Over the last couple of years, we have been having a particular kind of conversation more often.
A client will ask whether they own Palantir. Or Tesla. Or how much of their portfolio is sitting in Amazon. Sometimes it is about a specific company that has been in the news. More often it is a quieter question about what their money is actually doing while they get on with their lives.
These are good questions. They are also harder to answer than people expect.
In mid April the High Court delivered a judgment that puts those questions in a wider context. It is worth knowing about, even if you have never thought much about how the New Zealand Super Fund works.
A short word on the Super Fund
The New Zealand Superannuation Fund was set up by Parliament in 2001. It is a sovereign wealth fund, currently holding around $86 billion, designed to help meet the future cost of paying superannuation to New Zealanders. Most of us will benefit from it eventually, whether or not we have ever looked at it.
It is run by an independent body called the Guardians. By law, they have to invest the money on a prudent commercial basis, and they also have to do so in a way that avoids prejudicing New Zealand's reputation as a responsible member of the world community. That last part is unusual. Most large investment funds are not legally required to think about reputation in that way.
Until the judgment, the Super Fund had a strong international reputation in the responsible investing community. It excluded tobacco companies back in 2007, ahead of most of its peers. It was an early signatory to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment. It excluded a group of Israeli banks in 2021 after concluding they were materially involved in human rights breaches. It has been used in academic work as an example of how a sovereign fund can take ethics seriously while still performing its primary financial role.
That is the context that makes the judgment matter.
What the court said
The case was brought by three New Zealanders who argued that the Super Fund's investment policies on ethical issues were not strong enough to comply with the law. The court agreed.
The judge ruled that the documents the Guardians use to make ethical investment decisions are unreasonable and unlawful. They are too vague to be applied consistently. They do not give anyone, inside the fund or outside it, a clear way of telling whether a particular investment should be excluded or kept.
The court did not order the Super Fund to sell any specific investment. It ordered the Guardians to rewrite their rules so that those rules actually function as rules.
This is a significant ruling. It is not really about any one company or any one issue. It is about whether a major New Zealand institution can demonstrate, in a documented and defensible way, how it makes the ethical decisions it has told the public it makes.
A useful contrast
While I was reading the judgment, I was also reading material from Pathfinder, a New Zealand KiwiSaver provider that has spent the last year or so working through a similar set of questions about its own holdings. Several of the companies they invest in were named in a United Nations Special Rapporteur's report on the situation in Gaza.
Pathfinder reviewed each company. They surveyed their members. They engaged directly with the companies. They applied a documented Ethical Investment Policy with defined options and defined thresholds. In the end they divested some, kept others on a watch list, and granted one a formal exception on financial grounds because excluding it would have meaningfully changed the risk and return characteristics of the portfolio.
You do not have to agree with every decision they made to see that the process was documented, transparent, and capable of being challenged. That is what the High Court has effectively told the Super Fund it needs to be able to demonstrate.
What this means for our clients
The questions our clients have been bringing into our meetings are the right ones. What do I own. Why do I own it. Does this sit comfortably with how I see the world. They are not fringe questions. They are questions about ownership, and ownership is what investing actually is.
What this judgment underlines is that those questions deserve substantive answers rather than generic statements about responsible investing or bullet points about values. They deserve documented thinking that can be looked at, challenged, and followed.
This is part of why we do the work the way we do. The conversations about what you own and why you own it have always been part of the financial planning, not separate from it.
If any of this prompts a question about your own portfolio and how it is structured, that is exactly the kind of conversation we are here to have.
The judgment is publicly available on NZLII if you would like to read it. https://www.courtsofnz.govt.nz/assets/cases/2026/2026-NZHC-681.pdf
