Latest news with #BuildingNations
Newsroom
4 days ago
- Business
- Newsroom
Obstacles to making NZ great again at infrastructure
Opinion: Infrastructure New Zealand billed last week's Building Nations conference as 'New Zealand's premier event for the infrastructure sector'. The conference's aim was to show that 'New Zealand is a global exemplar of smart, sustainable, cost-effective infrastructure'. After the Government's recent $6 billion infrastructure package, with a further $200b worth of projects in the pipeline, and the Infrastructure Investment Summit last March, it was further evidence of a renewed emphasis on extending and upgrading national infrastructure.
The Spinoff
07-08-2025
- Automotive
- The Spinoff
Ōtaki to Levin cost blowout shines a spotlight on NZ's infrastructure woes
With a budget that has more than doubled, the road has little hope of recouping costs through tolls, writes Catherine McGregor in today's extract from The Bulletin. One very expensive road The cost of the Ōtaki to north of Levin (O2NL) highway has ballooned to $2.1 billion, more than double the original 2020 estimate of $817 million, despite the fact that construction has yet to begin in earnest. Infrastructure minister Chris Bishop has laid the blame squarely on the previous government, claiming 'it was basically costed on the back of an envelope very quickly so Grant Robertson could announce projects at the start of election year'. In a bid to contain spiralling costs, NZTA proposed a series of pared-back design changes earlier this year, including replacing an interchange with a roundabout. But those proposals were strongly opposed by Horowhenua residents and, as 1News reported in June, ultimately scrapped. NZTA told BusinessDesk's Oliver Lewis (paywalled) that reconsenting the changes would have added more delays and costs than simply sticking to the original plan. Tolls won't bridge the funding gap To help recoup some of the cost, the government will impose tolls on the O2NL once it opens in 2029. But they're unlikely to make much of a dent in the final bill. The Infrastructure Commission recently told a select committee that for a toll road to pay for itself, it must cost no more than $32 million per kilometre, carry 40,000 vehicles a day, and cut travel time by 15 minutes. As Thomas Coughlan writes in the Herald (paywalled), O2NL fails on at least two counts: it will cost about $85m per km and is expected to carry more than 20,000 vehicles a day by the late 2030s. Currently, just three toll roads exist in New Zealand, all in the upper North Island. More are planned, including Penlink north of Auckland and Tauranga's Takitimu North Link, with O2NL joining that list. On Wednesday, the government announced a new digital road user charge system that should also enable the digital payment of tolls – but easier toll payments won't solve the core problem of projects that cost far more than they can return. Consensus under construction The O2NL cost blowout coincided with this week's Building Nations infrastructure conference, where politicians from both major parties repeated the familiar call for bipartisan planning on major builds. Infrastructure minister Chris Bishop says he wants 80 to 90% agreement on the long-term project pipeline. But as The Spinoff's Joel MacManus points out, high-minded talk of consensus tends to mask the cynical partisan reality. Bishop insists his concerns are about 'project selection and management', but, Joel notes, his definition of the 'right' projects tends to track closely with his party's own preferences. Labour has hardly done better: its handling of the cancelled iRex ferry project kept National in the dark about the extent of the cost blowout until after the election. 'The problem is that it is easy to say your opponents should be bipartisan in supporting your ideas,' Joel writes. 'It's harder to agree to support your opponents' ideas.' The Green roadblock The problem with the bipartisan-infrastructure dream isn't just opposing priorities, but also a deeper ideological divergence. As Richard Harman argues in the Herald (paywalled), any future Labour-led government is almost certain to include the Greens, a party that remains staunchly opposed to National's Roads of National Significance, including O2NL. The Greens believe that funding should be redirected toward rail and existing road upgrades, not carbon-intensive new highways. A recent Labour-Greens minority report on another expressway project argued that 'there is an urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and New Zealand has a limited financial budget and a limited carbon budget'. According to Harman, this kind of objection 'transcends the purely practical and economic and veers off into ideological considerations', making lasting political consensus difficult to achieve. As long as infrastructure remains a proxy for deeper debates over climate, growth and spending priorities, bipartisan agreement may remain more aspiration than reality.
The Spinoff
06-08-2025
- Business
- The Spinoff
Lessons in bipartisanship from a de facto single-party state
At the national infrastructure conference, politicians from both major parties talked a big game about bipartisanship. But their actions tell a different story. The opening keynote at Infrastructure New Zealand's annual conference, Building Nations, was titled 'A Bipartisan Vision to Drive Infrastructure Investment'. It was a highly relevant headline. 'Bipartisanship' is the big buzzword in infrastructure right now. The speaker was Andrew Tan, a high-ranking civil servant in Singapore, talking about some of his country's major projects. That's right, New Zealand is learning about bipartisanship from a country that has had the same party in power since 1959. The second international address was by Dr Alex Katsanos, who spoke about the national infrastructure plan in his home country of Hong Kong. Yes, the place where only pro-Beijing 'patriots' are allowed to run for office and opposition parties have been barred from office and forced to disband. Both Singapore and Hong Kong are remarkable success stories of using infrastructure to support rapid economic growth. New Zealand can learn many things from them. Tan detailed Singapore's massive public housing programme, its urban greening and river cleanups. All highly commendable – but it wasn't achieved through bipartisanship. I asked Tan after his speech if it was ironic for New Zealand to look to Singapore for lessons on bipartisanship. He assured me that 'we do have an opposition, and it's growing stronger' [the Workers' Party currently has 12 of 99 seats in parliament, its largest-ever contingent] and the opposition supported the government's infrastructure programme. 'For Singapore, we've always seen the challenge as more external than internal, which is why it's necessary for us to have a very cohesive government, a cohesive society, and for everyone to work together.' Large infrastructure firms have consistently demanded more bipartisan long-term infrastructure planning. That's because big stuff takes a really long time to build. The infrastructure industry wants more certainty to know it can invest, hire staff and plan for the future. When politicians keep cancelling each other's projects, it creates a shock to the system and leaves less faith in the market. Both National and Labour have promised they're working on it. 'We are genuinely trying to achieve as much consensus on these big issues as we can,' said infrastructure minister Chris Bishop. Opposition infrastructure spokesperson Kieran McAnulty, sitting next to him on stage during an afternoon panel discussion, agreed. 'The stop-start-stop-start, we've got to end it.' The problem is that it is easy to say your opponents should be bipartisan in supporting your ideas. It's harder to agree to support your opponents' ideas. Both parties have been highly ideological in their infrastructure decisions. In 2017, the incoming Labour-led government scrapped a series of major highways. In 2023, the incoming National-led government scrapped light rail in Auckland and Wellington and the iRex project for new Interislander ferries. When I asked Bishop about this after his speech, he said, 'Those particular projects – that we campaigned on cancelling – actually, most people think were too expensive, unaffordable, unconsentable and unbuildable.' Which is entirely fair from a political standpoint; the government has the mandate to cancel those projects. But it's not bipartisanship either. Labour and the Greens may have been happy to negotiate a reset of those projects, but they certainly didn't want them scrapped. It's not just about big attention-grabbing projects. The industry leaders in the room were more frustrated about the 212 Kāinga Ora housing projects and 100 school builds the government has cancelled since 2023, disrupting a pipeline of contracts and employment that many businesses thought they could rely on. Bishop was asked about this twice, once in a media standup and once on stage by moderator Katie Bradford. Both times, he obfuscated, pointing out that Kāinga Ora built more homes in 2024 than 2023 – but not admitting any fault or even acknowledging that the cancellations happened. Labour MPs were willing to acknowledge some mistakes. McAnulty said some of the 2017 projects shouldn't have been cancelled. Chris Hipkins admitted Auckland Light Rail had become a mess and his government overestimated how much they could do in a three-year term. Of course, it's much easier to admit failures when you're in opposition, but it left Bishop in the awkward position of arguing that the two sides needed to meet in the middle, while maintaining that his government had never done anything wrong and was right to cancel all the other side's projects. Hipkins complained about the government's empty rhetoric: 'The current government believes that bipartisanship means saying what they're going to do and then telling everybody else they have to agree with it.' He said Labour had attempted to compromise by attending the government's Infrastructure Investment Summit in March, with some caveats around the use of Public-Private-Partnerships, 'and then we had our attempts to compromise manipulated, misrepresented and used to attack us by the current government. That isn't going to create an environment where bipartisanship is going to be embraced and is going to be endured.' Bishop insists his issue isn't a matter of cars vs trams, it's about good project selection and management – 'we've got to make sure we're building the right projects at the right time'. But he's also a highly opinionated guy whose definition of 'the right projects' is highly correlated to the party whose idea it was. That's not to excuse Labour either. In government, it had a particularly bad record of excluding the opposition from decision-making, to the extent that National had no idea how much the iRex project had blown out until it received a post-election update from Treasury. Given their track records, neither party's words are worth too much. McAnulty and Bishop sat on stage together in front of a huge room of executives who were braying for bipartisanship and promised them exactly what they asked for. But it's hard not to believe both would prefer to govern more like Singapore.
Newsroom
05-08-2025
- Business
- Newsroom
Infrastructure leaders push Govt to deliver ‘the great privatisation'
To critics, it's an unashamed fire sale of critical public assets. Even its champions call it 'the great privatisation'. But ministers at this week's Building Nations conference in Wellington will hear a strengthening call for what's now known as 'asset recycling' of public infrastructure.
