The National Infrastructure Plan, released today, sets out a vision for a more efficient, affordable future. But is infrastructure minister Chris Bishop willing to accept that he is part of the problem?
In the 1920s, New Zealand cities faced a problem and an opportunity: electricity was a growing technological innovation with a clear economic benefit. It allowed people to switch from ice boxes to fridges and from candles to lightbulbs. It was a convenience for homeowners, and a productivity boost for businesses.
Across the country, cities held referendums to establish local power boards, which would take out huge loans to establish electricity distribution networks that were paid back by the residents who used the electricity. For Auckland, it meant the 200,000 residents signing up for $1,450 in debt each. In today’s money, that would be a $2.9 billion piece of infrastructure, paid for solely by local residents. And yet, New Zealanders voted overwhelmingly in favour of it, with 85% support nationwide. Southland, which had the most expensive plan per resident due to the low population density, voted 94% in favour.
These days, most infrastructure decisions aren’t made by referendum. It would be too much of a hassle. There are 11,925 infrastructure projects in the national pipeline, across local and central government, worth a total of $275bn. No one wants to go to the polls for every single one of them. That’s why we, as voters, delegate those decisions to politicians. However, that comes with its own risks. Politicians can be out of touch with voters, blinded by partisanship or obsessed with building something that will define their legacy.
The electricity referenda were highlighted by the Infrastructure Commission in its long-awaited National Infrastructure Plan, released today, to make two points: firstly, that infrastructure investment can make an enormous difference to the economy and people’s quality of life, and, secondly, that people are overwhelmingly willing to pay for infrastructure when they see the value of it.
As part of its research for the plan, the infrastructure commission carried out polling which asked whether we should increase spending to improve infrastructure in New Zealand, even if that meant higher taxes or costs for consumers. It’s a pretty meaningless question, it produced a pretty meaningless answer, with a nearly even split between those who agreed, disagreed and didn’t know.
The answer, evidently, is that people are happy to pay for things they want and are unhappy to pay for things they don’t want. In other words, the government’s ability to fund infrastructure is dependent on voters’ willingness to pay for it.
The National Infrastructure Plan is a piece of work championed by infrastructure minister Chris Bishop and which was campaigned on by National at the previous election. The basic idea is generally supported across parties; New Zealand needs to do a better job of planning and funding infrastructure for the long term.
The crisis-level statistic which prompted the plan, and which Bishop trots out at every opportunity, is this: between 2010 and 2019, New Zealand ranked first among OECD countries in infrastructure spending as a percentage of GDP (5.4%). And yet, over the same period we ranked second-to-last in efficiency – basically, we don’t get a good bang for our buck.
To make matters worse, New Zealand’s population is ageing, meaning the ratio of working-age people to retirees will continue to shrink and debt levels for central and local government will continue to grow.
The previous Labour government had some high-profile failures on this front: Auckland Light Rail, Let’s Get Wellington Moving, and the second harbour crossing projects managed to spend enormous amounts of money and build a combined total of one pedestrian crossing.
This government has also been guilty of bad management. Simeon Brown was the most blatantly partisan transport minister we’ve ever seen, letting his single-minded love for cars dominate so much that he effectively banned government investment in cycling and walking projects, no matter how good the investment case was. And Bishop, who picked up the transport portfolio from Brown after a 2025 cabinet reshuffle, has rapidly expanded the Roads of National Significance programme, committing billions upon billions of Crown debt to roads with terrible investment cases, then running around the country scaremongering about how we can’t afford all these roads.
The idea that infrastructure can ever be completely non-partisan is naive, and the plan acknowledges this, but there are steps that can be taken to improve decision making.
The National Infrastructure Plan sets out 10 priorities for the decade ahead to get more balanced and affordable infrastructure:
- Lift hospital investment for an ageing population
- Complete catch-up on renewals in the water sector and restore affordability
- Implement time-of-use charging and fleetwide road user charges
- Prioritise and sequence major land transport projects
- Manage assets on the downside (planning for scenarios where certain assets fall out of use due to demographic, technological, or climate changes)
- Prioritise adequate maintenance and renewals
- Identify cost-effective flood risk infrastructure
- Commit to a durable resource management framework
- Commit to upzoning around key transport corridors
- Take a predictable approach to electrify the economy
Upon receiving the report from public servants, Bishop put out a statement celebrating it as vindication for his government. “It is encouraging that many of the commission’s top 10 priorities for the decade ahead reflect work already underway by the government,” he said. He’s not wrong. Several of the ideas on that list are Bishop’s pet projects, particularly RMA reform, congestion charging and upzoning.
However, other parts of the plan can be read as a direct repudiation of this government’s approach, particularly around land transportation, the most expensive category of infrastructure.
“Unlike other network providers that invest to meet demand, land transport investment is heavily influenced by the Government of the day’s objectives,” the plan says. It calls on the government to return to a system where roads are predominantly funded by user charges, rather than Crown debt. It’s critical of the Roads of National Significance programme for being far more expensive than previous motorway projects, and calls on decision-makers to “prioritise low-cost solutions before major upgrades”.
“We spend a lot to build roads to handle peak capacity instead of trying to spread use throughout the day,” the plan says. In other words, bus lanes, bike lanes, and congestion charging are a hell of a lot cheaper than building another highway through a city.
The Mt Victoria tunnel and SH1 improvements in Wellington, another of Bishop’s pet projects, is called out as an unwise investment: “there is a wide uncertainty range for when capacity constraints might be reached. This reflects underlying uncertainty about how rapidly demand will grow as well as choices about how to respond to capacity pressures when it is costly to upgrade capacity.”
The National Infrastructure Plan could be a much-needed reset to New Zealand’s investment strategy that finally puts us on a path to financial sustainability, but it requires a level of self-awareness and introspection that, frankly, we haven’t seen from this government.
The most likely outcome from this report is that Bishop and other National Party ministers will cherry-pick the bits they like, focusing on reducing consenting costs and other stuff they already want to do, while completely denying the fact that their preferred roads are exactly the kind of poor investments that got us into this mess.
The National Party is happy to dish out criticism when local councils or Labour governments make investment decisions that it deems irresponsible, but its approach to infrastructure in government has been “financial restraint for thee, not for me”. Until the government is willing to accept that they’re part of the problem and admit that some of its projects are a waste of money, it’s hard to put much trust in this plan.
