Here are a few thoughts to challenge your thinking and to keep you aware of issues that may impact your business.

Fieldays
Fieldays felt as though it was a turning point in our economic recovery. After a good start to 2026, the woe of the oil price shock caused by the Middle East conflict gave everyone a fright, but supply has remained open, prices are trending down, and we did not collapse.

Then along came Fieldays.

Recovery is an attitude, and our resilience stems from our attitude. The 2026 Fieldays showed that resilience attitude in spades.

Exhibitors, attendees and organisers all had smiles. The weather was about the best you could ask for as 132,000 people flooded through the turnstiles. Exhibitors spoke of increased turnover and for some there were records broken. Banks were entertaining their clients in fine fashion. Most farmers had paid down debt and seen their balance sheets strengthen, so they came to Fieldays with cash to invest. The big Waikato companies, such as Gallaghers, Power Farming, all the vehicle companies, as well as the smaller exhibitors spoke of big increases in turnover.

Nothing says recovery better than tills ringing with people spending.

But - and it needs to be a big but - farmers and city folk were cautiously optimistic and prudent, not excessive.

The final figures from the Fieldays team will tell the real story.

Simplifying Local Government
Are we bold or will our leaders be timid?

The logic for just one Waikato unitary council is becoming increasingly simpler to understand.

The government has laid out their assessment criteria, and as much as the parochial princes pontificate on keeping their mayoral chains and fiefdoms, that way of doing things has fundamentally failed as they delivered extraordinary and crippling rates increases over the past 35 years.

Having eleven councils in the Waikato Valley for a mere 535,000 people has caused decision-making that is not in the best interests of its citizens.

Having artificial boundary lines drawn on a map has proven to be a big problem for business and drives significant organisational costs for councils, which spill over very quickly into rates and fees increases. Inevitably, the councils on either side of the blue line on a map adopt different cultures, attitudes, rules, regulations, and a competitive mindset entrenches in the staff.

A One Waikato model encourages collaboration, combined thinking and decision making.

Crucially, it will give Waikato citizens far more leverage with central Government and encourage the interactive nature of our communities that should have been the hallmark of the Waikato.

Hamilton plumps its feathers as a metro city, however, the global standard for that term is a million citizens. At only 192,000 people, Hamilton has a long way to go.

Hamilton is more accurately described as the urban centre of a highly diversified, family-oriented economic catchment valley, with world class rural and urban enterprises.

Where would Gallagher be without a Waikato farming market? Where would so many Hamilton family businesses be without the rural economy and conversely how world class would the rural industry be without the innovation and expertise of Hamilton-based businesses such as Ag Research, Power Farming, LIC, and Fonterra.

When you sit in the upper floors of Hamilton City Council building you only see an urban vista, but when you see the cars drive into the city from around the Waikato to go to FMG Stadium Waikato, Claudelands, BNZ Theatre, to deposit cash into Craigs, Forsyth Barr, Rabobank or any of the Aussie banks or simply to work at the law, engineering, and accounting firms that rely of patronage from both inside and outside the city boundaries, you understand the deep interdependency of the Waikato.

The dependency of the city on its export-led rural industry is most stark at present, with farming revenue at high points not seen for some years. With some of the urban industry struggling at present, that alone should remind council leaders that dumping that interdependency by putting artificial lines on a map and down a street, you are potentially growing an urban vs rural, a “them and us” attitude, which will hamper our development for decades to come.

Business is calling for the Waikato to become one simple, cost-efficient, democratically responsive local government unitary council that keeps a lid on rate increases whilst delivering core services.

It forces us to be stronger together.

Join us on 28 July for a timely and insightful panel discussion on simplifying local government, featuring four Waikato council chief executives, each bringing a unique perspective on what these proposed changes could mean for our communities, services and economy.

Register here.

Te Huia

“Te Huia - where would we be without you?”. The answer is “probably happy with a bit more coin in our pockets”.

Our opposition to the subsidies provided by Central and Local Government to the Te Huia experiment is well known, so we were happy to see that the Regional Council increased Te Huia’s fares. After four years of cheap subsidised travel, the train travellers are now asked to pay a small increase for the final year of its five-year trial.

Te Huia has perennially failed to hit the targets laid out in its original business case. It is a mystery why we subsidise talented workers to travel to Auckland when our companies in the Waikato could employ them.

There are better alternatives. Independent, privately owned Bus companies provide a better service at a cheaper price with a product that is as fast, if not quicker.

Te Huia was founded on being a commuter service, but we do not get a detailed breakdown of the passenger profiles. Anecdotally, it seems to be an eclectic mix of passengers, with commuters, intra-Waikato travellers, university students, along with retirees with free time enjoying subsidised train travel.

Trains the world over are best at freight. Trains carry hundreds of tonnes of freight per year and can charge and justify their costs because they run at scale. Unless you have passenger numbers in the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands to provide scale, someone else other than the passenger has to subsidise the costs of train travel, and that poor individual is the long-suffering ratepayer and taxpayer.

Hamilton City Councillors -  ‘Misinformed’: City Hall rails against Te Huia train fare hikes | Waikato Times

While the politicians bemoan the fare increases, the brutal reality is that the costs of passenger train travel make lifting fares a necessary exercise.

If patronage drops off because of these fare increases, then it is because so many passengers were subsidised by the ratepayer; if patronage stays the same or increases then the fare should have always been higher.

It is a no-win situation for Te Huia.

Cambridge to Piarere [C2P]

It has been a long six-year wait to get the funding to finish off the Waikato Expressway to Piarere.

If Julie Anne Genter from the Greens and Phil Twyford of Labour hadn’t seized the allocated C2P cash to spend on projects such as the ill-fated Auckland Harbour Bridge cycleway, we would have been driving on the extension to Piarere by now.

The history of the C2P project is the poster child for abysmal infrastructure planning and delivery with too much political interference. This project’s history is the poster child for politicians wanting to do the opposite to what the other lot did, by prioritising ideology over the necessary infrastructure that brings prosperity to a region.

Politicians who fly over the Waikato from Wellington to Auckland miss the fact that the 16km of Cambridge to Piarere road has had over 35 deaths since 2000 and countless injuries. They also miss the Friday and Sunday night traffic jams as three lanes roll into one south of Cambridge.

Our thanks go to the current Government for getting the funding allocated, and we can now be assured the extension will finally get done.

Next steps are Southern Links and Piarere to Tauranga to cement the base of New Zealand’s golden triangle and open up roading to bring prosperity to Tauranga, Rotorua, Taupo, Napier and New Plymouth.

Business Philanthropy
Amid all the political party noise for capital gains taxes, wealth, death and succession taxes, or higher income tax rates for those earning over $160k, we need to acknowledge the good that is being done by business philanthropy.

The Waikato has a long history of businesses giving back to their community. The DV Bryant Trust is a shining example of the generosity of Waikato businesspeople. Enhancing wellbeing in the Waikato | Bryant Trust

Business philanthropy never seems to get the credit from politicians that it deserves. Recently, Wayne Barnes and his partner, Charlotte Lockhard, donated $22.7 million to cancer research. A stunning amount by any standard. Businessman donates £10m to name Charlotte Lockhart Precision Breast Cancer Institute after his partner | University of Cambridge

Here in the Waikato, many family firms quietly donate across myriad charitable causes and do it out of tax-paid surpluses.

Have a read of Generosity News from Momentum Waikato https://mailchi.mp/b52681aadf70/momentum-waikato-update-december-8341186?e=8aba76333a

The Gallagher families are well known for their generosity to all manner of initiatives in the Waikato

Sir-William-and-Lady-Judi-Gallagher-Foundation-Scholarship-2026-v5.pdf
Glenice & John Gallagher Foundation | Supporting Community Initiatives & Projects
About Us | Gallagher Charitable Trust

As are the Perry family with their substantial donations to sport, housing, Bridge Housing Trust steps up as Waikato’s ‘de facto Bank of Mum and Dad’ | Waikato Times and the development of the wonderful Te Awa River Ride Walk and Trail, the Egan family for their support since 2012 for the Greenlea Rescue Helicopter, their donations to Parkinsons research and the Maber family for their support and encouragement of kids’ rugby.

There are many Waikato philanthropists, too many to mention in a short note about giving back, but they all made their fortune, paid their taxes and have chosen to give back some of their surplus to the community that raised them.

It is all too easy for political parties to believe they can tax the achievers and spend that tax money better than the philanthropists themselves. Taxing business and giving the money to Wellington bureaucrats to dispense is illogical and wasteful.

A politician or bureaucrat, deep in the Wellington beltway bubble, knows so little of the needs of ordinary Kiwis in regional New Zealand, and some politicians are so shallow they play on envy to get their tax reforms past a gullible voting public.

Let business families give back to the communities that nurtured them.

Don’t inhibit their generosity.

Regards 
Don Good