collectivism. That’s the slow squeeze.

Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

Canny View: Into the Bush — and Back, Rewarded

Article #451

The crack of a rifle echoes through the ranges. Deer season is open, and thousands of New Zealand hunters are pulling on their boots, loading up their packs, and heading into the hills with purpose. The roar is in full swing, and the pursuit of a good stag and a well-stocked freezer is very much alive. 

As I watch the preparations unfold each year, I can't help but see unmistakable parallels between heading into the bush and heading into the markets. Both reward the well-prepared investor. Both punish the cavalier. In both cases, coming home well and coming home rewarded start long before you take your first step. 

Know the terrain before you go in 

No serious hunter heads into unfamiliar bush without doing their homework first. They study the topography, understand the animal patterns, check the weather forecast, and know their exit routes. They talk to people who have hunted that country before. They don't assume that experience from one range translates perfectly to another. 

The investment landscape demands the same meticulous care. Before committing capital, the prepared investor takes time to understand the environment they're entering: market conditions, their own risk tolerance, time horizon, and the nature of the assets they're holding. Again, a fund or asset class that performed brilliantly in one market cycle may behave very differently in the next. 

Winging it in either arena tends to end badly, and usually at a financial cost to the unwary. 

Make your intentions known 

Every responsible hunter tells someone where they're going, when they expect to be back, and the route they plan to take. More than mere courtesy, this is protocol that keeps people safe when conditions change unexpectedly. Search and rescue teams will tell you that the single most useful thing a hunter can do before heading out is leave a detailed intentions form with someone they trust. 

In financial planning, this translates to working with a trusted fiduciary adviser who holds the full picture of your goals, your situation, and your plan. They're the person who knows where you're headed, what you're working towards, and can raise the alarm or offer a steadying, experienced hand if the conditions shift unexpectedly. A financial plan that lives only in your head is about as useful as intentions you forgot to leave behind before heading into the ranges. 

Safety first: Treat every firearm as loaded 

The golden rule of firearm safety is to treat every weapon as if it's loaded, every time, without exception. No shortcuts, no assumptions, no matter how familiar the environment or how experienced you are. The moment you stop following the rules is the moment accidents happen. 

In investing, the equivalent is always respecting risk, even when conditions look calm, and the market appears benign. It's easy to become cavalier about risk after a long bull run. Portfolios go up, confidence grows, and caution starts to feel unnecessary. But the investors who come unstuck are rarely those who panicked in a downturn; more often, they're the ones who stopped taking risk seriously when times were good and had over-exposed themselves before the conditions changed. Complacency is the safety left on when you're absolutely sure you don't need it, and this oversight will catch up with you eventually. 

Don't pull the trigger prematurely 

A seasoned hunter knows that a poor shot, taken in haste, without a clear line of sight, or before the animal is properly settled, can wound rather than harvest, and cost you the opportunity altogether. Patience is not a waste of time, nor mere passivity. It is the active, disciplined decision to wait until conditions are right. 

The same applies to investment decisions made in the heat of the moment. Selling out of a portfolio when markets fall sharply can feel decisive, and even prudent, at the time. But it often locks in paper losses and leaves you sitting on the sidelines in cash when the recovery comes. And recoveries, historically, tend to come faster and more forcefully than most people expect. 

The discipline to hold your position, wait for the right conditions, and resist the urge to act simply because the uncertainty is uncomfortable is what separates a skilled, long-term investor from a reactive one. 

Go prepared and stay prepared 

The experienced hunter carries more than a rifle. They bring a first aid kit, emergency shelter, a personal locator beacon, and enough food and water to last longer than expected. They aim for the best outcome, while being genuinely prepared for the worst.

A well-constructed investment portfolio works the same way.  

Diversification is your emergency kit. It won't prevent all downturns or shield you from every storm, but it ensures no single bad outcome takes you out entirely. Spreading your exposure across asset classes, geographies, and sectors means that when one area of the market is under pressure, others may be holding firm or even gaining ground. Regular reviews with your adviser are the equivalent of checking your gear before each outing; it's essential maintenance that most people wish they'd undertaken sooner when something eventually goes wrong. 

The reward is in the preparation 

Seasoned hunters come home with something to show for their efforts more often than not, and it's not luck. It's methodical preparation, sound judgment, deep respect for the environment, and the discipline to follow the rules—even when no one is watching and it would be easy to cut corners. 

The same is true of investing. The clients who tend to come home well-rewarded are rarely those who chased the latest hot opportunity or abandoned their carefully built plan at the first sign of difficulty. They're the ones who went in prepared, stayed their course through the inevitable rough patches, kept reviewing and adjusting with their adviser, and trusted a disciplined, evidence-based process over the long run. 

The bush doesn't care how confident you are. Neither do the markets. But go in right, with a clear plan, the right gear, a trusted guide, and the discipline to follow through when it counts, and both have something well worth taking home. 

And if the stag proves elusive this Easter, there's always the egg hunt: a somewhat safer pursuit, with arguably better odds of coming home rewarded. 

Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

The Centurion’s Warning: Superannuation at 65—comforting politics, hard maths

Article #450

Nine years ago, I wrote about Roman Centurions. The New Zealand Economics Forum last month proved I wasn’t being dramatic enough.

When I wrote my very first Canny View in September 2017, I told the story of Roman Emperor Augustus and his military pension scheme, the Aerarium militare. Augustus faced a problem that will sound familiar: Romans were living longer, the pension fund was catastrophically underfunded, and someone had to pay for it.

His solutions were creative, if not entirely honest. Keep raising taxes. Extend the military service requirements, again and again. And when the pension rolls got too heavy? Launch another campaign! Rome always found another frontier war conveniently thinned the numbers — the Germans, the Dacians, the Parthians. It was just fiscal procrastination dressed up as military glory.

I wrote then: what is happening today is no different to those Roman times. At the end of the day, someone has to pay for it.¹

The Road to Rome’s Problems

The Aerarium militare is one of history’s most instructive fiscal cautionary tales. Augustus established it in 6 AD, seeding it with 170 million sesterces of his own money — a sum so large he had to make it a personal gift to avoid a Senate revolt over new taxes. When that proved insufficient, he pushed through a 5% inheritance tax and a 1% sales tax on goods sold at auction to keep the fund solvent. When Tiberius later tried to abolish the sales tax, his generals warned him that there was no other way to pay veterans. So, the tax stayed.

Each time the fund came under pressure, the response was the same: extend the service requirement. Augustus raised it from 16 years to 20, then up to 25. Soldiers who had signed up expecting to retire at 16 years found the goalposts moved, repeatedly, for fiscal reasons. Sound familiar?

Some historians trace a significant part of Rome’s eventual decline to the Senate later cutting pension payments altogether. With less incentive to serve, Roman citizens stopped enlisting. The ranks filled with barbarian mercenaries. Cohesion and discipline collapsed. The pension problem eventually helped unravel the army that held the Empire together.

New Zealand introduced its own old-age pension in 1898 — one of the first countries in the world to do so, under Richard Seddon’s Liberal government. It would be received at age 65, when male life expectancy was just 56. Like the Aerarium, it was never designed to be paid to most people. It was a safety net for the few who beat the odds. The pension that most New Zealanders now expect to receive for 20-plus years of retirement was conceived for people who, statistically, were unlikely to reach it at all.

Shifting Demographics Add Up to a Problem

Back in 2017, when I wrote that first article, over 15% of New Zealand’s population was aged 65 or older. Today, we’re past 16% and heading towards 20–21% within the next decade.⁵ We’ve gone from around 750,000 receiving NZ Super then, to over 912,000 today.⁶ Crucially, the working-age population supporting them is shrinking proportionally.

It’s not a sudden crisis of compassion, but rather a mathematical problem. The ratio of workers to retirees is deteriorating. Empires fall not from external threats but from internal fiscal contradictions — and we are living that reality now.

What’s Changed Since 2017?

In 2017, Bill English had just opened the door to raising the retirement age to 67 from 2037. Jacinda Ardern promptly pledged to repeal it and declared she’d resign before raising the retirement age. Labour won, the policy was scrapped, and the age stayed at 65. It hasn’t shifted since.

Movement comes only at the margins. Residence requirements for NZ Super are increasing from 10 to 20 years, phased through to 2042.⁷ Superannuation will consume 18.6% of tax revenue by 2029, up from 16.6% in 2023.³ But the fundamental policy lever — the eligibility age — remains politically untouchable. Augustus would understand completely.

What Treasury Said in Hamilton

At February’s New Zealand Economics Forum in Hamilton, Treasury Secretary Iain Rennie warned that ageing is already materially lifting expenditure and will continue to do so throughout the next decade, outpacing revenue growth. Without policy changes, New Zealand’s debt trajectory will become unsustainable.²

The number of people receiving superannuation will grow from 928,000 today to over 1,084,000 by 2029/30. That’s roughly the entire population of Tauranga added to the pension rolls in just under five years, costing a cool $7.7 billion more per year – equivalent to 22% of all projected tax revenue growth over that period.² Rennie was clear this isn’t a problem for future governments alone: “They are part of the chill headwinds confronting the government now.”²

Treasury’s longer-term projections show that without policy changes, government debt could reach unsustainable levels by the 2060s. This would be driven primarily by superannuation and healthcare costs for our ageing population.⁴ Every year of inaction makes the eventual adjustments more severe. That’s Treasury’s own modelling, not an opinion.

The Age Question Nobody Wants to Answer

At the same forum, a panel of economists and former politicians concluded that New Zealand can’t afford superannuation at 65… or even 67. Some suggested eligibility may need to rise as high as 72 or 73 to be viable long-term.²

Back to our Roman friends: Augustus didn’t want to cut centurion pensions either, as it was politically impossible. Instead, he extended service requirements, raised taxes, and launched another Parthian campaign. Each short-term fix made the structural problem worse. Eventually, the promises became mathematically impossible to honour, and the system failed.

We are not Augustus. We have better data, better institutions, and better options. What we seem to lack is the political will to use them.

What Actually Needs to Happen

Raising the age alone won’t fix this. The Forum panel agreed on that much.²

The deeper issue is savings and productivity. There is no credible path to lifting New Zealand’s productivity without matching Australia’s savings rate.² That means taking KiwiSaver seriously: Not as a nice-to-have, but as the foundation of our retirement system.

With 3.4 million New Zealanders enrolled — 90% of the workforce — KiwiSaver has been a genuine success. But 1.6 million members were making no contributions as of March 2025, either out of the workforce or on contribution holidays.⁴ It’s a structural gap we keep patching rather than fixing.

Compulsory contributions, properly locked in until retirement, would be a meaningful start. Paired with a gradual, signalled increase in eligibility age — giving people decades to plan — and we begin to look less like Augustus clutching at straws, and more like a country with a plan.

If you’re under 50, don’t rely solely on NZ Super. Your KiwiSaver balance isn’t a supplement anymore. It’s becoming the primary pillar of your retirement income – treat it accordingly.

The 450th Edition Lesson

In my first article, I concluded that failing to act would be irresponsible and place an extremely unfair burden on younger generations.¹ Nine years later, that’s exactly what we’ve done.

New Zealand is in a stronger position than most comparable countries. But public debt is at its highest point in 30 years, and the cost curve is steepening. The window for gradual, manageable change is narrowing.

The Romans had options. They could have reformed early, adjusted gradually, and built a sustainable system. Instead, they extended, delayed, promised — until the promises became impossible to honour and the system helped collapse the army that held everything together.

We still have choices; they didn’t. But as Treasury made clear last month, that won’t be true forever. And conversation without action is just more Parthian campaigning.

The Centurions learnt too late that empires don’t honour promises they can’t afford. We can avoid that mistake. But only if we start now.

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Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

---

References

¹ Stewart, N. (2017, September 16). Like Romans, fall on our sword and raise retirement age. Stewart Group. https://www.stewartgroup.co.nz/we-love-to-write/2017/9/16/like-romans-fall-on-our-sword-and-raise-retirement-age

² New Zealand Economics Forum 2026 (February 2026). Treasury presentations on fiscal sustainability and superannuation costs.

³ New Zealand Treasury. (2025). Budget Economic and Fiscal Update 2025. https://www.treasury.govt.nz/publications/efu/budget-economic-and-fiscal-update-2025

⁴ New Zealand Treasury. (2025). He Tirohanga Mokopuna 2025 – Long-term Fiscal Statement. https://www.treasury.govt.nz/publications/ltfp/he-tirohanga-mokopuna-2025

⁵ Stats NZ. (2024). Population estimates and projections. https://www.stats.govt.nz

⁶ Ministry of Social Development. (2025). New Zealand Superannuation recipient data.

⁷ Work and Income. (2024). Change to residence criteria for NZ Super and Veteran’s Pension. https://workandincome.govt.nz/eligibility/seniors/nz-super-and-veterans-pension-residency-changes-2024.html

$3 at the Pump — Crisis, Panic, or a Lesson We Refused to Learn?

Article #449

The average price of unleaded 91 jumped 14 NZD cents over a single weekend — and suddenly, commentators are reaching for the kind of language we last heard during COVID. Back then, we fought over toilet paper. Today, the panic commodity is petrol.

Let us first take a breath and assess.

The cause: Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz (which handles about a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade). This of course follows retaliatory strikes after a US and Israeli attack on Iran in late February. [1]

The effect: Global oil prices have surged past US $100 per barrel, with Brent and WTI hitting around US$110 to US$114 at the height of the crisis. That pain is not contained to the petrol forecourt. It is flowing into every corner of our economy simultaneously, because energy is embedded in the cost of producing virtually everything. [1]

The most visible casualty so far is Air New Zealand, another unfortunately familiar occurrence. Our majority state-owned carrier has cancelled approximately 1,100 flights through early May, impacting around 44,000 passengers. In USD, jet fuel spiked from around $85 per barrel before the conflict to between $150 and $200, with the refinery crack spread (the margin between crude oil and refined jet fuel) blowing out from $22 to as high as $115 per barrel. That’s a structural blow to an airline already recording losses, and it has suspended its full-year earnings guidance entirely because the numbers no longer make sense. [2–5]

Finance Minister Nicola Willis has cited New Zealand's 50 days of fuel supply as a form of reassurance, but the public must read the fine print carefully. That figure includes fuel still sitting on tankers at sea, in transit from the very region in crisis. The fuel physically on New Zealand soil is closer to 28–33 days, depending on the product. [6]

More concerning still, that onshore storage is heavily concentrated around the former Marsden Point site in the north. That means regional centres and the entire South Island operate effectively on just-in-time supply and sit at the end of an extra coastal-shipping leg that adds its own layer of vulnerability. If supply were completely cut off today, New Zealand could sustain itself for roughly a month. [6,7]

That is not 50 days — and it should reframe the conversation entirely.

Muldoon-era carless days, last deployed between July 1979 and May 1980, are being discussed as a last resort. The mere fact we’re having this conversation in 2026 should give everyone pause. [8]

This is where a Canny View requires plain speaking.

Energy is not a lifestyle choice. It is the oxygen of economic activity. Every business—whether moving freight, running a dairy farm, manufacturing product, or providing professional services—consumes energy somewhere in its cost structure. When that cost surges sharply and suddenly, the business faces exactly three options:

1. Pass the increase to the customer.

2. Absorb it through productivity gains and efficiency.

3. Close their doors.

There is no fourth option. This is precisely why energy price shocks are so broadly inflationary. They don’t strike one sector. They strike all sectors at once.

For shareholders and business owners, the message is clear. A viable business must pay its bills, pay its staff, and generate sufficient return to keep capital engaged. When a major uncontrollable cost input (like energy) doubles overnight, that margin compresses fast.

The businesses weathering this shock best are those that made deliberate investments in energy resilience during the quieter years. Fleet operators who transitioned to hybrid or electric vehicles, alongside conventional petrol and diesel workhorses, are finding their total fuel bill meaningfully lower today. Those with suitable rooftops or landholdings who installed solar are generating their own daytime electricity, reducing grid dependency when traditional energy costs are most volatile.

Neither investment requires ideological conviction, only the basic financial discipline of stress-testing a cost structure and acting before the stress arrives.

Resilience is built in calm weather, not in a storm.

Now to the harder conversation — one that goes well beyond oil.

New Zealand's coal reserves exceed 15 billion tonnes, spread across Waikato, Taranaki, the West Coast, Otago and Southland. Our West Coast bituminous coal is internationally prized for its exceptionally low sulphur, low ash, and low phosphorus content — a premium quality product valued by the global steel industry. Yet Genesis Energy's Huntly Power Station sources most of its coal from Indonesia, with imports surging 311% in 2024 as domestic gas supply fell faster than expected. [9–11]

We export quality. We import what we need to keep the lights on. It’s a paradox, not a viable strategy.

The same logic applies offshore. Geological surveys estimate a 90% probability that New Zealand holds undiscovered oil reserves of at least 1.9 billion barrels, with a 50%  probability that the figure reaches 6.5 billion barrels. We are not a Saudi Arabia. But we are far from a barren rock. [12]

Which brings us to the captain's calls demanding accountability — plural, because there were more than one.

In 2018, then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern unilaterally banned all new offshore oil and gas exploration permits—no parliamentary vote, no Select Committee process, no national conversation. One announcement. Then, under the same Ardern government, New Zealand's only oil refinery at Marsden Point was closed and permanently decommissioned in 2022. The owner has since confirmed there is no prospect of restarting it; it would take billions of dollars and years of work to rebuild what took decades to establish. Associate Energy Minister Shane Jones described the closure as having fatally wounded New Zealand's fuel security. It’s difficult to argue otherwise this week. [13,14]

An uncomfortable but instructive parallel comes to mind. During Stalin's forced collectivisation in Ukraine in the early 1930s, a nation sitting atop some of the world's most productive agricultural land experienced a devastating famine while grain continued to be exported across its borders. The resources existed, and the policy choices negated them.

New Zealand is not Ukraine, and this is not the Holodomor, but the underlying dynamic—voluntarily denying access to domestic resources while importing vulnerability from abroad—is a pattern worth acknowledging.

A nation surrounded by grain, starving. A nation surrounded by hydrocarbons, panicking at the pump.

Muldoon would be baffled. His Think Big programme in the early 1980s was explicitly designed to convert New Zealand's own natural gas into synthetic fuels, fertiliser and methanol, and reduce oil import dependency following the 1973 energy shock. Think Big was expensive and its outcomes were mixed. But the underlying instinct — that a small, geographically isolated nation at the bottom of the world needs to take energy sovereignty seriously — wasn’t wrong. [15]

Domestic production does not fully insulate a small open economy from global prices. But it reduces the foreign exchange drain of pure import dependency, supports local employment, generates royalties and tax revenue for the Crown, and critically – reduces exposure to the shipping disruptions and geopolitical shocks we are living through right now. In times of crisis, a country with some domestic production and refining capacity is materially more resilient than one with neither.

The toilet paper panic of 2020 passed, and we learned almost nothing from it. Let us use this one differently: we need to have the serious, unsentimental conversation about energy sovereignty that we should have started long before Ardern's captain's call made it more urgent than it ever needed to be. We’ve missed the boat on energy resilience, and the storm has arrived; all we can do now is fortify ourselves to better weather the next one.

---

Nick Stewart

(Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Ngāti Māmoe,
Ngāti Waitaha)

Financial Adviser and CEO at Stewart Group

• Stewart Group is a Hawke's Bay and Wellington based CEFEX & BCorp certified financial planning and advisory firm providing personal fiduciary services, Wealth Management, Risk Insurance & KiwiSaver scheme solutions.

• The information provided, or any opinions expressed in this article, are of a general nature only and should not be construed or relied on as a recommendation to invest in a financial product or class of financial products. You should seek financial advice specific to your circumstances from a Financial Adviser before making any financial decisions. A disclosure statement can be obtained free of charge by calling 0800 878 961 or visit our website, www.stewartgroup.co.nz

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References

1. NZ Herald, Petrol prices expected to hit at least $3 a litre in some places, March 2026

2. Flight Global, Fuel price volatility prompts Air New Zealand to suspend earnings guidance, March 2026

3. Global Banking & Finance Review, Air New Zealand cut flights, fuel price surge wreaks havoc, March 2026

4. AeroTime, Air NZ to cut 1,100 flights amid soaring fuel prices, March 2026

5. NZX Announcement, Air New Zealand suspends FY2026 guidance, March 2026

6. RNZ, How much fuel does NZ have — and what happens if we run out?, March 2026

7. Infonews, NZ Fuel Situation — South Island Vulnerabilities, March 2026

8. NZ Herald, Carless days are no solution to an oil shock (Liam Dann), March 2026

9. Wikipedia, Coal in New Zealand, citing USGS and MBIE data

10. USGS Fact Sheet 2004-3089, New Zealand Coal Resources

11. Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment, Energy in New Zealand 2025 — Coal

12. New Zealand Parliament, The Next Oil Shock?, citing Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences 2009

13. NZ Herald, First look: Inside Northland's Marsden Point oil refinery post-shutdown, November 2024

14. NZ Herald, Inquiry into reopening New Zealand's only oil refinery, March 2024

15. Wikipedia, Think Big, New Zealand Third National Government economic strategy