Guy,
You're prescribing broad industrial self-sufficiency for a country of 5 million people that has no hard security guarantee from any major power. That's not ambition — it's a recipe for wasting scarce capital on capabilities NZ can never sustain.
You cite Estonia as a digital-state model, but you leave out the part that matters: Estonia spends ~3.4% of GDP on defense and exists inside NATO with an explicit American security commitment. Its e-governance is ornamental next to that guarantee. NZ has no equivalent. It faces the Pacific with no treaty ally obligated to fight for it. In that position, sovereign procurement isn't a cost to be minimized — it's one of the few tools you have to make your country worth defending. Buy from the power you need, and make the relationship stickier every year.
NZ doesn't have the workers, the engineers, the capital, or the domestic market to sustain competitive IT platforms, defense manufacturing, or heavy industry. That's not defeatism — it's arithmetic. Rocket Lab succeeded because it did one narrow thing and sold it globally. It did not succeed because NZ tried to build a domestic space ecosystem. Your proposal to insource 50% of sovereign purchases ignores the obvious: most of what NZ buys, it cannot build at competitive quality or cost, and pretending otherwise just produces expensive, second-rate substitutes that make the country poorer.
You want 95% renewables. Fine — if the levelized cost beats the alternatives and the grid stays reliable. But if it doesn't, you're asking NZ to pay a premium for a virtue signal, and NZ's margin for error on that kind of indulgence is close to zero. Germany is the cautionary tale: industrial power at 2–3× US prices, a manufacturing sector in decline, and an economy that hasn't grown meaningfully in half a decade. Germany can absorb that mistake. NZ cannot.
Norway, Switzerland, and Singapore are prosperous and secure because they operate inside a Western order guaranteed by American hard power. They are not sovereign in any meaningful strategic sense — they are clients of a system that works. Finland and Sweden just admitted as much by joining NATO after decades of pretending otherwise. True independence for a small country is not a goal; it's a liability. The play is not to stand alone. The play is to make yourself indispensable to the power that stands behind you.
Your instinct to build more at home is right. But build narrow. Build things your allies need. Build things that make NZ harder to abandon. The rest is expensive vanity.