COMMENTARY: By Vincent Wijeysingha
Will maximising investment returns override ethics? That is the question the tertiary sector posed to UniSaver, the academic equivalent of KiwiSaver, now revealed to invest in Israeli weapons and military intelligence.
In 2024, some 400 university staff appealed to UniSaver to divest from such companies.
The fund initially ignored the call.
The fund issued a statement in September 2025 emphasising its fiduciary duty to ensure best performance, arguing divestment was unnecessary because the New Zealand government had not imposed sanctions against Israel, and noting its Israel-linked exposure is only 0.11 percent of total assets.
After a November open letter signed by 715 staff, nearly double the earlier number, UniSaver agreed to meet representatives of the group.
What should the tenor of those discussions be?
And why should any of this matter to the average New Zealander returning from the summer lull, facing a new year that looks uncomfortably like the last, with no sign from the Prime Minister’s State of the Nation last weekend that domestic pressures will ease?
The core question
This is the core question: with so many local concerns, why should the Israel–Palestine conflict matter?
Or, more pointedly, why should 0.11 percent of a pension fund belonging to a relatively privileged cohort matter to those worried about jobs, the cost of living, and healthcare?
Global issues are closer than we think. The suffering of Gazans and the anxieties of New Zealanders share a root: public policy framed as instrumental and amoral, where the wellbeing of persons is sacrificed to detached abstractions of markets and efficiencies while morality and integrity are treated as incidental.
These attitudes yield the same harvest everywhere: dehumanisation, insecurity, and the corrosion of civic trust.
Our only defence is a moral standpoint that declares “thus far shall you come, and no farther”.
When a society publicly avows that certain principles, human dignity and the integrity of persons, are non negotiable, it restores those ideals to the centre of the public square.
This is what a rules-based order is for: to foreground the human person before power and profit. Where such an order is honoured, flourishing follows; where it is neglected, flourishing is the first casualty.
Small acts of moral probity — even a mere 0.11 percent — may appear inconsequential.
Beacons for human progress
Yet as articulations of what we hold valuable, they resound deeply in the moral universe. They are the lit matches that, gathered, become the beacon that lights human progress.
Recent years have seen our public life dominated by the contrary impulse: to measure every policy by an economic yardstick calibrated to austerity.
As we enter an election year, two paths lie before us: one paved by slavish adherence to instrumental rationality, the other by a politics that puts people in a place of honour and treats wellbeing, security, and human flourishing as the purpose, not by product, of policy.
We have precedents. In the 1930s, as the world entered a moment not unlike our own, New Zealand, small, distant, still reeling from the Depression, adopted what became known as a moral foreign policy.
After that most devastating conflict, we added our voice to a chorus that helped shape a rules-based international order privileging human rights, cooperation, and diplomacy over war.
From the gradual undermining of that settlement, particularly after the crisis-ridden 1970s, one can trace many of today’s global and national disorders.
So what has all this to do with UniSaver?
Instability gathering pace
From our relatively safe redoubt at the bottom of the world, we watch instability elsewhere gather pace. Shall we respond in the same polarising, amoral terms or recover the loftier stance that once gave us outsized moral influence?
The UniSaver Board now faces a profound opportunity. In opposing the 715 who call for ethical investment, it has chosen expediency over ethics.
But morality often begins with small, unfashionable acts that grow, over time, into the juggernaut of social change.
Consider how a small student-led divestment campaign in the 1950s catalysed what became the global movement that helped topple South African apartheid.
Such actions shift the parameters of the values debate. Even if it concerns only 0.11 percent, UniSaver can redraw the moral horizon.
If its decision signals that we value a fair go for all — yes, even for far off Palestinians — it will achieve far more than a simple reassignment of assets.
It will have reminded us who we are.
And it will return UniSaver to being an institution to be proud of, one that affirms that people matter at least as much as the return on investment.
Dr Vincent Wijeysingha is senior lecturer in social work and social policy at Massey University. He is a member of Uni Workers 4 Palestine but writes here in a personal capacity.
Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz
