Geoff Cooper: Infrastructure Commission CEO on the draft National Infrastructure Plan

There's growing calls for New Zealand to get realistic about our infrastructure.

The Infrastructure Commission's released a 30-year draft plan today  for future builds and upgrades to roads, hospitals and public buildings.

It highlights how we're not getting value, despite spending a lot.

Commission CEO, Geoff Cooper, says a large issue is our lack of spending on maintaining existing infrastructure.

He explained we are running our assets into the ground, so repairs cost more - leaving less money for everything else.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Afternoon, Welcome to the show. New Zealand is not getting
banged for it's buck when we spend on infrastructure. This
is according to the Infrastructure Commission's first draft National Infrastructure Plan,
which reckons that our spending puts US in the top
ten percent of developed countries, but what we're getting for
that puts US in the bottom ten percent. Now. Jeff
Cooper is the Chief executive of the Commission.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
High Jeff, hi, hether, how are you doing good?

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Thank you very much? Why we're not getting banged for buck?

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Look, I think this is a number. There's a number
of things behind this, but ultimately that we're probably we're
not optimizing what we've got. We're trying to spend out
of our way out of some big problems, and we
can do better, particularly when it comes to thinking about
how we optimize the maintenance and asset management of the
services around us.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
And what are we not doing right with our project planning.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
I think with project planning, like I think sometimes it's
that where we're probably going faster than we need to. Oftentimes,
I think we need to get consensus on exactly what
the problem is before we jump to what exactly the
solutions are you know the solution that the example I've
been using on this is that you know, folks in
Awk cond for instance, of spending you know, five days

(01:06):
every year sitting in traffic. But we know we can't
build our way out of these problems. It's too expensive
and it takes too long, and so thinking about how
we can make better use of the existing network, put
people in places where they don't need to drive, or
in fact, thinking about time of use charging that shifts
that that peak. Right.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
The good news is that we are spending enough every year,
aren't we to try to catch up here?

Speaker 2 (01:32):
That's a really important part in this plan. I think,
you know, for a long time we've been told that
we can't fund our way out of this, but we
spend a lot on infrastructure, and actually it does put
us right at the top of the league tables in
the OECD. This is a question about how to get
better bank buck.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
Look is there are we are we getting ripped off
by construction companies? Is that part of it?

Speaker 2 (01:57):
I don't know. I would I would go back to
asking the question about value for money and the projects
that we're that we're thinking about and the problems that
we're trying to try to solve, right. I mean, one
of the big plays or big points that we're making
in the plan is that New Zealand's demographics are changing tremendously.
We have an aging population, and yet our spend on

(02:18):
hospitals has been dead flat for the last fifteen years.
So it's about the problems we're trying to solve.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
Okay, So why is it that it costs so much
in this country to build a road, build a hospital,
build anything.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
I think there are some things that are out of
our control. Right. We are the same size as great
as Sydney, but we are spread over a land mass
which is twenty one times larger. So many of the
many of these things. We are on a difficult piece
of geography at the bottom of the South Pacific with
actually a very small population, right, and that that obviously
creates funding challenges. But other times the problems are ones

(02:53):
that we create for ourselves. We have enormous complexity, for instance,
in something like our zoning ordinances, where we have, you know,
oney one hundred of them across the country and you
know Japan has thirteen, So we can we should be
thinking about ways to streamline this so that we can
deliver more effectively for everyday New Zealand.

Speaker 1 (03:11):
Okay, so what are the seventeen project recommended Rather, let
me ask it like this, of your seventeen recommended projects,
what three do you think are the most important.

Speaker 2 (03:20):
Yeah. Look, the first one is setting out a path
of funding for infrastructure that we can fund. We spend
a lot of time talking about what it is hard
to do and what can't be done with small populations.
What we're setting out in the draft Infrastructure Plan is
what we think can be achieved, so that that's point one.
The second is a set of recommendations about making it

(03:41):
easier and more cost effective to build. We think we
need to clear the wave for infrastructure to improve social
and environmental outcomes and of course improve productivity. And the
third one is thinking a lot more deeply about how
we are going about maintaining our existing asset base. What
we're finding is our assets are in bad shape and
what we're doing is we're running them down to the

(04:02):
point that these assets end up with massive cathex programs
at the end of it, and that means we don't
have much money for everything else. So the plan is
really trying to show how we can lift our performance
and go back to actually in the nineteen nineties when
New Zealand was regarded as a center of excellence for
looking after the assets it has.

Speaker 1 (04:20):
Great stuff, Jeff, Thanks so much appreciated. Jeff Cooper, Chief
Executive Infrastructure Commission. For more from Hither Duplessy Allen Drive,
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