New Zealand And Palantir

Millions of New Zealand citizens are making good money today from the killing of kids thanks to the New Zealand Superannuation Fund which has over $140,000,000 invested in Palantir, described by some – for good reason – as The Most Evil Company on Earth. Additionally, billions of dollars of the New Zealand wealth fund are invested in several of the world’s top military-industrial companies that are destroying the lives of millions of people across the planet. Some of the products (see below) specifically target entire families.

New Zealanders have to make up their minds: are they for genocide and the West’s forever wars or are we for peace, an independent foreign policy and the UN Charter? I hope it is the latter but for that to be more than hollow words we need to take practical action. A great place to start is to instruct the Guardians of the New Zealand Super Fund to divest from the war machine.

Palantir, founded by Alex Karp and New Zealand citizen Peter Thiel, is at the centre of an array of A.I. driven kill programmes for the US, Israeli and other militaries, including the NZDF. Human assessment and intervention in the kill chain is small despite the programmes being notoriously inaccurate. But they have made outrageously large profits for the New Zealand Super Fund.

Programmes that Palantir are deeply involved in include Lavender, The Gospel and Maven which perform core roles inside the IDF and the US Department of War (Palantir’s single largest client). In the case of Lavender, the programme was developed by the notorious Israeli Unit 8200 but the UN Special Rapporteur confirmed Palantir provided “core defence infrastructure” powering the predictive targeting of these systems.

Israeli newsite +972 describes Lavender as fulfilling a long-term goal of a system that can rapidly process massive amounts of data to generate thousands of potential “targets” for military strikes. This is where Palantir excels and why Alex Karp declared that the future of hard power would be based on software.

“Such technology,” +972 quotes an Israeli officer, resolves a “human bottleneck for both locating the new targets and decision-making to approve the targets.” Gaza has seen the dawn of autonomous kill machines – and New Zealand is helping deliver death to thousands of civilians by investing hundreds of millions of New Zealand tax dollars in these companies. But aren’t these programmes designed to more accurately kill the “bad guys”?

“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” an Israeli intelligence officer told a +972 reporter. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

So that’s who New Zealand is today. Killing kids. Making money. Our government is even ignoring attacks on our own citizens by the Israeli Occupation Force. We’re no longer the Labrador puppy of the West; we are a fully paid up member of a system that kills babies, women and children as a preference and makes oodles of dollars out of it to fund cozy retirements. What has become of my country?

I suspect most New Zealanders don’t want their Super Fund to invest in companies like Palantir. Under New Zealand law NZSF should scrupulously avoid such investments. Under the NZ Superannuation Act the appointed Guardians must not only invest in a prudent and commercially effective way to build up the fund that millions of New Zealanders depend on in retirement but they must also do so “in a manner consistent with avoiding prejudice to New Zealand’s reputation as a responsible member of the world community”.

Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa won a major victory in the New Zealand High Court this month when it sought a review of the fund’s compliance with New Zealand law, specifically requirements around ethical investing. The Court found in PSNA’s favour, declaring in April 2026 that the fund had established an investment framework which was “unreasonable and unlawful”. PSNA used as central examples the NZSF investments in companies with investments in the Israeli Occupied West Bank of Palestine.

In its ruling, the High Court noted that the Guardians until 2020 had included the UN Global Compact principles in their own responsible investment policy documents as a benchmark for their investments. The Compact is a voluntary pledge to operate as ethical corporate citizens. In 2020 NZSF quietly dropped the commitment and started expanding its investment in military-industrial businesses that are making staggering profits by killing a staggering number of civilians across the planet.

Gabriella Brayne, spokesperson for Anti-War Aotearoa (New Zealand) criticized the Super Fund for hollowing out key references to human rights and global ethical investment standards.

“It is disturbing yet unsurprising that in light of the Court’s fact-finding, the Super Fund Guardians have quietly been investing in highly profitable, yet murderous industries over the past few years of genocide in Gaza and illegal aggression across the region. It appears that our superannuation scheme has also opportunistically profited from a growing ‘economy of genocide’. These investments are illegal, both under international law as well as domestically, in prejudicing our reputation as a responsible member of the world community and signatory state of the UN Charter,” Brayne said.

Through the Super fund, Kiwis have billions of dollars invested in top 100 military companies like L3Harris Technologies, AECOM, Booz Allen Hamilton and others who hold contracts with the US war department. Many companies people would simply associate with “technology” – Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Oracle, and IBM – are in fact major military and defence contractors deeply involved in the War on Iran, Gaza, Lebanon and other theatres. These five alone represent over $4.7 billion of the fund’s portfolio. Just one example: Microsoft Azure provided the “hyperscale” cloud backbone for Israel’s Unit 8200 which powers mass surveillance and targeting of Palestinians. It is worth noting that New Zealand, US, UK, Canada, and Australia all share intelligence via Five Eyes with Unit 8200.

Google is similarly compromised. Along with Amazon, Google is the driver of Israel’s Project Nimbus, providing the Israeli military with AI tools for object tracking – for example intercepting traffic cameras in Tehran or Beirut, running facial recognition on travellers. When “targets” are identified, they are fed to command centres which launch missiles to assassinate military, political or cultural leaders, even journalists and doctor

Palantir is a particular cancer that the government has injected into our country. It is now deeply embedded in the New Zealand Defence Force and the Government Security Communications Bureau (GCSB), our top spy agency. The minister of defence confirmed this year that the government’s “ongoing partnership with Palantir is led by the GCSB”, signalling that mass surveillance of New Zealand citizens is moving into high gear. In the US, Palantir’s pattern-finding systems underpin U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its aggressive workplace raids and large-scale enforcement operations in Democrat-controlled cities.

Palantir is now trying to gain major contracts here that will see it access our population’s health and other records to advance the interests of their key client in Washington.

Here in New Zealand, these are the people who can most immediately effect change for the better at the NZSF. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, Finance Minister Nicola Willis, and the Guardians of the Fund itself: John Williamson (Chair) Fiona Oliver, Sue Brake, Henk Berkman, Hinerangi Raumati Tu’ua, David McClatchy, Andrew Wilson. Write to them, especially if you know them, and ask them to look into their hearts and see if they can find a sense of common humanity, a feeling for suffering humanity. We can do better. We must do better.

Eugene Doyle