Off the guardrails, Danyl McLauchlan (New Zealand Listener, 22 August, 2026)

It’s been 18 years since the end of Helen Clark’s term as prime minister of New Zealand. She’s 76, and extremely busy. She chairs a host of international agencies, mostly based in the Northern Hemisphere, but they close for the July-August summer holidays. “So basically I get to come home,” Clark tells the Listener in a phone interview from her house in Auckland.

Not that being in New Zealand lessens her pace. Two Sundays earlier, she was enjoying cross-country skiing across the top of the Pisa Range in Central Otago.

“I’ve got another ski trip planned for August, and I try to catch up with emails and the various things one hasn’t had time to do. I’m still settling my dad’s estate from December last year.” (George Clark died then, aged 103.)

Clark is also the founder and patron of the Helen Clark Foundation, a non-partisan, long-term-focused think tank, and she’s publicising its new book, Facing Up To Our Future: Challenges and Choices for New Zealand. It’s a sequence of 20 essays by academics and policy experts from a range of political tribes. Contributors include former National treaty minister Chris Finlayson and New Zealand Initiative researcher Michael Johnston. Each chapter addresses one of the deep policy challenges confronting the country, ranging from macroeconomics to teaching, housing, competition, lobbying and the treaty – issues on which our current political system seems deadlocked.

Clark’s husband, sociologist Peter Davis, is the editor of the book and wrote the introduction and four of the chapters. She credits him with “all the hard work”.

“The idea,” she says, “was to say that there could actually be quite a lot of common ground across a range of issues … pretty much across the spectrum, people are identifying the same sets of issues, but we need to be able to debate these in a mature way to go forward.”

She thinks our current political impasse is a design failure. “When MMP was being advocated for, the advocates said it would force more cross-party discussion and move towards consensus. Of course, what happened in practice was the political system pretty much divided into two camps and carried on in the majoritarian fashion they’d largely had before. That’s been the problem.” The raw material is there, she says: “We do have more in common than we have not in common.” And she insists the ideas in the book aren’t a Labour manifesto. “Do I agree with every single one of them? No, probably not.”

Institutionalised

In the latest Ipsos Issues Monitor quarterly survey in July, 62% of New Zealanders identified the cost of living as their key political issue. It’s been the top concern for more than 41/2 years, with surprisingly little policy introduced to address it.

In May, the OECD’s economic survey identified lack of competition as a key driver of high prices in New Zealand. Our markets are unusually concentrated – banking, construction materials, energy, groceries – and incumbents hold them that way with exclusive supply agreements, vertical integration and predatory pricing.

The country already has an agency meant to deal with this. The Commerce Commission has studied groceries, fuel and banking, and each time produced recommendations it has no power to enforce.

One of Facing Up to Our Future’s consistent themes is the value of independent institutions, and Clark thinks the commission is a prime candidate for empowerment, authorised to intervene in markets and restructure commercial entities. “In an age where there don’t seem to be as many long-serving, competent politicians” – she pauses, then continues – “where people are, in essence, coming off the street, almost, into ministerial positions, and the public service has been somewhat incapacitated, the role of these independent institutions to give us quality policy becomes quite important.”

For Clark, one of the key challenges facing political leaders are “guardrail issues” –problems that everyone can see but no one wants to solve because they’re politically contentious. She cites a list. “The age of superannuation [entitlement], not means-testing the super, capital gains tax is another one. And then there are issues where the party that takes something on is worried there’ll be a huge spend-up against it supporting the other party.”

New Zealand’s last significant market restructure began under Clark in 2006: the break-up of Telecom, then a monopoly. The trigger, she says, was partly the ordinary indignities – “very hard to transfer your account, couldn’t take your number, all the rest of it”. But mostly it was Korea. “I went to an Apec summit at the end of 2005, and we were shown all the latest [communications technology]. I thought, ‘This is preposterous. We’ve got nothing like this.’” A short laugh. “So I went back and said do something about it. And they ended up deregulating that market.”

Clark sees the current caution about breaking up the monopolies as a classic guardrail. “To go over guardrails, you face a lot of flak at the time, but in time you build a consensus behind you. I remember in the lead up to the 1984 election, it was almost a sacred cow that you couldn’t do anything that would hurt Anzus, but Labour developed a policy on nuclear weapons – the first position wasn’t to withdraw from Anzus, but [the nuclear-free policy] is what we want to do.

“In the end, the Americans decided that wasn’t what they wanted, nor did the Australians, so we moved our separate ways. But that guardrail was overcome, and then the nuclear-free policy became a sacred cow that no one would speak against. It often comes down to leadership, really.”

Follow the money

The Ombudsman recently found that Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s office breached the Official Information Act in its handling of a briefing note from a Fonterra staffer to the PM’s chief policy adviser. The document argued for legislation shielding Fonterra, Genesis, Z Energy, NZ Steel, Dairy Holdings and BT Mining from private climate-liability litigation. There are numerous former lobbyists currently serving in the cabinet; the most notable are Act’s Andrew Hoggard, a former president of Federated Farmers, now Associate Minister for Agriculture and for the Environment, and Nicole McKee, a former lobbyist for the firearms sector, now Associate Minister of Justice, in charge of firearms reform.

“It’s impossible, of course, to stop lobbyists coming into the political system, because anyone’s free to stand,” says Clark. Then, sternly: “But I do think putting a former gun lobbyist in charge of the Arms Act is a bit much. That ain’t acceptable to me.”

The OECD ranks us as one of the least regulated lobbying markets in the developed world. Asked about the lack of safeguards across multiple Labour and National governments, including hers, Clark says, “Some of the issues under integrity weren’t as acute as they are now. There wasn’t as much money sloshing around in politics. And the lobbyists …” She stops. “Did I ever see a lobbyist? Can’t recall. It just wasn’t as much of a factor. I didn’t have ministers leaving to become lobbyists.” (In 2022-23, three departing ministers in the Ardern/Hipkins government moved into lobbying, consultancy or government relations roles.)

Most liberal democracies have revolving door bans – the book makes the case for a three-year stand-down period for ministers and senior officials before they transition from politics to industry.

We’re a small democracy, and a little money goes a long way.

Then there’s the money. Since the start of 2023, New Zealand’s political parties have declared just over $52.6 million in donations. National has banked $22.4m of it, more than the next two parties combined. “We probably need to be a lot more vigilant about foreign money coming in,” Clark says. “We’re a small democracy, and a little money goes a long way.”

She thinks beneficial ownership legislation is needed to track who ultimately owns or controls a company. Where does the money really come from, and who benefits from government decisions? She has been chairing the global Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative board for seven years. New Zealand, she notes, does not currently meet the standard for extractives governance (managing natural resources). “We’re too opaque. Fast-track hasn’t helped that. Loose political donation law hasn’t helped it.” Another pause, before she adds dryly, “You do have to worry that policy and money are somehow linked.”

The week before Clark spoke to the Listener, the government announced a $60m subsidy for Golden Bay Cement’s Northland plant. It produces 60% of domestic supply and requested a bailout to offset its Emissions Trading Scheme cost disadvantage against imports that don’t have to factor in the cost of carbon. Fletcher Building – which owns the plant – committed $150m.

For many years, economists have warned governments against “picking winners”, which often translates into bailing out politically connected losers. In recent years, policy to support strategic industries has enjoyed a resurgence, based on its spectacular success in Asian economies such as China and South Korea and the acute vulnerability many nations now feel about supply disruption. Other developed nations have coherent frameworks about how taxpayer money is spent in such situations. New Zealand gives it away on an improvisational, ad-hoc basis.

Clark asks, “How much has gone into that seafoods company down the East Coast?” This is the Whakatōhea Mussels Ōpōtiki project championed by New Zealand First’s Shane Jones, which received $19.85m in direct government investment through the Provincial Growth Fund, plus up to $16.5m in additional crown funding provided as a mixture of loans and equity, with the crown also becoming one of the company’s largest shareholders through subsequent capital raisings. The company continues to report substantial losses.

“This is all nuts, right? If we’ve got money to spend on promoting wealth creators, that ain’t the way to do it.”

Lost capacity

Part of the problem is the decline in state capacity. Industrial policy requires public matter expertise across public agencies to manage the complex economic interventions. Again, this is a quality in our political system Clark feels has degraded.

“When I ran the UNDP [United Nations Development Programme], people said, ‘What’s the difference between this job and being prime minister of a country?’ And I said, ‘The difference is that UNDP advises on things but as prime minister, your cabinet system could come up with a set of proposals and a plan for implementing them, and you’d have reasonable confidence you could do it.’ I’m not sure now that you have that confidence. They don’t seem to be able to cost anything; the timelines blow out. Something’s gone desperately wrong here.”

Rebuilding public sector capacity is the starting point for most of the other goals in Facing Up to Our Future. Clark worries about the ubiquity of consultants in the policy process. Ministers and departments are “lurching from consultancy to consultancy. Whereas the very best of a public service is when you have a long-term, committed capacity which has the corporate knowledge but also the innovative thinkers in it to think outside the box. You can then have continuity and innovation. But I think we now have discontinuity and not much innovation – it’s lose-lose.”

Divided we fall

The most distinctive chapter in Facing Up to Our Future is Chris Finlayson’s. Titled Friends We Are Better than This, it’s a sustained critique of the current government’s track record on crown-Māori relations. The former National minister for treaty negotiations charges his party and its coalition partners with defecting from 50 years of bipartisan consensus on addressing historical grievances under the treaty. He attributes it to short-term political incentives – racial slogans and wedge politics are effective at the ballot box while causing long-term damage to national cohesion.

“Māori feel a tremendous amount of pressure,” Clark says. “Sometimes I’ve sat down and listed all the things: school textbooks thrown out because of Māori words in them, the names of government departments – English has always got to be first – taking away treaty responsibilities from school boards, the Māori Health Authority gone, the false referendums on Māori wards, the Treaty Principles Bill which was dragged around, the advisory bodies to councils from iwi disbanded. John Key’s advice to National’s party conference was to take the temperature down. He knows you’ve got to find a middle ground on these things.”

But she sees a broader problem: the lack of consensus across a range of major issues. The most conspicuous – and most expensive – has been around infrastructure. A 2026 report commissioned by Infrastructure New Zealand estimates the total cost of successive governments stopping, delaying and cancelling major infrastructure projects sits at approximately $11.8b. “I don’t recall a single Kiwi infrastructure project being canned when I became prime minister,” Clark says. “And I don’t recall John Key’s government cancelling a single infrastructure project we’d committed to. But somehow we’ve got to a situation where National is seen as anti-public transport and walking and cycling, and Labour is seen as anti-roads.” She snorts. “This is ridiculous.”

Past, present, future

Clark is arguably the last prime minister for whom the machinery of government worked as intended. Does she wish she’d done anything differently? Does she look at the trajectory of the housing market – the boom began under her watch – and think, “That ended badly”?

“The problems weren’t as acute then,” she says. “And we could house people – my government also increased the numbers of state houses quite a lot. In those days, a family on the street was a headline, right now it’s so many. While prices were going up, so were incomes, and the poorest were able to be housed, and the rents were fair, so it wasn’t of a crisis dimension.

“What else do I wish I’d done? I wish someone had come up with the idea of the parliamentary budget office. I think that would have been quite helpful.” This lack of a budget office – again, a regular feature of many modern democracies that New Zealand mysteriously lacks – is the reason our politicians spend so much time screaming at each other about fiscal holes. Clark says she would also have empowered the Commerce Commission.

What’s she optimistic about? Is there anything about New Zealand that’s better than she’d expected when she left office in 2008? A further long pause. “I feel we’ve been treading water. We need a new lurch forward. One insight I did gain over my nine years in government was that we’re in a race to the future, and if you don’t keep cycling very hard, you soon fall behind.

“We have a huge GDP per capita problem, and while we can still say we’ve got a good education system and we educate great people, if our economy isn’t providing the space for those people to feel they can do well here, we’ll keep bleeding talent and become an incubator for the rest of the world.”

Mind the elders

HELEN CLARK WEARS MANY HATS. After leaving the Beehive, she led the United Nations Development Programme from 2009-17 (the first woman appointed) and also chaired the UN Development Group. Today, she chairs Gavi, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, alongside a duo of World Health Organisation partnerships: the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research and the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health. She chairs the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which promotes open and accountable management of revenues from oil, gas and mining; the Global Leadership Foundation, in which former heads of state provide confidential advice to current national leaders and the Global Commission on Drug Policy. And she’s a president of Chatham House, the prestigious London-based geopolitical think tank.

She’s also a member of The Elders. An organisation founded by Nelson Mandela, it brings together influential global figures to promote peace and human rights. Mandela set them the goal of using their “almost 1000 years of collective experience” to work on solutions for seemingly insurmountable problems and help resolve some of the world’s most intractable conflicts.

When Clark calls politicians as a member of The Elders and says, “This is what you should be doing when you’re thinking long term,” do they say, “You don’t have to face an election, you have no idea of the reality of politics any more,” or are they a bit more receptive?”

Clark: “If we’re talking to leaders, they know that we know what it’s been like to be in their shoes, so you do get a hearing, definitely. Of course, not all of The Elders are former heads of state and government – Archbishop Tutu chaired it until his death, Kofi Annan chaired it as former secretary-general of the UN, Ban Ki-moon was a very active member until quite recently, and there are two or three others who aren’t former leaders.

But what do The Elders actually do? “We meet formally twice a year as a board, occasionally there’s a retreat – I was at one in Morocco last year. I’ve been to one on AI outside London this year, because AI is also being picked up as a strand of activity now, given the lack of global governance and, in fact, not particularly effective national-level governance, either. So we’re coming at it from that angle.

“And then there’s the opportunity to do various missions, like the one [ex-Ireland president] Mary Robinson and I just did to the West Bank. We have a presence at the UN General Assembly during the high-level week, at the Munich Security Conference, and at various other convenings.”

Are there any conspiracy theories about The Elders?

“No, funnily enough.”

Danyl McLauchlan, Politics Writer/Feature Writer/Book Reviewer · The Listener

Facing Up To Our Future: Challenges and Choices for New Zealand, edited by Peter Davis (Dunmore Publishing for The Helen Clark Foundation, $35) is available now in your local bookshop.

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