RNZ National’s Midday Rural News today ran a segment on rural broadband and Starlink’s growing share of the rural market.

Audio © Monique Steele, Guyon Espiner, RNZ National, Midday Rural News, 27 May 2026. Source: rnz.co.nz.

A few things worth adding that the segment didn’t have time to cover.

The Commerce Commission says it will respond if competition or consumer harm emerges. By the time those harms are visible, the local providers will already be gone. Towers come down. Niche technical expertise disperses. You can’t rebuild a regional network serving the remotest areas of our country from a press release.

The Feasey report, commissioned by the Commission itself, warned about this in October 2025. Only four days later, Evolution Networks went into liquidation. That is the pattern the report described.

The segment also pointed to the telecommunications amendment bills currently before Parliament as part of the government’s response. The two bills bring offshore providers under existing levy and regulatory obligations. They do not address spectrum allocation, terrestrial resilience, the consolidation of rural connectivity onto foreign-controlled platforms, or the structural risk described in the Feasey report.

MBIE and the Commerce Commission, both quoted by RNZ, are agencies. The Minister responsible, Hon Paul Goldsmith, has not stated a public position on the structural risk. At the 2026 TUANZ Connecting Aotearoa Summit on 13 May, he described his role as “not to meddle.” His departmental advice on the structural market impact of LEO services exists but is withheld under s 9 (2)(f)(iv) of the Official Information Act.

I hand-delivered hard-copy briefing packs to 40 interested MP’s in Parliament and to the Prime Minister’s office, asking that the issue be treated as a national risk and resilience question, not a mundane telecommunications portfolio question.

The PM’s office transferred the correspondence to Minister Goldsmith (to whom I had already delivered the same briefing).

I wrote back via email to request a referral to DPMC’s National Risk and Resilience Directorate. The response acknowledged the correspondence and said the concerns “may inform the broader programme of work being undertaken on New Zealand’s resilience.” A specific referral to the Directorate has not been confirmed.

If Starlink were switched off or somehow became unavailable today, it would be bad. If it were switched off in ten years, or even five, after the alternatives are gone, it would be catastrophic. That’s the part that didn’t make the cut.

And this isn’t just about Starlink. LEO satellites face a variety of inherent vulnerabilities that ground-based networks don’t. A severe solar storm, for example, can take constellations out across providers. Amazon Leo won’t escape or reduce that risk. It actually compounds it.

The question I ask is what this country chooses to keep within its own reach. Infrastructure built here, that can be fixed here, that can be governed here, is being replaced, one withdrawal at a time, by capacity bought offshore. The bills before Parliament do not address that. No agency has been mandated to ask whether that is the right trade. By the time the question is officially raised, the answer will already be set.

Starlink has been a real benefit to many rural customers, and I’d be the first to say so. The point is not what it provides today. The point is what the country is losing the ability to do for itself.