Simplicity managing director Sam Stubbs said the fund “fundamentally is a good idea”.
Mr Peters referenced the Ireland and Singapore as examples where similar funds were in place, and Mr Stubbs believed they were good examples to follow.
“Effectively, what they have done is they’ve taken a lot of their key infrastructure assets and rolled them into a big fund, and they’ve raised additional money to do more.
“The really important thing about that is you have a completely separate layer of governance over that fund, which means it’s effectively depoliticised.”
In particular, Mr Stubbs highlighted Singaporean government-owned investment firm Temasek, which invested in equities and also outright owned key infrastructure.
New Zealand could have a similar model.
“It should be done here … by really rolling in a combination of the existing assets we already have, and the example might be the power companies.”
Mr Stubbs said the fund could then raise money to invest in long-term infrastructure decisions.
For it to be successful, politicians would have to stay out of decision-making.
Mr Stubbs added KiwiSaver fund managers, such as Simplicity, would be interested in partnering with a fund if the government chose to go down that path.
“We’re also long-term investors, so we would be ideal investment partners for the Future Fund”, he said.
