There's a stark contrast between the Luxon/Willis "say yes" and "open for business" positive propaganda in trying to attract investors and the reality.
We had a net loss of 47,000 citizens last year. A big story this week was US immigrants selling their farm and leaving the country due to lack of private property rights when the council designated their most productive land as a "significant natural area."
Not to mention that investors would often need to bribe half a dozen tribes to get anything done. Even Peter Thiel, who went through the effort to purchase a citizenship, walked away after the Environment Court denied him consent for his holiday home in Wanaka.
Maybe Luxon/Willis are serious about reversing the damage done, but then maybe they'd actually talk about these problems with concrete promises and solutions? It's laughable and they're rightly mocked on social media every time they bring up their plans to make NZ attractive for investors.
Enough with the negativity! One man is doing something serious to attract investment and that's Shane Jones the Matua of Mining, the Minister of Economic Nationalism. The recent proposal for Special Economic Zones, starting with Marsden Point, has been branded as either straight out of North Korea or libertarianism depending on who you ask.
The most successful SEZ policy was that of China's Deng Xiaoping. He succeeded Mao and had a big dilemma. How do you fix a failed communist state without giving the career communist bureaucrats a reason to launch a coup against you? Enter the SEZ.
That's how you take a backwards communist state and turn it into a successful state-capitalist one. New Zealand sometimes feels like it's in the same boat.
On the other side of politics, the Mises Institute and libertarian economist Murray Rothbard have made positive overtures to SEZs. The idea is simple: deregulation on a small geographic scale. A type of red-tape secession. You can test-run an area with less regulation, more rights, and lower taxes with the hopes to one day expand that experiment out to everyone if successful.
There are risks of course, many SEZs fail to achieve their aims or make good profits, but every business venture comes with those risks built-in
For New Zealand there's talk about fuel terminals, ports, energy production, and drydocks. These are all good use of special deals in the interest of national security, if handled correctly. Unfortunately refining oil doesn't seem to be back on the table, but increased storage capacity is.
The other thing that should be on the table is 21st century energy sovereignty through Bitcoin mining. NZ First could become the first party to court the "tech-bro nationalist" demographic. While numerically small, this lobby was the number one spender in the last US elections. This is the "new money, new elite" that pops up every few generations and the economic opportunities are huge.
El Salavador has done this with their "Bitcoin City" SEZ which is essentially a geothermal power plant with a massive Bitcoin server farm attached to it.
The key thing about Bitcoin mining is that it is a perfect use of stranded energy that would otherwise go to waste. Base load contracts can easily fund new geothermal energy production in areas that need it most, especially the upper half of the North Island. Especially if SEZs are in play to make it easy. On the three cold winter days every year that we need full access to our base load, those GPUs can be turned off in an instant. By comparison, it takes at least several days for Tiwai Point to turn the aluminium smelter off, and every time they need to it costs extra because it impacts their other contacts.
If the power for the North Island was produced from geothermal plants with Bitcoin mining as the guaranteed buyer, there would be no limit to how much energy we could produce to bring prices down and boost other heavy industries.