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Big decisions and trade-offs will need to be made in order to assure New Zealand of the future infrastructure it needs, the first strategy document released on Monday by the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission indicates.
The document is billed as "New Zealand’s first-ever long-term infrastructure strategy".
The Government has welcomed it, and will be giving its official response to the strategy - which contains 68 specific recommendations - in September.
Rautaki Hanganga o Aotearoa – New Zealand Infrastructure Strategy 2022–2052 sets out the infrastructure challenges and opportunities facing New Zealand over the next 30 years. It draws on research, consultation and the views of more than 20,000 New Zealanders. (The 68 recommendations are on pages 88-97 of the attached PDF.)
The New Zealand Infrastructure Commission, Te Waihanga Chief Executive Ross Copland says to meet the country's ambitions, "there are some big decisions and trade-offs that need to be made".
"Electricity generation capacity needs to increase by some 170% to meet our net zero carbon goals; while it will cost about $90 billion to fix New Zealand’s water networks. Some $5 billion of local government infrastructure is vulnerable to sea level rise. These challenges come at a time when construction costs are rising 60% faster than prices elsewhere in the economy and we expect a shortfall of 118,500 construction workers in 2024,” he says.
“More of the same simply won’t cut it. The strategy shows we will have to be smarter about how we plan, deliver and pay for our infrastructure. This includes changing the way we pay so we can better manage demand and use of networks. We also need a consenting system that actively prioritises meeting our net-zero carbon goals and housing New Zealanders. Much of our existing resource management system is not enabling of our national objectives.”
Recommendations in the strategy include:
- Achieving net-zero carbon emissions at minimum cost, and making it easier to leverage our abundant renewable energy resources.
- Making use of tools like congestion charging on busy roads to make better use of our transport connections.
- Increasing housing opportunities in areas with good access to infrastructure access and enable greater and easier urban development through minimum levels of upzoning and mixed-use zoning.
- Allowing for water meters to manage demand and encourage water conservation.
- Preparing infrastructure for the impacts of climate change.
- Reducing the amount of waste we create, particularly for products that can’t be recycled.
- Increasing technology use, including greater uptake of real-time data about infrastructure that can help with planning and maintenance, for instance, through digital twins.
- Standardising planning policy across New Zealand and ensuring New Zealand cities plan for significantly more growth.
- Streamline consenting processes, particularly for infrastructure that helps meet national objectives like a zero-carbon economy, and reduce the regulatory burden on construction materials.
- Providing greater certainty for businesses in infrastructure industries to invest in skills and training development, and developing the talent required to deliver New Zealand’s future infrastructure.
It is planned to revise the strategy at least every five years.
"This is the beginning of a much longer-term ongoing conversation with all New Zealanders,” Copland says.
Infrastructure Minister Grant Robertson said the strategy was "an invaluable piece of work".
"We have never had a single document setting out New Zealand’s long-term infrastructure strategy and a vision for how infrastructure can lay the foundation for the people, places and businesses of Aotearoa New Zealand to thrive for generations to come."
Robertson says over decades the country has "simply not invested enough, not planned far enough ahead or with sufficient coordination or efficiency to meet our infrastructure needs".
"This has helped fuel the housing crisis, made it difficult to reduce emissions and significantly impacted our productivity and overall wellbeing."
There is an "urgency" to addressing our current infrastructure deficits while also meeting future needs caused by population growth and climate change, he says
“The strategy also shows that while further investment is critical, we must be smarter about the way we plan for, deliver and use all of our infrastructure. Trying to just build our way out of these challenges would mean nearly doubling what we currently spend to around 9.6% of GDP over a 30-year period. That’s over $31 billion per year – a sum that we would struggle to afford or have the capacity to deliver.
“This means we need to get more from the infrastructure we do build, reducing costs and prioritising for the greatest impact."
Robertson says the Government is now preparing a response to the strategy, which will set out the steps to turn strategy into action.
"As required by legislation, we will share this response in September, determine which recommendations to prioritise, and assign lead agencies to implement them. In many cases responding to the recommendations builds on current work underway - such as resource management reform, the health and disability sector reform, and the Three Waters Reform Programme.
“However, the recommendations in the Strategy cannot be met by the Government alone. New Zealand needs the whole system, including central and local government, iwi/Māori and the private sector to work together to address the significant challenges we face. We all have a part to play."
38 Comments
You have to laugh at congestion charging and upzoning being specifically mentioned, but not the actual construction of new infrastructure to support them, which arguably does not exist in any of our cities when it comes to things like public transport.
I suppose at least it shows that suppressing demand and reducing incomes is preferable to making promises about building new things that you may get held accountable for as far as central government is concerned.
Not sure if you guys are unaware...but just FYI, green fields sprawl development doesn't discover new water and wastewater infrastructure just sitting waiting ready in the ground, or roads floating on the top. It has to be built, and sprawl is expensive to build and more so to maintain.
It's a given that infrastructure has to be maintained and improved and enlarged in existing areas. Has been for quite a while now. There's this city overseas called London that's a famous example.
- Standardising planning policy across New Zealand and ensuring New Zealand cities plan for significantly more growth.
Significantly more growth - why? Surely, growth in population is avoidable.
It annoys me that this premise of a growing population never gets any qualification... in other words I don't think our natural birth rate is increasing is it?... let alone "significantly".
The Infrastructure Commission premise for why this planning is important is based on research. For instance the following.
Research and modelling analysis from New Zealand’s Infrastructure Commission — Te Waihanga shows that if Auckland;
- had not downzoned from the 1970s, and
- had made timely infrastructure investments (and interventions like congestion charging) to avoid the decline in average travel speeds from the 1990s
then house prices could have been 69% lower.
Nonsense, Brendon.
This is a Limits to Growth, what can we do in the remaining time question?
The kicker, as others have said is:
"and ensuring New Zealand cities plan for significantly more growth"
They, and you, are 100% wrong about that - not that it matters much; global events are seeing to that. Next year, watch wheat 'prices'. Watch cooking oil 'prices'. Watch energy - and therefore everything - 'prices'. The peak is in the rerview mirror now - yet you steadfastly chose/choose to believe, in the face of fact. Of physics. You weren't lone - almost everyone who was economics-trained went down the same rabbit-hole - but why? Fear?
Did it control for a whole lot of other factors which could have significantly influenced house price growth, such as financial liberalisation, structural reductions in the cost of finance and levels of immigration?
did it acknowledge the benefits as well as the costs of the approach from the late 1970s?
Yes it controlled for other factors, such as, population growth, immigration, and income growth. It acknowledged difficulty in factoring in mortgage interest rates because the data series was incomplete - but there is some evidence over the long-run interest rates are not as important as supply being unresponsive to demand. "Prices now rise more rapidly because housing supply is slower to respond to demand. We estimate that when demand for housing increases, we now build one-quarter to one-third fewer homes than our grandparents did (Te Waihanga)" - this seems significant. Read the paper if you want to check.
Natural population growth in NZ is around 30,000 p.a. but our birth rate is only 1.6 per woman. So as soon as the boomers start dying off in earnest our population would start to fall.
Personally, I'd vote for any party campaigning on a stable population platform, even if the rest of their policies were daft.
"Significantly more growth - why? Surely, growth in population is avoidable." Why? Because the more crowded we are, the more depleted the resources, the more unbreathable the air, undrinkable the water, the more plastic we become, the less natural systems function, the better off we will all be. It's all some grand plan to fill the planet up with humans, until its uninhabitable and then let our spawn loose on the universe to spread the good message of growth. As we colonise planets and strip resources we can pretend we are lifting any fortunate natives out of poverty. We can rewrite the history of the universe. Remake it in our image. Become Gods. Or more likely, crash Earth's life support systems, go extinct and become another notch on Fermi's belt.
Couldn't agree more Kate. One has to be sceptical on pronouncements from specialty Quangos like the Infrastructure Commision, comfortably insulated from the real world and with the Infrastructure NZ (an industry association heavily weighted toward large developers, bankers, lawyers, & civil construction companies) who are cheerleaders for more growth, more public spending by councils,etc., and who are actively in the ear of the Commission.
All these parties seem to get very excited about prospects for growth,...maximising immigration as just one aspect.
I suppose one could claim that talking about &/or recommending more infrastructure spending is the expected role of these organizations, and that consideration of broader issues like adverse effects of immigration, falling productivity across NZ, falling education standards, etc., is the responsibility of government & in a wider sense, Parliament.
Good luck with that one folks!
See my comment directly above Kate.
by the way, the zealot I am referring to, intriguingly, is the partner of a Green Party MP.
curious. Or maybe not so, as I am often perplexed as to what the Green Party stands for. Or maybe he simply has a very different political outlook to his partner! Quite possible. The neo-liberal, pro-growth zealot together with the greenie!
Gonna,gonna, gonna oh the patience we need to have , just give our disreputable political parties more time and it will all be fixed .BS I for one have no confidence in any long term planning or short term for that matter, deliver something concrete or shut the hell up . Basic common sense says to fix existing infrastructure to cater for existing population before yapping about future pipe dreams . Before any planning for infrastructure you need to have a population plan .
Is it reasonable to expect people to behave in low emission ways when the infrastructure to support that behaviour does not yet exist, and there is no prospect of the infrastructure being created in any kind of timely or appropriate way, given the Minister of Finance’s comments?
Put another way: if you want people to behave in a particular way, make it easy. To require people to do things when behaviour isn’t supported just looks punitive.
Unfortunately, that tends to be the way things get done in NZ: all big stick with very small helpings of carrot.
Executing just change to do things like transform our cities is a colossal task. The last 50 years of politicised and professional planning has left us with urban centres dominated by unsustainable, low-density suburban monocultures, and they are still being built.
The task of migrating to medium density diverse places in any kind of reasonable time frame, where it is actually possible to live a decently comfortable low-emission life, is in the hands of the same political and professional groups that got us to where we are now.
Do you think there are some justified issues of trust?
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