For years, New Zealand has spent big on infrastructure without always getting the results to match.
Now, the Government is vowing to change that. And, it has cross-party support.
It’s backing all 16 recommendations in the Infrastructure Commission’s National Plan, a blueprint for how the country plans, funds and delivers the things we all rely on.
The coalition has agreed on 13 of those and is supporting the remaining three in principle.
The 30-year plan includes a review of the Land Transport Fund and requires Crown entities to publish long-term investment plans.
Labour and the Greens have also offered explicit support, with both parties writing forewords to the Government’s response.
Infrastructure NZ chief executive Nick Leggett told The Front Page the plan should shift decisions away from short-term political cycles and towards evidence, need and long-term priorities.
“At the moment, we’ve got this habit of letting the politicians drive that through election cycles. So every three years, the Government gets elected and says, ‘We’re going to do this’, and we get very down into the details.
“What the infrastructure plan is looking at is where our need is, not just today, but tomorrow, where we have not invested, and where the investment priorities are for the future.
“It ultimately will try and take it out of political discussion, and try and orientate it more in evidence and need, which is where New Zealand needs to be if we’re going to do this better, and ultimately get more value for the money that we spend on our infrastructure,” he said.
At the moment, the plan says that while New Zealand is one of the top spenders in the OECD, we rank towards the bottom for getting “bang for our buck”.
Each year, we invest just over $20 billion in infrastructure, yet on a dollar-for-dollar basis, we achieve less than many of our international peers.
“That long-term investment planning is really important. Proper asset management reporting, understanding the assets we’ve already got, because New Zealand is quite good at building, set and forget, and then just walking away and forgetting about maintaining our assets,” Leggett said.
“Ultimately, what we want to see is action taken... that means that this Government or the next can say, ‘okay, we know that the education buildings are worth however many billion dollars. Every year we’re going to put aside in our Budget some money that seeks to maintain and improve those’.
“Rather than reacting to it, there’ll actually be a plan across the long term. That takes discipline. And, you know, politicians love opening something new. They love cutting a ribbon. That’s what drives a lot of our infrastructure behaviour.
“There was a guy in the UK, an infrastructure expert, who said New Zealand’s like the only country left in the world where politicians decide what projects get built.
“What we’re trying to do is flip this around here. That’s what this whole National Infrastructure Plan is about,” he said.
