Drury: Digital boost key to reviving NZ

Xero founder Rod Drury has renewed his call for a rule change to allow wealthy foreigners to buy property in this country’s top destinations.

But he said any influx into areas such as Queenstown or Hawke’s Bay would depend as much on digital connectivity as it would on opening up the market to land investors.

Addressing the epidemic response committee yesterday, Drury said 1000 sections could be allocated more or less “immediately” in Queenstown, which he suggested could add $5 billion of residential construction and jobs to an area that is otherwise economically dead and will “likely take some years to recover”.

In response to a question from Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson on whether the focus should be on building low-cost housing, Drury said it wasn’t “one or the other”.

“The issue is money,” he said. “Also, there is no reason that an allocation of, say, $500,000 per project couldn’t be redirected to a low-cost housing programme, but I’d be more interested in asking government where they see the downside in building homes.”

Drury said a critical part of saving jobs and getting the economy started quickly would be upgrading mobile data infrastructure, particularly in outlying and rural areas.

“Superannuation funds are looking for investments, so this is an opportunity to kickstart capital works and expansion of the 5G network.” He said it was also time to sort out changing the domestic payments networks to become contactless, while retaining a larger slice of the $400 million to $500m that went to Australian banks each year.

Drury said the payments system could also play an important part in the contact tracing effort while the country is still battling covid19.

He suggested calling for expressions of capability from companies with the ability to assist in contact tracing. “Companies should be able to send through solutions”, then health authorities could host online sessions for them to demonstrate their capabilities.