I heard a glib response from a colleague this week to news that yet another business case was being commissioned on Auckland’s second harbour crossing – if we printed all the reports produced over the years on a second crossing we could drop them in the harbour and cross on them!

That’s how much toing and froing there’s been without a result. Now we have another report on the way. It may be needed, but it’s hard not to agree with the exasperation.

But rather than debating bridge versus tunnel in isolation, we need to ask a much bigger question: what does Auckland, and New Zealand, need from its supply chain?

That’s why a Minister of Supply Chain is one of the key calls in National Road Carriers’ election manifesto launched yesterday.

We have a Minister of Rail. We have a Minister of Transport. But we don’t have one person in Government accountable for making sure our supply chain works from end to end.

I find that strange.

Australia, Singapore and the United Kingdom all recognise that supply chains are too important to their economies to be managed in silos. They have a clear point of accountability in Government.

We should too.

Every time goods move inefficiently, the cost ultimately lands on Kiwis. It is an invisible part of the cost of living. And for our exporters, sitting at the bottom of the world’s longest supply chain, every extra cost and delay makes competing internationally that much harder.

The problem is, we aren’t even properly measuring how efficient and productive our supply chain is.

And that matters right now because we simply can’t afford to build everything we need.

As Minister Chris Bishop and the Infrastructure Commission have made abundantly clear, our eyes are bigger than our stomach when it comes to infrastructure. Road user charges are barely covering network maintenance, let alone building the new infrastructure we need.

So we have to stretch every dollar.

That means making investment decisions based on what gives the whole supply chain the best return, not which individual road, rail or port project has the best political case.

Take Auckland’s second harbour crossing. Should we build a more expensive tunnel, or a bridge that potentially frees up more money for other critical infrastructure? What does each option mean for freight resilience, efficiency and the wider network?

Or look at Lyttelton, where bigger ships mean more containers arriving – and therefore more trucks and trains moving them on the land side. What road and rail investment do we need to prevent congestion?

These are supply chain questions.

The Government has made good progress. The National Infrastructure Plan gives us a 30-year pipeline and takes some of the partisan politics out of infrastructure. Minister Bishop’s Freight Advisory Council has also shown its value, particularly during the recent fuel supply shock.

Now we need to build on that.

Give the Freight Advisory Council a mandate to advise on the National Infrastructure Plan. Build a much richer picture of what goods are moving where, when and how, what they are worth, and where the choke points are.

And put one Minister in charge of making the whole thing work.

Because we shouldn’t be making billion-dollar transport decisions by looking through a windscreen at one project at a time.

We need to see the whole road ahead.

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