Quietly this week, amongst news of peace deals and World Cup matches, a significant piece of news may have slipped your notice. The Government has accepted all 16 recommendations of the National Infrastructure Plan (NIP), a 30-year blueprint for overhauling how New Zealand plans, funds, and delivers infrastructure. But what made it truly remarkable wasn’t the plan itself. It was that Labour and the Greens both wrote forewords to the Government’s response. In Wellington, that passes for a miracle.

After decades of underinvestment and often ham-fisted execution, including projects announced without funding, ballooning costs and the next Government cancelling what the last one started, the major parties appear to have grown up. Bipartisan political will of this kind is rare and, frankly, overdue. As Labour’s Kieran McAnulty put it: every time the plan changes, we lose time, money, and skilled people, too many of them to Australia. That is the problem this plan sets out to fix.

For road transport operators, this cannot come soon enough. New Zealand spends more on infrastructure as a share of GDP than any other OECD country, yet ranks near the bottom for efficiency. Our members have watched their substantial road user charges achieve less and less, even as weather events continue to hammer critical routes. The Waioweka and Awakino gorges are stark examples of a network that needs resilience investment now. The plan also rightly calls for a review of the National Land Transport Fund, a system under real strain. NRC has consistently called for a long-term infrastructure pipeline, and now we have one with cross-party commitment behind it.

This matters beyond the projects themselves. Contractor companies can now see a decades-long horizon rather than a three-year political cycle. That confidence means investment in people and plant, and ultimately better value for every dollar collected in road user charges. Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop put it plainly: “Having a plan on its own is not enough. What matters is execution.”

He is right.

The Freight Advisory Council now has a clear mandate to step in and sharpen how transport infrastructure is planned within the NIP framework, ensuring multi-modal freight and supply chain thinking informs every major decision.

It may be hard to get excited about politics when Parliament so often resembles a school yard. But today, I will take the win. It may be World Cup time, but I am genuinely delighted to see less political football and more serious planning out of Wellington.

Justin Tighe-Umbers, Chief Executive, National Road Carriers Assn