We love to hate them, but what if road cones are actually a sign we’re getting things right? In this week’s episode of When the Facts Change, Bernard Hickey chats with Peter Nunns, acting general manager of the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission Te Waihanga, about how our infrastructure challenges run deeper than a slew of orange cones.

Outside of student flats, road cones are rarely celebrated. More generally we consider them chunky bits of plastic that get in the way and slow us down. Wayne Brown tapped into the collective disdain for these beacons of temporary traffic management, campaigning on the promise to bring an end to “road cone mania”.

In this week’s episode of economics podcast When the Facts Change, host Bernard Hickey suggests we might want to consider road cones differently. They might be the bane of our commute, but perhaps they’re also a measure of success? A sign we’re doing something about our infrastructure – building new hospitals, repairing roads, addressing issues with our stormwater systems.

Peter Nunns, acting general manager of the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission Te Waihanga, says we currently have around $286 billion worth of infrastructure, or a bit over two-thirds of GDP. “When we look at roads per capita, electricity connections per capita, water usage per capita, we’re sort of at or above median OECD countries in all these areas. We don’t have, in gross physical terms, less infrastructure than anyone else.”

However, Nunns suggests that even though our physical infrastructure stocks are comparable to other high-income countries, it’s clear a significant proportion of that stock is no longer fit for purpose. He says “the question that raises is, where are there gaps and where are there challenges?”

One of the main challenges for Te Waihanga lies in forecasting the rate of population growth. “We’ve missed in both directions over the last two generations,” Nunns says. “Statistics New Zealand, and other people in the sector, are doing their best to get better information and improve the forecasting methods, but it is hard.”

So how could (or should) we plan the systems that keep our country running? And who is responsible for divining the future to make decisions that can have an impact for decades to come? Listen to When the Facts Change as Bernard Hickey and Peter Nunns discuss the murky business of planning infrastructure projects for an uncertain future.

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