The Budget has naturally overshadowed it, but otherwise the big political story of the week has been the climate change lobbying scandal: hidden corporate influence that appears to have persuaded the Beehive to introduce a retrospective law change designed to stop private climate lawsuits against the likes of Z Energy and Fonterra.
It feels like a landmark in the public’s understanding of how corporates shape government decisions. Earlier lobbying scandals were too abstract to hold attention. This one has touched a nerve with anyone who wonders why successive governments do so little about climate change.
How powerful interests lobbied in the dark, and got what they wanted, has produced real anger. Audrey Young, writing about it yesterday, needed only two words. “It stinks.”
The man in the middle
The story changed when the staffer was named: Matt Burgess.
He was identified on Wednesday night as the Prime Minister’s senior policy adviser who received the hard-copy briefing notes from Fonterra and Z Energy — material that was not later disclosed through the OIA process. Andrea Vance named him at The Post. RNZ confirmed the role. Approached for comment, Burgess said only: “I have nothing to add.”
His job was Luxon’s chief policy adviser, and he came into it after working as a senior economist at the business think tank and lobby group, the New Zealand Initiative. So the Burgess story has become one of the clearest recent examples of the revolving door.
He was not a neutral public servant but a political appointee in the Prime Minister’s inner circle, and his beat covered resource management, energy and the Emissions Trading Scheme. His background at the NZ Initiative is not incidental colour. It is the point. In 2022 he wrote Pretence of Necessity, a report arguing that New Zealand did not need extra climate policies layered on top of the ETS. More recently, Initiative figures have also argued that Parliament, not the courts, is the proper place to settle climate liability. Those are distinct arguments, but politically they point in the same direction: keep climate accountability within the statutory framework and away from common-law litigation.
On its own, Burgess’ NZ Initiative background does not prove improper conduct. People move between think tanks and politics all the time. But in this case the overlap is unusually direct: the policy area, the corporate interests, the ETS argument, the hostility to court-led climate accountability, and the subsequent law change all point in the same direction.
When Fonterra and Z Energy delivered their briefing notes in mid-2024, the material went to Luxon’s chief policy adviser. That matters. It means the documents were not merely dropped somewhere in the outer machinery of government. They reached a senior political adviser whose policy background was unusually relevant to the very question being pushed by the companies. The proposals were framed in the companies’ interests and, on the reporting so far, appear strikingly close to the eventual direction of government policy.
The New Zealand Initiative
The Initiative grew out of the merger between the old Business Roundtable and the New Zealand Institute. It is not a lobby shop in the usual sense. Its influence is less direct and, for that reason, more interesting. It publishes reports, convenes business leaders, hosts politicians, briefs members, and develops a pool of people who can move easily between the world of corporate-funded policy work and the world of ministerial decision-making.
That is not sinister in itself. It is what serious think tanks do. But it becomes politically important when the people trained in that world end up handling the very policy questions their former institution has spent years trying to shape.
Its own prospectus sells the access plainly enough: private briefings from the research team, reports before publication, members’ meetings and lunches with senior politicians and opinion leaders, and an annual retreat with leading politicians and guests. What it is too modest to say is that it also helps create the personnel pool from which future ministerial offices draw.
The Initiative insists it is independent and non-partisan. Oliver Hartwich, its executive director, has complained that “conspiracy theories” about its links to the global Atlas Network are the most tiresome part of his job, and notes that former Initiative researchers turn up in Labour and Act offices, not only National ones.
That defence is less reassuring than Hartwich seems to think.
The question is not whether the Initiative secretly runs the Government. That is too crude. The more interesting question is how a business-backed worldview gets normalised inside the policy system: not through bribery or brown envelopes, but through careers, papers, private briefings, board seats, and a steady flow of people between think tanks and ministerial offices.
Eric Crampton, the Initiative’s chief economist, once joked that Luxon’s office had “stolen” Burgess from them. It was probably meant as collegial banter. But it also captures something real about Wellington: people do not have to be formally seconded from think tanks into ministers’ offices for their assumptions to travel with them.
Was Fonterra funding the think tank?
One question follows naturally: was the Initiative funded by the same companies whose briefing notes Burgess received? The honest answer is: we cannot fully tell, because the Initiative does not publish a complete current membership list.
The Initiative is funded by membership fees from the country’s largest corporations. Its roster has included all five major retail banks, energy companies such as Genesis Energy, supermarket chains, Google and British American Tobacco, among dozens of others. Genesis Energy is one of the defendants in Smith v Fonterra, and its chair, Barbara Chapman, is the Initiative’s deputy chair. So one of the companies Mike Smith was suing sits inside the think tank, and one of its directors helps run it.
Fonterra’s tie is older and looser. Its chief executive sat on the board in the early years, and Nicola Willis was a Fonterra executive during that period. Whether Fonterra or Z Energy are current paying members is not something the Initiative’s disclosures let you establish, because the full membership list is not public. I will not overstate it. There is no clean line running from a Fonterra cheque to a Burgess report to a government law.
But the absence of a neat paper trail does not make the question irrelevant. The Initiative is funded by large corporate members, including companies in sectors with a strong interest in climate, energy, regulation and litigation risk. That does not prove a direct line from any particular company to any particular policy. But it does show why the Initiative’s role matters: it is part of the network through which business-friendly climate arguments are developed, polished and carried into government.
Its climate position for a decade has served those industries’ interests, and it trained and employed the man who went on to receive their lobbying inside the Prime Minister’s office.
This is why the story should not be reduced to a conspiracy claim. The more plausible problem is also the more ordinary one: the same people, the same institutions and the same assumptions keep circulating through the same small set of rooms.
Most people imagine lobbying as an outsider trying to bend a minister’s ear. This case suggests something subtler. By the time Fonterra and Z Energy arrived with their papers, the argument they were making may already have been familiar, respectable and welcome inside the office. In that situation, a briefing note does not have to change anyone’s mind. It only has to give officials and ministers a ready-made argument for doing what they were already inclined to do.
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