The Government’s Quarterly Action Plan
At the start of this month, the Government released its now-familiar Quarterly Action Plan, setting out the next tranche of priorities. As expected, several are directly relevant to the infrastructure sector. Chief among them is the introduction of new planning legislation to replace the Resource Management Act (RMA). However, time is tight, with Parliament’s sitting days rapidly running out before the summer recess.
The proposed Planning Bill and Natural Environment Bill represent a seismic shift in how we plan and manage both the built and natural environments. Getting this right will require more than technical precision; it demands cross-party consensus on a planning framework that endures. Without bipartisan support, New Zealand risks continuing its pattern of oscillating between proposals, and never quite landing the stable, long-term direction our planning system so urgently needs.
While a full select committee process has been signalled, the timing of the Bills’ introduction will be challenging for many stakeholders. For some, this will mean presents from Santa and leisurely summer reading will be replaced by the task of navigating dense legal clauses across hundreds of pages of proposed legislation.
The combination of the holiday period and a disjointed start to the new year, with multiple provincial anniversary weekends and Waitangi Day compressing the working weeks, risks limiting the time available for meaningful scrutiny and testing of the proposals. Yet this is precisely what is needed to ensure a robust, enduring planning framework fit for the decades ahead. The new provisions will require careful examination, practical testing, and space for stakeholders to fully understand their implications, including the inevitable unintended consequences that come with such significant reform.
The Transport and Infrastructure Select Committee reported back on the Land Transport Management (Time of Use Charging) Amendment Bill at the end of August, unanimously supporting the Bill including some amendments made following public consultation. As another Q4 Action the Government will now look to pass this legislation before the end of the year which will then enable the first scheme to be developed and implemented. Auckland has undertaken a significant amount of work but given the pressures on Queenstown, would this be a better location for a scheme pilot?
Legislation to amend the Infrastructure Funding and Financing Act is also on the task list this quarter. This is a key part of the next phase of the Going for Housing Growth Pillars 2 and 3 which will introduce developer levies – enabling growth to pay for growth in our urban areas. These provisions are expected to go some of the way to addressing the infrastructure challenge for local authorities.
Another action item this quarter is for the government to take policy decisions to introduce rate caps. We will watch with interest as this work progresses. More than 80% of local authority rates is spent on infrastructure already. We are concerned that the arbitrary limiting of rates income could further impact infrastructure, especially long-term asset management.
There have also been several significant Government announcements, which had been well received including the changes around the seismic ratings for building through the changes to the New Building Standard (NBS). These proposed changes are significant and will change many vertical infrastructure plans and retrofits.
Further good news is that NZTA will lead an updated National Freight Demand Study. Understanding the flow of all our freight around the country, post-Covid, is critical to gaining better knowledge of our infrastructure and plans.
Connecting Canterbury
Our work with Simpson Grierson on a Connecting Canterbury White Paper is progressing well. We discussed the proposals further during a Leaders Lunch with Minister for the South Island and Associate Transport Minister James Meager and will hold a launch event later in November. The White Paper is the infrastructure sectors contribution to a possible future regional deal as well as a future regional spatial plan.
The timing is also appropriate with a lot of recent discussion regarding the South Island’s near-exclusion from the Government’s latest round of Roads of National Significance funding.
Project Financing
INZ’s final Masterclasses: PPP and Private Finance will be held in Wellington 11-12 November. This is an excellent opportunity to upskill on infrastructure finance and learn from international experts. Professor Martin Locke from Sydney University and expert Ian Greer will share their knowledge and expertise as New Zealand once again seeks to build its capability in this space.
Shaping Queenstown: The 2025 Tourism and Infrastructure Summit
Another successful event with The Post, and sponsored by Air New Zealand, was held in Queenstown in mid-October, highlighting the myriad issues facing the tourism and infrastructure sectors.
Former Prime Minister Sir John Key entertained the audience with personal anecdotes and his views on tourism and infrastructure. He supports the idea of a bed tax – or bed charge – as one of several tools needed to help pay for infrastructure.
Infrastructure New Zealand also supports a bed charge as part of a suite of funding tools to share the burden of tourism infrastructure costs across all visitors. Councils need additional methods to help fund that infrastructure and ratepayers simply cannot afford to foot the bill alone.
But the Tourism Minister, Louise Upston, made it clear during her speech to the event that no new taxes were coming under the coalition government, and that includes any form of bed levy or tourist tax.
That issue, and many others were discussed during a lively panel discussion involving Ngāi Tahu Holdings chief executive Todd Moyle, Air NZ chief sustainability officer Kiri Hannifin, Queenstown Airport chief operating officer Todd Grace, and Green Party infrastructure spokesperson Julie Anne Genter.
Exclusive polling insights were also shared by Freshwater Consulting’s Mike Turner. This is the third event Infrastructure New Zealand has run in conjunction with The Post and more are planned for next year. It’s an excellent way to lead the discussion on a number of important issues facing the country.
Media
Infrastructure New Zealand has been busy with media inquiries this last month as well as proactively issuing several media releases. When the Government announced it was looking into the reinvestment of its funds currently tied up in Chorus’s debt relating to the Ultra-Fast Broadband rollout out, Infrastructure New Zealand issued a media release supporting this. We have consistently advocated for asset recycling and its potential since releasing the report, Unlocking Value: Recycling Our Infrastructure Assets to grow New Zealand.
We also issued a media release following Labour’s announcement around its proposed New Zealand Future Fund. The potential for New Zealand to have an infrastructure fund, like Singapore’s Temasek fund or something more akin to the Canadian Infrastructure Bank is exciting and would help provide more certainty and meet our long-term infrastructure needs.
The Government’s announcements earlier this month around the new procurement rules have been a long time coming. While the reduction of rules down to 47 is welcome, the sector has generally felt that large scale complex infrastructure procurements should not be wrapped up in the same bundle as government stationery and toilet paper acquisition. Infrastructure New Zealand welcomed the new streamlined procurement rulebook as fairer and simpler.
You can read our media releases here.
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