Source: Buy NZ Made
Buy NZ Made says local councils are dragging their feet on procurement reform, a year after central government overhauled its own rules to give New Zealand businesses a fairer shot at public contracts – and did nothing to bring councils along with it.
The 5th edition of the Government Procurement Rules came into force on 1 December 2025, introducing a mandatory economic benefit to New Zealand test and a clear expectation that lower-value contracts go to capable local suppliers. It was a hard-won admission that decades of procurement practice had treated New Zealand businesses as an afterthought.
However, local councils, which between them control billions of dollars a year in ratepayer money on everything from civil works to professional services, are not covered by the new rules.
Procurement at the council level is still set by each authority’s own policy under the Local Government Act, and Buy NZ Made’s engagement with members over the past year shows the vast majority have made no move to apply anything like the same test.
The result is a public procurement system running on two different sets of values at once: one that increasingly backs New Zealand businesses, and one – closer to home, spending ratepayers’ own money, in their own communities – that still doesn’t ask the question at all.
“Central government worked out that shovelling public money offshore while local firms go under is a bad look and bad economics,” Buy NZ Made executive director Dane Ambler says.
“Councils are some of the biggest buyers in their regions. Every contract they hand to an out-of-town or offshore supplier by default, without even weighing the local benefit, is ratepayer money that could have kept a local business, and local jobs, alive.”
In the latest horror story, Buy NZ Made has uncovered councils moving ahead with the purchase and installation of container-mounted shelters supplied by companies importing Chinese-made shelters.
Many firms present themselves as “NZ Made” when they are, in fact, only New Zealand-owned. Councils must take note of this important distinction: NZ ownership does not mean a product is made in New Zealand.
Buy NZ Made is not asking councils to abandon value for money or open competition. It is asking them to stop pretending local economic benefit is someone else’s problem. That means adopting an economic benefit test equivalent to central government’s, publishing how local benefit is weighed in tender evaluations, and stripping out the compliance barriers that quietly favour large out-of-town incumbents over capable local and New Zealand-owned suppliers.