30-year 'Infrastructure Plan' backed by Parliament

Almost all of Parliament is backing the 30-year Infrastructure Plan, with the government agreeing in full to 13 of 16 recommendations and four further actions.

The remaining three recommendations are supported in principle, and the government says further work is required.

Labour and the Greens have also offered explicit support, with both parties writing forewords to the government's response, welcoming a long-term non-partisan approach - although the Greens wanted the government to go further.

The NZ Infrastructure Commission provided the Infrastructure Plan to the government in December and unveiled it publicly in February, setting out 16 recommendations and 10 priorities for the next decade.

Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop said the government's changes in April shifting responsibility for assurance on infrastructure projects from the Treasury reflected the recommendations, 11 of which reflected work the government had under way.

The three priorities that needed further work included predictable government funding signals; multi-year budgeting; and coordinated workforce development.

On the first two, the response showed Treasury would be tasked with investigating how to "extend the horizon" for infrastructure planning, which would be needed before the government could transfer more funding to multi-year budgets.

On workforce development, more work was needed to figure out the best way forward and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment would work with the Commission on improving workforce data and integrating it with current policy processes.

The Infrastructure Minister would report back on this work by Treasury and MBIE in June 2027, after the election.

Bishop said the government was already "taking action" on all 10 of the priorities, and had agreed to four further actions.

These included:

• Review the land transport funding system, with public consultation from June 2028
• Legislate to require department and Crown entity long-term investment plans and asset management reports
• Require infrastructure providers to maintain up-to-date data in the National Infrastructure Pipeline and strengthen data quality over time
• Strengthen public sector project leadership with the Infrastructure and Public Service Commissions developing a professional standard for public sector leadership, build a cross-agency directory of 'Senior Responsible Owners' and establish a professional benchmark for critical leadership roles

He said the plan had been a "sobering wake-up call" for many, with New Zealand's 5.8 percent average spend putting it in the top 10 percent of countries, but ranking in the bottom 10 percent for efficiency and fourth-to-last on asset management.

Given the "significant challenges" facing the system, he said it was concerning that infrastructure plans had been produced before - in 2010, 2011, and 2015 - with many of those recommendations carried forward to this year's.

"What differentiates this plan from its predecessors is that it was independently produced by the Infrastructure Commission, separate from the government of the day," he said.

"New Zealand now has a clear plan. The next step is action ... now the responsibility falls to governments - this one and those that follow - to act."

He said he was "encouraged" by Labour and the Greens' endorsements of the plan and broad endorsement of the government's response.

Labour's Infrastructure spokesperson Kieran McAnulty in his foreword said Labour and National-led governments had "announced projects without funding them, watched costs balloon, and scrapped what the other side started".

"Every time the plan changes, we lose time, we lose money, and we lose the skilled people who build these things, too many of them to Australia. That is the problem this plan sets out to fix."

He said the plan offered a long-term, evidence-based path that did not belong to any one government, a prize "bigger than any single policy".

Labour felt the path laid out was "broadly the right one" and had "worked constructively" with the government "where it counts", he said, in the spirit of focusing on getting infrastructure built rather than trying to claim credit for it.

Green Party Infrastructure spokesperson Julie Anne Genter said the party supported all 16 recommendations in the plan, and said the party overall welcomed the government's intention "and urges that this commitment to long-term planning and evidence -informed decision making continues to drive investment in long-lived assets".

However, she raised concerns about the government's response to Priority 4 - prioritising and sequencing land transport projects - saying the current emphasis on new state highways was "at odds with" recommendations 1, 2, 7 and 13.

"The GPS also allows specified projects to circumvent the investment assurance process because they are simply deemed strategic priorities. We hold that all new major land transport projects (over $500m) go through the IPP process or similar investment assurance."

The Greens were unconvinced the government's RMA reforms going through select committee would end up able to provide what the country needed, Genter saying it may be preferable "to return to some aspects of the NBEA and Spatial Planning Act that had a far more robust and considered development process, and substantively, left less to Ministerial discretion."

She also urged the a stronger focus on recommendation 15 - to co-ordinate workforce planning - saying infrastructure planning and workforce planning should be more closely linked, and - like McAnulty - registered the Greens' opposition to an LNG import terminal.

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