Was Think Big Really a Disaster?

Was Muldoon’s Think Big Really a Disaster?

Forty Years On, the Projects That Survived Are Still Powering the Economy. The Political Verdict Was Handed Down in 1984. The Economic Verdict Is Only Now Becoming Clear.

In the political memory of New Zealand, Think Big is a cautionary tale. It is the story of a domineering Prime Minister who borrowed billions, built grandiose industrial projects that the private sector would not touch, mired the country in debt, and left his successors to clean up the mess. Roger Douglas, the Labour Finance Minister who dismantled much of Muldoon’s legacy, described the plan to expand New Zealand Steel as an exercise in futility. The words “Think Big” became, for a generation of policymakers, shorthand for reckless government overreach. The political verdict was devastating and it was delivered swiftly. The economic verdict has taken 40 years to arrive. And it tells a very different story.

This article attempts something that, remarkably, has never been done in any comprehensive public form. It takes each of the major Think Big projects, examines what they cost, measures what they have delivered over their full operating lifetimes, and asks the question that the political narrative never paused long enough to consider. Did the programme, taken as a whole and measured across decades rather than electoral cycles, actually work?

The answer is more complicated and more interesting than either Muldoon’s champions or his critics would like. Some projects were genuine failures. The synthetic petrol plant at Motunui, which opened in 1986 and closed in 1999, lost enormous sums. The planned aluminium smelter at Aramoana never got off the ground. Treasury assessed the New Zealand Steel expansion at a net present value of negative $225 million at the time it was approved. But the projects that produced physical infrastructure, that poured concrete and laid pipe and installed turbines, have in many cases been generating economic value continuously for three to four decades. And when you add up that value, including the employment, the exports, the tax revenue, the regional economic activity, and the avoided social costs of the unemployment that would have existed without these industries, the ledger looks very different from the one that Roger Douglas presented to the public in 1984.

Why Think Big Happened

The context matters, because it is remarkably similar to the situation New Zealand faces in April 2026. In the late 1970s, New Zealand’s economy was suffering from the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis, the loss of its guaranteed export market following Britain’s entry to the European Economic Community, and rampant inflation. The second oil shock of 1979 doubled prices again, from US$12 to US$19 per barrel. The New Zealand government banned weekend petrol sales. On 30 July 1979, carless days were introduced, requiring private motorists to nominate one day per week when they could not drive their car. The cost of oil was the dominant component of the balance of payments deficit.

Robert Muldoon, Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, looked to the substantial reserves of natural gas beneath Taranaki and off its coast as an opportunity to transform the economy. His Energy Minister, Bill Birch, developed a programme of large scale industrial projects designed to reduce New Zealand’s dependence on imported oil, utilise domestic natural gas, create employment, and generate export earnings. Allan Highet, a National cabinet minister, coined the label “Think Big” in a speech to a National Party conference in 1977. The programme promised 410,000 additional jobs. It delivered far fewer. But it built things that are still standing.

Hugh Templeton, a member of Muldoon’s cabinet, later recalled that the 18,000 officially unemployed in 1978 was considered a huge and unacceptable number. The government was fearful about the impact on affected individuals, their families, and their communities. That concern for the human cost of unemployment, whatever one thinks of the policy response, is worth noting. The subsequent Rogernomics reforms, which corporatised state departments and opened the economy to international competition, cost 30,000 jobs in the short run according to data cited by the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research. The cure, at least in employment terms, was more painful than the disease.

What It Cost

Estimates of the total cost of the Think Big programme vary, with figures typically cited in the range of $7 billion to $11 billion in dollars of the time. Public debt soared from $4.2 billion when Muldoon became Prime Minister in 1975 to $21.9 billion when he left office in 1984, though not all of that increase was attributable to Think Big. Much of the borrowing was done overseas, exposing the country to exchange rate risk and contributing to the balance of payments difficulties that precipitated the 1984 fiscal crisis.

The major individual project costs, in dollars of the time, included the Marsden Point refinery expansion at $1.84 billion, the Clyde Dam at $1.4 to $2 billion (including $936 million in gorge stabilisation works), the New Zealand Steel expansion at $1.959 billion, and the Motunui synthetic petrol plant and associated methanol facilities at several billion dollars collectively. The government’s shareholding in New Zealand Steel, which had reached 89 percent as a result of the expansion, was sold for $300 million in 1987, crystallising an enormous loss on paper. The Labour government that inherited the programme took the costs onto the balance sheet and sold assets for whatever they could get.

These are large numbers by any measure. In today’s dollars, adjusted for inflation, the total programme cost would be equivalent to roughly $20 billion to $30 billion. But costs are only half of a ledger. The question that was never adequately answered at the time, and has not been answered since, is what the surviving projects have returned.

The Survivors

Of the major Think Big projects, six produced physical infrastructure that continued to operate long after the political controversy subsided. One was a clear failure. One was never built. What follows is a project by project accounting of what survived, what it has delivered, and what the employment effects have been, including the indirect and induced economic activity that radiates outward from each facility into its surrounding community.

Project	Original cost	Still operating	Estimated lifetime return
Clyde Dam	$1.4–$2B	Yes (33+ years)	$4–$6B (wholesale electricity)
Marsden Point refinery expansion	$1.84B	Operated 36 years (closed 2022)	Billions (70% of NZ fuel for 36 years)
Methanex methanol plants	Several billion	Yes (40+ years)	$15–$25B (exports)
NZ Steel expansion (Glenbrook)	$1.96B	Yes (40+ years)	Tens of billions (90% of NZ steel)
Tiwai Point smelter expansion	Included in programme	Yes (contracted to 2044)	~$1B/year exports ($50B+ lifetime)
Kapuni ammonia urea plant	Included in programme	Yes (40+ years)	40% of NZ urea supply
Motunui synthetic petrol	Several billion	No (closed 1999)	Net loss
Total programme	$7–$11B (1980s dollars)	6 of 7 projects survived	Exceeds cost by 5–10x

The Clyde Dam

The Clyde Dam on the Clutha River near Clyde in Central Otago was one of the most controversial projects in New Zealand’s history. The government overrode a High Court ruling through the Clutha Development (Clyde Dam) Empowering Act 1982 to allow construction to proceed. The rising waters of Lake Dunstan submerged the historic main street of old Cromwell, orchards, homes, and 2,300 hectares of productive land. The gorge stabilisation works, necessitated by the discovery of artesian water in what had been thought to be dry landslides, added $936 million to the project cost. Construction peaked at approximately 1,000 workers on site.

The dam was completed in 1993 and has been generating electricity continuously for over 33 years. It has a capacity of 432 megawatts and generates an average of 2,100 gigawatt hours per year. Together with the older Roxburgh Dam downstream, also on the Clutha and also owned by Contact Energy, the two stations account for approximately 10 percent of New Zealand’s total electricity generation. At an average wholesale electricity price of roughly $80 to $100 per megawatt hour (prices have been significantly higher in recent years), the Clyde Dam’s annual generation has a wholesale value in the range of $170 million to $210 million per year. Over 33 years of operation, the cumulative wholesale value of the electricity generated is conservatively in the range of $4 billion to $6 billion, and likely higher given recent price trends.

The dam currently provides a smaller number of permanent jobs than during construction, as hydroelectric stations are highly automated. But the electricity it generates underpins the economy of Central Otago, powers homes and businesses across the South Island, and feeds into the national grid via the Cook Strait HVDC link. The infrastructure also created Lake Dunstan, which now supports a tourism and recreation industry in the Cromwell district. Contact Energy, which was privatised in 1999 and subsequently majority acquired by Origin Energy of Australia, continues to operate both Clutha dams as core generation assets. The irony, noted by critics, is that one of New Zealand’s most expensive infrastructure assets, paid for by taxpayers, is now generating profits for Australian shareholders.

The Marsden Point Refinery Expansion

The 1980s expansion of the Marsden Point oil refinery, completed on 30 May 1986 at a final cost of $1.84 billion, doubled the refinery’s refined oil production while increasing crude intake by only 25 percent, through the installation of a hydrocracker and other advanced processing units. The then managing director of Refining NZ stated in 2020 that without the Think Big expansion, the refinery would have closed. Instead, it operated for a further 36 years, from 1986 until 2022, supplying approximately 70 percent of New Zealand’s refined fuel needs.

At its peak, the refinery directly employed approximately 1,100 people, making it one of the largest employers in Northland and contributing more than 7 percent of the regional economy. But the direct workforce tells only part of the story. The refinery sustained an ecosystem of specialist contractors, service companies, and suppliers that collectively employed hundreds more. SRG Global, for example, maintained a permanent workforce of approximately 45 full time equivalent trade staff at Marsden Point under a five year maintenance contract signed in 2014, with numbers swelling to over 100 during plant shutdown periods. SRG had been present on site since 2007 providing protective coatings and refractory maintenance services, and also provided an additional team of eight for the Te Mahi Hou expansion project. WorleyParsons held a five year engineering, procurement, shutdown, and construction management contract and maintained an on site office. Honeywell Process Solutions held a five year contract to maintain and modernise control systems. BOC New Zealand built a dedicated plant on site to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Each of these contractors employed staff who lived in the Whangārei district, paid rent or mortgages, bought groceries, sent children to local schools, and spent their wages in the regional economy. The multiplier effect of this spending, the induced economic activity that flows from a well paid industrial workforce into a provincial community, is difficult to quantify precisely but is well understood by economists. A commonly cited multiplier for industrial employment in regional areas is 1.5 to 2.5, meaning each direct job supports one to one and a half additional jobs in the local economy through spending on goods and services. Applied to the refinery’s peak workforce of 1,100 direct employees and several hundred contractors, this implies a total employment footprint of perhaps 2,500 to 3,500 jobs in the Northland region attributable to the refinery’s existence.

Over 36 years of operation following the Think Big expansion, the refinery processed billions of litres of fuel, generated hundreds of millions of dollars in wages and contractor payments, and sustained a community of skilled industrial workers in one of New Zealand’s most economically disadvantaged regions. When the refinery closed in 2022, the workforce dropped from around 310 to 60. The contractor ecosystem, including companies like SRG Global, lost their Marsden Point work. Channel Infrastructure‘s chairperson James Miller acknowledged in 2024 that the retention of a skilled contractor base was important for economic growth in Northland, and that restoring manufacturing at the site could bring back that investment. The $1.84 billion spent in the 1980s created an industrial asset that sustained a regional economy for nearly four decades. The closure, when it came, was felt across the entire district.

The Methanex Methanol Plants

The methanol plants at Motunui and Waitara Valley, originally built as part of the Think Big programme to convert Taranaki natural gas into exportable methanol, are among the programme’s most enduring successes. The Motunui plant was originally designed to produce both methanol and synthetic petrol. The synthetic petrol operation was a failure (discussed separately below). But the methanol production has continued, under the ownership of Canadian multinational Methanex, for over four decades.

At full capacity, Methanex’s three Taranaki plants (two at Motunui and one at Waitara Valley) can produce up to 2.4 million tonnes of methanol per year. Approximately 95 percent of production is exported to customers in the Asia Pacific region. The New Plymouth mayor stated in 2021 that Methanex generated $800 million per year in export earnings and made up 10 percent of the local economy. Approximately 300 people work at the Motunui plant directly, with additional employment at Waitara Valley before its mothballing in 2021. Port Taranaki, which handles the methanol exports, employs 116 staff whose jobs are partly dependent on methanol volumes. In the 2023/24 financial year, methanol trade through Port Taranaki was 1.28 million tonnes.

Methanex is the single largest user of natural gas in New Zealand, consuming approximately 40 percent of the country’s total gas supply. This dominance has become a source of tension as gas production declines and competition for gas between industrial users and electricity generators intensifies. The Waitara Valley plant was mothballed in 2021 due to gas supply constraints, and in 2024 Methanex proposed scaling back to a single production unit at Motunui. The company’s future in New Zealand is genuinely uncertain, tied to the declining gas reserves that originally justified the Think Big investment.

But the cumulative economic contribution over four decades is enormous. At $800 million per year in export earnings at peak production, even allowing for years of reduced output and plant closures, the total export earnings over the methanol operations’ lifetime are conservatively in the range of $15 billion to $25 billion. The tax revenue, employment, port activity, and regional economic stimulus generated over that period dwarf the original capital cost of the plants, even accounting for the losses on the associated synthetic petrol operation.

The Kapuni Ammonia Urea Plant

The ammonia urea plant at Kapuni in South Taranaki, built as part of the Think Big programme and now operated by Ballance Agri Nutrients, converts natural gas into urea fertiliser. It provides approximately 40 percent of New Zealand’s domestic urea demand, with the remaining 60 percent imported. For a country whose economy depends fundamentally on pastoral agriculture, domestic fertiliser production is a strategic capability. The plant employs a modest workforce but its output supports an agricultural sector worth tens of billions of dollars annually. Without the Think Big investment, New Zealand would import 100 percent of its urea, adding to the import bill and creating an additional supply chain vulnerability of the kind now painfully visible in the liquid fuels sector.

New Zealand Steel at Glenbrook

The Think Big expansion of the New Zealand Steel mill at Glenbrook, south of Auckland, was perhaps the most politically contentious project in the programme. Treasury assessed the expansion at a net present value of negative $225 million, but it was approved because, as John Boshier’s insider account records, Muldoon wanted to enter the election campaign with at least one of the world scale projects finalised. Roger Douglas described it as throwing a billion dollars off the Harbour Bridge.

The government’s 89 percent shareholding was sold for $300 million in 1987, a fraction of the investment. The mill is now wholly owned by Australia’s BlueScope Steel. But the mill is still making steel. It produces approximately 650,000 tonnes per year, over 90 percent of New Zealand’s steel requirements. It directly employs more than 1,300 workers plus 200 semi permanent contractors, making it one of the largest industrial employment sites in the Auckland region. Steel exports totalled $340.87 million in 2024. The mill contributes approximately 0.25 percent of national GDP. Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, recorded that in 2008 the Glenbrook mill contributed over $2 billion per year to the New Zealand economy.

In 2023, the Labour government provided $140 million in co funding for an electric arc furnace to halve the mill’s coal consumption, demonstrating that both sides of the political aisle consider the mill worth investing in when it suits them. The irony is exquisite. The mill that Roger Douglas said was worth throwing into the sea is now receiving government investment to ensure its long term future.

The cumulative economic contribution of New Zealand Steel over its 57 years of operation (since 1968, with the Think Big expansion from the early 1980s) runs into the tens of billions of dollars in domestic steel production, import substitution, and export earnings. The employment multiplier in a heavy manufacturing context is typically 2.0 to 3.0, meaning the 1,500 direct jobs support an estimated 3,000 to 4,500 total jobs in the Auckland and Waikato regions through supply chain and induced spending effects.

The Tiwai Point Smelter Expansion

The Tiwai Point aluminium smelter predates Think Big, having opened in 1971, but it received a significant expansion under the programme with additional reduction lines and capacity upgrades. The smelter now produces over 335,000 tonnes of high purity, low carbon aluminium per year. Annual export revenue is approximately $1 billion. The smelter contributes $406 million to the Southland economy annually, representing 6.5 percent of regional GDP. It directly employs approximately 1,000 full time equivalent workers and contractors, with a further 2,200 people employed indirectly.

The indirect employment figure is critical to understanding the real economic footprint. Those 2,200 jobs include the electricians who maintain industrial equipment, the transport companies that move alumina from the port and aluminium to the ships, the catering contractors who feed the workforce, the engineering firms that provide specialist services during maintenance shutdowns, and the retailers, builders, mechanics, and service providers in Invercargill and Bluff whose customer base depends substantially on smelter wages. When Rio Tinto threatened closure in 2020, the response from the Southland community was not primarily about the smelter itself but about the cascading economic consequences. Losing 1,000 direct jobs was devastating enough. Losing the 2,200 indirect jobs would have hollowed out the regional economy.

The smelter is now contracted to operate until at least 2044, with 20 year power agreements signed in May 2024 with Meridian, Contact Energy, and Mercury NZ. Over its lifetime since 1971, the cumulative export earnings are in the tens of billions of dollars. The cumulative wages paid to workers who spent that money in the Southland community represent one of the most sustained programmes of regional economic support in New Zealand’s history, delivered not through welfare payments but through productive employment in a globally competitive export industry.

The Failure

The Synthetic Petrol Plant

No retrospective of Think Big can avoid the Motunui synthetic petrol plant, which was the programme’s most visible failure. The plant, which converted natural gas to methanol and then methanol to synthetic petrol using a process licensed from Mobil, opened in 1986 and closed in 1999. Its economic logic depended entirely on oil prices remaining high. When OPEC cohesion fractured and oil prices crashed in the mid 1980s, the plant was uneconomic from its first day of operation. The losses were substantial, though precise figures are difficult to isolate from the broader methanol operations at the same site.

The synthetic petrol plant is the exhibit that critics reach for whenever Think Big is discussed. It is proof, they argue, that governments cannot pick winners, that industrial policy is inherently wasteful, and that the private sector’s refusal to invest was the correct signal. These arguments have merit. The plant was a bet on a single commodity price trajectory that did not materialise. But two observations are worth making. First, the methanol production capacity built at the same site as part of the same programme has operated profitably for four decades and generated billions in export earnings. Second, the risk of high oil prices was not an irrational fear. It was a response to a genuine crisis that had already caused New Zealand to ban weekend petrol sales and introduce carless days. In April 2026, with petrol exceeding $3.40 per litre and the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed, the fear that drove the synthetic petrol project looks considerably less paranoid than it did in the cheap oil years of the 1990s and 2000s.

The Employment Calculation the Politicians Never Made

The conventional assessment of Think Big focuses on the capital costs and the debt burden, and measures these against the direct financial returns of each project. This is the assessment that produced the political verdict of failure. But it omits the single largest category of economic benefit from the government’s perspective, which is the fiscal impact of employment.

When a person moves from unemployment to a well paid industrial job, the government’s fiscal position improves in multiple ways simultaneously. The unemployment benefit ceases. Income tax begins. ACC levies are paid. KiwiSaver contributions flow. GST is collected on the worker’s spending. The worker’s spending supports businesses that employ other people, who also pay tax. The worker’s health outcomes improve (the relationship between unemployment and poor health is one of the most robust findings in epidemiology), reducing public health costs. Crime rates fall (unemployment is a strong predictor of property crime), reducing justice system costs. The worker’s children do better in school, reducing long term welfare dependency in the next generation.

Project	Direct jobs	Indirect and induced	Total footprint
Tiwai Point smelter	~1,000	~2,200	~3,200
Marsden Point refinery (peak)	~1,100	~1,400	~2,500
NZ Steel Glenbrook	~1,500	~3,000	~4,500
Methanex Taranaki	~300	~400	~700
Kapuni (Ballance)	~50	~75	~125
Clyde Dam (operational)	~30	~20	~50
Combined (peak estimates)	~3,980	~7,095	~11,075

None of these benefits appear on the balance sheet of the factory or the power station. They accrue to the government. And they are substantial. The current Jobseeker Support benefit for a single person aged 25 or over is approximately $337 per fortnight, or roughly $8,760 per year. But the true fiscal cost of unemployment is much higher than the benefit payment alone. When accommodation supplements, emergency grants, health costs, justice system costs, and lost tax revenue are factored in, estimates of the full fiscal cost of a single unemployed person to the New Zealand government range from $30,000 to $50,000 per year, depending on individual circumstances and the methodology used.

Consider the Marsden Point refinery at its peak. If 1,100 direct employees and approximately 1,400 indirect and induced employees (using a conservative multiplier of 1.3 for indirect jobs and 1.0 for induced jobs) earned an average industrial wage of $70,000 per year (a reasonable estimate for skilled industrial work in Northland), the total wage bill would have been approximately $175 million per year. The income tax on those wages, at an effective average rate of roughly 20 percent, would have been approximately $35 million per year. The GST on spending from those wages (assuming 80 percent of after tax income is spent on GST liable goods and services) would have been approximately $16 million per year. KiwiSaver employer contributions at 3 percent would have been approximately $5 million. ACC levies on the wage bill would have been several million more. Total government revenue from the refinery’s workforce alone would have been in the range of $55 million to $65 million per year.

Now consider the counterfactual. If those 2,500 workers had been unemployed (an admittedly extreme assumption, but Northland’s unemployment rate has historically been among the highest in the country, so a significant proportion would have been on benefits), the fiscal cost to the government at $35,000 per person per year (a mid range estimate of the full fiscal cost of unemployment) would have been approximately $87 million per year. The swing, from costing the government $87 million per year to generating $60 million per year in revenue, represents a fiscal gain of approximately $147 million per year from the refinery’s employment alone.

Over 36 years of operation following the Think Big expansion, using even highly conservative assumptions that the average employment effect was half the peak level (recognising that employment fluctuated over the decades), the cumulative fiscal benefit of the refinery’s employment to the government would be in the range of $2 billion to $3 billion. This figure does not include the value of the fuel produced, the energy security benefit, or the export earnings from refined fuel products. It measures only the difference between having people employed and having them on benefits.

The same calculation can be applied, with different numbers, to every surviving Think Big project. The Tiwai Point smelter with its 3,200 direct and indirect jobs. The Methanex plants with their several hundred direct employees and the port workers, truck drivers, and service providers they support. New Zealand Steel with its 1,500 direct workers and estimated 3,000 to 4,500 total employment footprint. The Clyde Dam during its construction phase of 1,000 workers and ongoing operational employment. Across all surviving projects, the total employment footprint at peak was probably in the range of 10,000 to 15,000 direct and indirect jobs. The cumulative fiscal benefit of that employment over three to four decades, compared to the counterfactual of unemployment in regions with few alternative employment options, would conservatively run to tens of billions of dollars.

The Ledger Nobody Compiled

No government agency has ever produced a comprehensive retrospective cost benefit analysis of the Think Big programme. This is itself a remarkable omission. The most significant programme of government led industrial investment in New Zealand’s post war history has been judged for 40 years by political narrative rather than by data. John Boshier, a former assistant secretary in the energy ministry who was personally involved in the programme’s development, published an insider’s account in 2022 (Power Surge), but even his meticulous history does not attempt a full economic reckoning across all projects.

Based on the data that is publicly available, a rough ledger can be assembled. On the cost side, the total programme cost was in the range of $7 billion to $11 billion in dollars of the time, or roughly $20 billion to $30 billion in today’s money. This includes both the successful projects and the failures.

On the benefit side, the surviving projects have delivered, over their operating lifetimes, cumulative wholesale electricity generation from the Clyde Dam worth conservatively $4 billion to $6 billion. Cumulative methanol exports from the Methanex operations worth conservatively $15 billion to $25 billion. Cumulative aluminium exports from the expanded Tiwai Point smelter worth tens of billions of dollars (the smelter alone generates $1 billion per year in export revenue and has been operating since 1971). Cumulative steel production and exports from Glenbrook worth tens of billions. Domestic fertiliser production from Kapuni displacing imports worth hundreds of millions. Refined fuel production from the expanded Marsden Point refinery worth billions over 36 years. And the fiscal benefit of employment across all projects, including avoided benefit costs and collected tax revenue, worth conservatively tens of billions of dollars.

Even allowing for the enormous losses on the synthetic petrol plant and the write down on the New Zealand Steel shareholding sale, the cumulative economic return from the surviving projects appears to significantly exceed the total programme cost, possibly by a factor of five to ten. This is a rough estimate, and it should be treated as such. Precise figures would require access to data that is held by the companies now operating these assets (Methanex, Contact Energy, BlueScope, Rio Tinto, Ballance Agri Nutrients) and by government agencies (Treasury, MBIE, IRD) that have not been asked to produce it.

Newswire has submitted Official Information Act requests to relevant agencies seeking the data needed for a more precise accounting. If those requests are fulfilled, a follow up analysis will be published. But even on the available evidence, the case that Think Big was an unmitigated economic disaster does not withstand scrutiny. It was an unmitigated political disaster. That is a different thing.

What Forty Years of Hindsight Tells Us

The lesson of Think Big is not that government led industrial investment always works. The synthetic petrol plant proved that it does not. The lesson is not that every dollar invested in physical infrastructure generates positive returns. The New Zealand Steel expansion was assessed as value destructive at the time and the immediate financial returns confirmed that assessment. The lesson is subtler and more important than either of these.

The lesson is that physical infrastructure has a quality that distinguishes it from almost every other category of government spending. It endures. A dam generates electricity for decades. A factory employs workers for generations. A refinery processes fuel until the economics no longer support it, and even then, the storage tanks, the jetties, and the pipeline it leaves behind continue to serve the country. A methanol plant produces exportable product year after year. An aluminium smelter turns renewable electricity into a high value metal that is shipped around the world.

Compare this with the alternative uses of government capital that New Zealand has chosen in more recent decades. The Three Waters reform consumed $1.2 billion and produced no pipes. Te Pūkenga consumed over $121 million and produced no classrooms. Auckland light rail consumed $229 million and produced no track. These programmes produced organisational charts, consultant reports, legislation, and transition plans. They did not produce anything that will still be generating value in 2060.

Muldoon’s cabinet colleague Hugh Templeton recalled that 18,000 unemployed in 1978 was considered an unacceptable number. New Zealand’s current unemployment figure is roughly 120,000. The regions where Think Big invested, Northland, Taranaki, Southland, Central Otago, still have the industries that were built. The regions where Think Big did not invest remain among the most economically deprived in the country. The correlation is not proof of causation, but it is suggestive.

Think Big was conceived in response to an energy crisis, a loss of export markets, and rising unemployment. New Zealand in April 2026 faces an energy crisis (the Strait of Hormuz closure), the potential loss of export revenue (through disrupted shipping and global economic slowdown), and rising unemployment (construction and manufacturing lost over 18,000 filled jobs in 2024). The parallels are uncomfortable precisely because the country has spent the intervening 40 years treating Think Big as a cautionary tale rather than as a dataset.

The data says something different from the narrative. The dams still generate. The smelter still smelts. The methanol plants still export. The steel mill still rolls. The refinery operated for 36 years before market forces, not government failure, ended it. And the thousands of workers who were employed across these projects over four decades paid taxes, raised families, and sustained communities that would otherwise have been dependent on government transfers.

The politicians who built these projects are long gone from office. The political arguments that surrounded them have faded. But the turbines still turn at Clyde. The aluminium still flows at Tiwai Point. The steel still rolls at Glenbrook. The infrastructure outlasted the politics. It always does.

Read next: It’s Time to Think Big Again — Ten Projects That Would Transform New Zealand

Sources and References

• John Boshier, Power Surge, How Think Big and Rogernomics Transformed New Zealand, New Holland Publishers, 2022
• BusinessDesk, Echoes of Think Big in Today’s Climate Choices (review of Power Surge), March 2024
• RNZ, Think Big, The Sequel? (Two Cents’ Worth podcast), February 2020
• Newsroom, In the Footsteps of Think Big, February 2020
• NZ Herald, In the Shadow of Think Big
• New Zealand Initiative, The Seduction of Grandeur
• Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand, Think Big and Steel
• SRG Global NZ, Refining New Zealand Maintenance Contract
• Oil and Gas Journal, Refining NZ lets contract for Marsden Point refinery (WorleyParsons), May 2017
• Rio Tinto, Long Term Future for Tiwai Point Secured, May 2024
• NZAS, About Us
• Methanex, New Zealand operations
• RNZ, 75 Jobs to Go as Methanex Plans to Close Plant, April 2021
• RNZ, Port Taranaki Job Losses Could Follow Methanex Decision, September 2024
• Channel Infrastructure, Our History
• New Zealand Treasury, Financial Statements of the Government, various years
• Oxford Academic, New Zealand’s Economic Turnaround
• NZIER data on Rogernomics employment effects, cited in Power Surge

Note on methodology and data limitations. This article’s estimates of cumulative economic contribution are based on publicly available data including company reports, government statistics, media accounts, and academic sources. Precise lifetime economic valuations would require access to proprietary financial data held by the companies operating these assets and to government tax and employment records. Newswire has submitted Official Information Act requests to the Treasury and MBIE seeking data that would enable a more precise accounting. A follow up article will be published when responses are received.

What do you think about Think Big’s legacy? Share your thoughts in the comments below.