Comment: At a time of constrained funding, growing infrastructure needs and increasing complexity, our biggest challenge is not a shortage of infrastructure, it’s how to prioritise and align to make confident decisions that will meet today’s challenges and set us up for a resilient future.
Keeping a focus on short-term costs is critical, but what can get lost in the noise is that well planned infrastructure investment delivered with purpose can be the key to unlocking economic development, productivity and prosperity.
Infrastructure as a catalyst for economic growth
Infrastructure isn’t valuable because it exists. It’s valuable because of what it enables.
To achieve the greatest return from infrastructure investment, we need to strengthen the connection between economic development, infrastructure planning and the communities those investments are intended to serve.
As a nation, we need to be more deliberate about aligning infrastructure investment with areas of competitive advantage and future growth. We shouldn’t plan around assets, we should plan around outcomes, like economic growth, productivity, resilience and community wellbeing.
Infrastructure is an enabler rather than an objective, so investment should begin with a clear understanding of the opportunities we want to unlock. The Waikato Expressway is often viewed as a transport project, but its real significance is the wider role it plays in connecting the Golden Triangle economy. Together with rail networks, inland freight hubs, and access to the Port of Tauranga, it helps create an integrated system that supports trade, investment and productivity. The value comes not from any single asset, but from the way they work together.
Delivered well, investment in infrastructure lowers business costs, improves market access, unlocks private investment, supports labour mobility and regional development, strengthens export competitiveness, and ultimately drives productivity that makes everyday life better for people.
Infrastructure as a system
Power, water, transport, urban centres – they all work together and are part of our everyday life, so why do we manage and build this infrastructure independently?
The greatest infrastructure challenges and opportunities are often found at the interfaces – they rarely sit within a single agency, sector or discipline. The solution to one organisation’s challenge may lie in another’s investment programme, yet decisions are often made through separate funding, planning and governance processes.
There are lots of reasons for the separation, but increasingly we’re recognising that people experience infrastructure as connected systems, and are planning accordingly. It’s about getting the optimum mix of infrastructure and designing it to work together as seamlessly as possible.
Solutions that drive growth need coordination between sectors like transport, land use, energy, housing, water, freight, and increasingly, digital infrastructure.
There are live examples where we are collectively getting this right. Just in the last couple of weeks new passenger rail stations opened at Paerātā and Drury in the south of Auckland, the next stage for Te Tupu Ngātahi Supporting Growth, a large programme alliance delivering transport infrastructure driven and designed for whole communities, considering rail, rapid transit, walking and cycling connections, roads, public spaces, utilities and housing as part of a single system.
New Zealand has spent decades optimising individual assets. The next productivity gains may come from optimising connections between assets.
Planning is the key
The current convergence of spatial planning and local government reform creates a rare opportunity to rethink how we invest in New Zealand’s future. As councils come together, merge infrastructure plans and establish shared regional priorities, we have a chance to pull apart infrastructure programmes shaped by historical boundaries and put them back together around the economic opportunities, growth patterns and community outcomes that will drive future prosperity and resilience.
Spatial planning is a practical framework for improving infrastructure decisions, because it forces agreement on what growth looks like before spending money. It helps connect infrastructure investment to long-term outcomes by enabling coordination across agencies and sectors to create a shared view of future growth, aligning investment timing and confidence.
What’s important is how those plans help multiple organisations build a shared understanding, and see opportunities to join the dots and make system-based decisions that focus on outcomes.
The recent Taranaki Energy Scenarios work our Beca team did with MartinJenkins for Taranaki Regional Council provides a glimpse of what this approach could look like in practice. Rather than starting with a predefined infrastructure programme, it began by exploring the economic opportunities, industries and communities the region could support over the coming decades. Only then did it consider the infrastructure, land use and investment decisions needed to enable those futures. That’s the essence of spatial planning and systems thinking – start with the outcomes we want to create, rather than the assets we want to build.
Infrastructure priorities shouldn’t be determined solely by infrastructure providers. Increasingly public and private development players recognise the need to get together and integrate early in the process. Some of New Zealand’s most promising growth opportunities are emerging where public and private sector partners are collaborating early to shape outcomes. Te Utanganui Central New Zealand Distribution Hub is a good example, bringing together councils, iwi, infrastructure providers and industry to create a shared vision that will keep national supply chains strong, before individual projects are locked in.
There are positive signs that central and local government are increasingly understanding the need for alignment and consolidation. The 16 recommendations in the National Infrastructure Plan, supported across political parties, have moved spatial planning from a discretionary exercise to a legislated national obligation for the first time in our history. New ministry MCERT (Ministry for Cities, Environment, Regions and Transport) is up and running, and councils are going through amalgamation discussions.
The real opportunity is not simply to reorganise institutions or combine plans, but to align them around the economic and community opportunities we want to unlock.
A three-point plan for productivity
The future challenge is not simply delivering infrastructure. It’s improving the quality of infrastructure decisions. Here’s my three-point plan to further the conversation:
- Start with economic outcomes . Prioritise investment based on productivity, growth and long-term value. Identify the industries, trade opportunities and growth areas that will drive future prosperity, and then align infrastructure priorities accordingly.
- Give industry a stronger voice . Ensure infrastructure priorities reflect the needs of the businesses, exporters and communities that create economic value, not just the infrastructure owners.
- Plan across organisational boundaries . Take a system-wide view of infrastructure needs. Create mechanisms for agencies, industry and infrastructure providers to jointly identify opportunities and constraints, and use spatial planning to create a shared view of where growth, investment and community outcomes intersect.
The key question is how we ensure we invest in the infrastructure that will unlock the future we want.
Because ultimately, the infrastructure that transforms a country is not defined by what was built, but by the opportunities it made possible.
