By Nick Leggett, Chief Executive, Infrastructure New Zealand
New Zealand has no shortage of infrastructure plans, but delivery remains a challenge
Aotearoa New Zealand does not suffer from a shortage of infrastructure ideas. We have strategies, long-term plans, priority lists, reform programmes and review cycles. We have a well-developed policy language, and an industry that is sophisticated, experienced and globally connected.
What we lack, and what has emerged clearly through recent conversations across the sector, is a system that consistently turns intent into delivery with discipline.
Infrastructure New Zealand is developing its manifesto for the upcoming election. While it is not yet finalised, and will be shaped and refined in the months ahead, the direction is increasingly clear. Across transport, water, energy, vertical and horizontal construction, and advisory sectors, a common driving theme is emerging: smarter, faster, better.
If there is one theme that cuts across every sector, it is this: approvals and funding release are the choke point. The problem is not usually that projects are poorly conceived. Rather, it is that once approved in principle, projects enter a labyrinth of funding ‘buckets’, approval channels and escalation triggers. When a project changes, and they all do, even modest variations can require new business cases, multiple sign-offs and political revalidation.
The net effect is predictable:
- Projects start later.
- Variations stall longer.
- Pricing validity expires.
- Contractors reprice.
- Escalation compounds.
The result of all these changes is projects labelled as ‘blowouts’. This is not primarily a technical problem; it is a system design problem. If New Zealand wants better outcomes, it must streamline the ‘in-flight change’ process. That means:
- one integrated approvals route for project variations, regardless of funding source
- clear delegation thresholds that prevent minor adjustments from triggering full business case resets
- mandated timeframes for decisions
- explicit recognition of retained-risk events as different from scope creep.
When risk is consciously retained rather than transferred at a premium, it should not be treated as a failure when it materialises. It should be treated as a ‘known known’, with the response having been anticipated in risk planning.
Smarter reform is not about rewriting strategy documents; it should aim to remove the friction that slows down sensible decisions. There will always be problems and additional costs in the delivery of infrastructure, but we should not build in unnecessary costs up-front in self-protection and blame shifting. We should be a mature system that learns how to better manage risk and then accepts that, in some cases, risks do materialise.
A second consistent theme is capability. New Zealand does not behave consistently like a ‘smart client’. That phrase is often used, but, in practice, it requires three things: clear definition of the problem being solved, commercial literacy as it relates to my above point, and the confidence to allocate risk sensibly and manage contracts actively.
Instead, the system frequently exhibits risk aversion, dependency on external advisers and blurred accountability. Procurement models are sometimes selected too early, influenced by fashion, ideology or external advice, and then locked in before the problem has been properly defined.
Once the market is engaged, it is extremely difficult to reset and the consequence is not just higher cost, but lost trust and momentum.
The emerging solution is not another large bureaucracy; it is professionalisation delivered through a lean centre of excellence for procurement and commercial capability, mandatory review of project set up before market release, shared playbooks, model contracts across agencies and much clearer standards for what good looks like.
Infrastructure delivery is a specialist discipline, and it should be treated as such. We should have the right people in the system who have confidence and skills to act, which will, in turn, get New Zealanders the best deal out of their infrastructure spend.
New Zealand has become adept at searching for more evidence, more assurance, and more validation before acting and deciding to proceed with projects. Meanwhile, project timelines extend and inflation compounds. Our culture of caution, which often celebrates doing nothing or slowing things down as a success, totally underestimates the cost of time. Delays do not just defer expenditure; they erode market confidence, fragment supply chains and increase risk pricing. Escalation is rarely recovered.
Compounding all this is political churn. Projects take years to design, consent and prepare. Political cycles run on three-year terms. Each election – and election campaign – can introduce pauses, resets or reframing of priorities. Even when projects are not cancelled, the uncertainty alone slows the broader programme. The system pays for that churn. New Zealanders pay for that uncertainty in their infrastructure bills.
Stability matters more than performative bipartisanship. Governments should be able to change priorities, but the underlying delivery machine (and most projects that the system has offered up) must remain in motion. The discipline and challenge for New Zealand is putting its faith in a National Infrastructure Plan and associated institutional actors, who are given a stronger mandate to deliver infrastructure for whoever is in government.
As we vote this year, we should be demanding of prospective governing parties and their swearing of faith in a stronger system to deliver a programme, and pipeline that has been properly stress-tested and is ready to go. We don’t want political fingers in the system unless they are required. What we do want is politicians to set the direction and investment themes of their programme, ask questions of it, appropriate money, and then monitor delivery and performance. We need the infrastructure project tap turned on and kept on across electoral cycles.
Practical ideas for our policy prescription include:
- requiring agencies to maintain consent-ready projects across a spectrum of priorities, so that new governments can activate rather than restart
- a disciplined 100-day review period before stopping or materially altering major works
- cross-party mechanisms to improve institutional memory and understanding.
The objective is simple: protect the baseload of work from avoidable disruption.
Speed without discipline creates waste. Discipline without speed creates cost. The balance lies in better decision rights, realistic risk assessment and more honest treatment of change. This includes rethinking the assumption that every project variation represents failure. It includes measuring the true time from approval to construction start. It includes publishing timelines as well as budgets.
If time is money in the private sector, it should be treated as such in the public system so that taxpayers get the best deal, and communities get to enjoy the benefits of good infrastructure earlier and cheaper than they otherwise would have.
The backdrop to monitor our performance over time should be some nationally agreed metrics, industry health, demonstration of improved value for money, and our performance against Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development standards.
There is another tension in New Zealand’s infrastructure approach: in some cases, we over-engineer. Risk aversion, liability anxiety and institutional caution can drive specifications beyond what life-safety standards require. In other cases, we build to the minimum viable capacity and then discover, within a few years, that growth has outstripped provision. Both are optimisation failures. Fit-for-purpose design means we need to start designing to code intent, not institutional fear. We should differentiate standards by seismic risk and intended asset life. We must also be more explicit about what ‘success’ looks like and avoid innovation for its own sake when replication would suffice.
Infrastructure is not an end; it is the platform for the economy and society we choose to become. Our lack of focus and attention on the common ends we are seeking as a country is a yawning gap across this electoral cycle.
Fragmentation has been identified as another structural weakness by the infrastructure industry.
Multiple agencies procure and deliver infrastructure with thin capability, inconsistent standards, and limited shared learning. Delivery is often treated as a secondary function, rather than a core discipline.
The emerging reform view is not centralisation for its own sake. It is coherence, with shared standards, shared reporting, shared lessons learnt, clearer allocation of expertise, and a more commonly used delivery vehicle across government agencies
Infrastructure New Zealand’s manifesto will continue to evolve. But the themes are increasingly consistent:
- speed with discipline
- stability over churn
- fit-for-purpose design
- talent as strategy
- modern funding and enabling tools
- infrastructure as an enabler of national ambition.
The coming election will inevitably generate debate about what to build. Infrastructure New Zealand intends to focus just as strongly on how we build, and how we govern the system that delivers.
It is not too late to influence that agenda. If your organisation is not part of Infrastructure New Zealand, now is the time to join our infrastructure whānau and contribute to shaping the operating rules of the system you work within.
Smarter, faster, better. Not another plan, but a better way to deliver.