Treasury has told MPs it is "a little over halfway through" its review of state asset ownership, but insists the exercise is not driven by a desire for asset sales.
Treasury bosses has been reporting back to Parliament's finance select committee. Photo: RNZ / REECE BAKER
The update came as the department's leadership team fronted to Parliament's finance select committee on Wednesday morning as part of Scrutiny Week.
Treasury has previously confirmed it is evaluating all the state-owned companies to help the government better understand why it owns them.
Addressing the committee, Treasury bosses confirmed that work was ongoing, with officials providing updates to ministers "entity by entity" over the past year.
"We're a little over halfway through in terms of the programme," deputy secretary system and sector performance Mark Sowden said.
"Ultimately, the minister [Simeon Brown] intends to take them all as a collective through Cabinet, once they've read them all."
Green co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick asked whether the exercise involved the direct contemplation of asset sales.
Chief executive Iain Rennie said Treasury was not making any recommendations along those lines.
"Decisions about retaining assets, selling assets, carving up part of assets... that sits with ministers."
Sowden said the review looked at whether the Crown had a policy interest in a particular area and then asked what was the best way to achieve that.
He said the exercise was initiated primarily to assist Treasury in its monitoring of the assets' performance.
"You may conclude that the Crown doesn't have an ownership purpose, and then that's up to ministers to decide, well, what do they want to do with that asset?
"But it's actually not driven by that," Sowden said. "The idea of what you might keep or drop is almost an offshoot."
Treasury bosses said they had not provided fuller advice to ministers around the potential consequences of particular asset sales, but would do so if that was requested of them.
"There will be particular assets that will have, for example, particular Treaty-related policy issues," Rennie said.
"Absolutely, in follow-up advice, we'd want to make sure that ministers were aware of that, seized of that, understood that."
Sowden committed to providing MPs with more details about which entities had already been assessed and which were in progress.
When asked for a status update by RNZ earlier this year, Treasury would only say that the work was ongoing and remained "under active consideration".
In response to further questions from Swarbrick, Sowden confirmed Treasury had already provided advice on the ownership purpose for New Zealand Post.
"Like postal systems all around the world, the mail volume is declining. They are becoming more of a parcel delivery business," Sowden said.
"Without going into the advice we gave, there are other options for the government to be able to achieve the delivery of a sustainable mail service beyond owning New Zealand Post."
Labour finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds also pushed Treasury to clarify what safeguards were in place to ensure it was not providing advice to assist National in formulating its election policy.
"That's very hazy," she said. "There are public statements by the leader of one governing party that [asset sales] wouldn't happen under their watch."
Rennie said he was "very mindful" of the "grey area" but was comfortable that the advice being provided was for government, not party, purposes.
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