Written By:
- Date published:
1:22 pm, March 25th, 2026 - 6 comments
Categories: Economy, employment, jobs, unemployment -
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This government has an appalling record of large scale business closures, which continue to damage the careers of thousands of New Zealand workers.
Kitchen Things, Smith’s City, and Smith & Caugheys all died as part of the massive consumer confidence collapse within a recession that this government has not turned around.
Carter Holt Harvey, Kinleth, Alliance Group Smithfield, Winston Pulp International and other smaller mills have been killed off in no small part due to this government failing to regulate electricity prices.
Goodman Fielder in Dunedin, Hawkes Bay and Auckland and McCain Group in Hastings will close most of their factories in early 2027, and other smaller food plants in Nelson are also closing. This is caused in no small part by the failure to properly regulate New Zealand’s supermarket duopoly meaningfully, which has simply killed off the margins that would keep those businesses viable. Also weakened food import standards have undercut local growers and processors.
Fonterra has massively shrunk in terms of its operational footprint, revenue base, and business focus as a result of selling its global consumer brands business to Lactalis for over NZ$4 billion.
Fletcher Building is now reduced to a husk of its massive former self, now just selling gib, Batts, and a few other basic building lines.
Hobson Green Group, Teak Construction, Formcrete, Dart Engineering, and volumes more construction and engineering companies have gone to the wall. This is what happens when the government collapsed much of the construction industry by killing off almost all of its housing development arm, and comprehensively breaking the anticipated pipeline of infrastructure projects through 2024-25. There were 22 company death notices in one week alone.
Each one of those closures represents devastated families, with houses, dinners to prepare, children and grandchildren to get to school, and doctors and bills to pay – tens of thousands of them in total.
The government effort to accelerate 149 large projects for business through the Fast Track legislation has currently resulted in 1 actually getting underway.
This government is bad for our major businesses and bad for our workers.
NZ's crane index, an indicator of construction levels, has dropped from 157 three years ago to 102 now. See the graph in the link.
“New Zealand’s construction sector remains under significant pressure, with activity falling sharply across the country’s main centres.”
https://www.rlb.com/oceania/insight/rlb-crane-index-new-zealand-q1-2026/
Auckland's crane glory days of 2016-2019 are long, long gone.
There is not a lot of confidence in the NZ Economy at present, hence thousand's bailing out to Australia for better opportunities.
Declining resilience
*loss of good horticultural land
*Road maintenance costs with lower quality bitumen (and heavier trucks)
Standards?
*loss of Co2 from Marsden Point to local industry (shortages and higher cost)
Alternative supply?
*Kapuni urea plant closure – supplied quality and cheaper fertilizer (more reliable than from Gulf) for horticulture. This is cited by growers.
Alternative supply (Oz?)
https://www.thepost.co.nz/business/360974191/who-making-margins-mccain-closure-and-war-price-spike-crushing-nz-vege-growers
*We were supposed to be developing an Infrastructure Plan, to balance the capability to deliver projects with allocation of available resources. What happened?
In one part (residential housing), government chose to transfer away from Kainga Ora (to social housing providers, iwi or charity where they had land was OK).
But it is the counter-cyclical investor of necessity, and this shower stuffed it. A plan requires a schedule or pipeline of jobs, not beholden to commercial risk.
Yes – and to restate what you said in more general terms:
These are very obvious points – and they all run counter to the central ideology of the current Government.