Winston Peters used a Sunday speech in Whangārei to pitch a Special Economic Zone at Marsden Point, accuse past governments of “economic treason” over the 2022 closure of the oil refinery there, and unveil former mayor Vince Cocurullo as New Zealand First’s candidate for the city at the 2026 general election.
The proposal, which the party would campaign on at the election, would combine the disused refinery site and the adjoining Northport into a single zone focused on energy and maritime industry. Resource Management Act consents, district plan rules and the usual involvement of agencies such as the Department of Conservation would be replaced by decisions of a government expert panel, with tax breaks, wage subsidies, rates rebates and reduced company taxes available to qualifying investors. Peters also signalled that the Overseas Investment Act could be relaxed inside the zone to attract foreign capital.
“Whangarei in New Zealand First’s view is a gateway to Northland and its many attractions, should be ‘no more a Cinderella City’,” Peters told the crowd, according to his published speech text. “Whangārei needs to come alive again.”
He called the 2022 conversion of the refinery into a fuel import terminal “economic treason” and said the country had handed away its only oil refining capacity for short-term commercial reasons, then watched fuel security weaken. The new SEZ, Peters argued, would unlock “this province’s potential and its main resource, which is the biggest resource in this country when it comes to transport, the only deep port in the country.”
Cocurullo, who served a single term as Whangārei mayor from 2022 until losing his seat at last year’s local elections, was introduced on stage as the party’s general election candidate for the Whangārei electorate. Sitting list MP Jenny Marcroft was reannounced as the candidate for Kaipara ki Mahurangi, a seat she has contested twice before. Former Labour Cabinet minister and Far North deputy mayor Dover Samuels was in the audience.
The Marsden Point SEZ idea is not new. Regional Development Minister Shane Jones and Peters first floated it during an August 2025 visit to Northport, where Jones told RNZ that “this business of constipating and protracting all these resource consent processes is making the country broke” and Peters said the zones would “go a step beyond fast-track legislation”. The Sunday relaunch elevates the proposal from a regional development talking point to formal NZ First election policy, with legislation promised either in the current parliamentary term or, more likely, after the election if the party returns to government.
Marsden Point sits at the mouth of Whangārei Harbour and was for nearly six decades home to New Zealand’s only oil refinery, which closed in April 2022 after Refining NZ shareholders voted to convert the facility into a simple import terminal. The decision removed roughly 240 specialist jobs from the district and left the country reliant on imported refined petrol, diesel and jet fuel. Northport, which sits alongside, is the country’s northernmost commercial deep-water port and handles forestry, dairy and bulk cargo.
Around the Sunday announcement, Peters also restated several other NZ First positions already in the public arena, including the party’s campaign to buy back the Bank of New Zealand from Australian ownership, which Newswire reported on Thursday after Chris Bishop dismissed the plan as “fantasy land stuff”, as well as proposals to break up the major power companies and address the supermarket duopoly. He repeated his criticism of the proposed India free trade agreement and his opposition to formal recognition of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
The package Peters described in Whangārei runs parallel to the wider Northland development pipeline that NZ First and the coalition government have been pushing since taking office, including the Marsden Point rail link to Oakleigh, the Northland Expressway and a proposed public-private dry dock for ship repair near Northport. A decision on a separate biorefinery project at the site, which would produce diesel and jet fuel, is expected later this year. Independent estimates have put the rail spur cost at around a billion dollars, a figure Peters rejected in August 2025 when he told reporters NZ First would “get value for money” and “we’re not talking about a billion dollars or anything like it”.
No formal response from Labour, the Greens or Te Pāti Māori had been issued at the time of writing. National’s position on Marsden Point itself is sympathetic, with the party already a partner in the fast-track regime, but ministers have generally been cautious about wholesale carve-outs of the RMA for single sites, preferring the national fast-track consents process introduced last year. Reaction from local councils, which would be stripped of consenting powers inside the zone, is also yet to come, with the Whangārei District Council and Northland Regional Council both contacted for comment by 1News.
With the general election due later this year, voters who want to compare where NZ First, National, Labour, the Greens, ACT and Te Pāti Māori sit on questions like Special Economic Zones, RMA reform and foreign investment can use the Newswire 2026 voting tool to line their own views up against each party’s published policy positions before they head to a polling booth.
What do you think? Should Marsden Point become a Special Economic Zone with its own consent panel and tax regime, or is fast-track law the right line for the rest of the country to follow? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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