New Zealand Infrastructure Commission Publishes First Assessment Of The Value Of New Zealand's Infrastructure and it’s not great news.

With our roads, water pipes and other essential infrastructure wearing out, New Zealand needs to spend around 60% of its infrastructure investment to look after what we already have, rather than building more.

This is a key finding of a new report from the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission, Te Waihanga, which provides the first comprehensive assessment of the value of New Zealand’s infrastructure. 

"Using data from Statistics New Zealand, we found that our infrastructure assets, excluding land, were valued at $287 billion in 2022. Nearly three-quarters of our infrastructure assets are publicly owned through central and local government and over one-quarter are commercially or privately owned," says Peter Nunns, the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission’s Director of Economics. 

"Infrastructure assets can have huge benefits for society, but they must be maintained, renewed, and repaired to ensure that they continue to provide those benefits - and that costs money.

"The question is: are we currently investing enough on renewals? In some areas, like electricity distribution, the data suggests that assets are being renewed at about the right rate. But in other areas, like state highways, local roads, and water infrastructure, renewal investment seems to be too low to ensure our assets are maintained for the long term. If this trend continues, the condition of our infrastructure will decline," Nunns says. 

"What’s even more concerning is that in some sectors, like education, health, and justice infrastructure, we couldn’t find good data on maintenance and renewal spending. This is because central government, which owns most of these assets, does not compile and publicly report this data.