Latest / Best of Business / Nick Leggett: Infrastructure New Zealand CEO voices concerns as City Rail Link costs blow out

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Nick Leggett: Infrastructure New Zealand CEO voices concerns as City Rail Link costs blow out · Best of Business

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  Speaker 1: You're listening to a podcast from News Talk zed B.
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  Speaker 2: Now another crack at central government over infrastructure. The bloke
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  Speaker 2: who's been hitting the CRL this is the Oakland City
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  Speaker 2: Rail and he's leaving to go to Ireland. He wants
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  Speaker 2: more cross party deals around big projects by chopping and changing,
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  Speaker 2: he argues, and he's probably right with governments. Each government
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  Speaker 2: comes in suddenly we're building a road, and then we're not,
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  Speaker 2: and then we are and then we're not. The cost
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  Speaker 2: of course goes up, so Infrastructure New Zealand's tub executive
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  Speaker 2: Nick Leggett is with us on this Nick morning, Hi Mike.
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  Speaker 2: First excuse this is the CRL is it's billions of
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  Speaker 2: dollars over, it's years late. And his argument this is
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  Speaker 2: Sewan Sweeney. His argument is the international thinking is you
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  Speaker 2: can't actually price this stuff accurately. Is he right?
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  Speaker 3: Yes, he is to a degree. And I mean when
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  Speaker 3: Sewan Sweeney says something about infrastructure, we should all listen.
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  Speaker 3: The point he made was until you engage a builder
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  Speaker 3: and you get or your funders in line, you don't
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  Speaker 3: really have a project. And that's something new Zealand does
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  Speaker 3: very badly. You think about all the projects that we've
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  Speaker 3: had around the country that have been sort of out
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  Speaker 3: there in theory, whether it's light rail for Auckland, a
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  Speaker 3: second half across and let's get well into moving. All
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  Speaker 3: lots of money, hundreds of millions of dollars spent on planning,
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  Speaker 3: business plans and the like, but no funding ever confirmed,
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  Speaker 3: nobody actually ever engaged to build. They're just a nice
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  Speaker 3: idea until you actually lock anything in in New Zealand
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  Speaker 3: is really bad might and actually push and go, and
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  Speaker 3: as a result we get very very poor efficiency. It
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  Speaker 3: costs us billions of dollars a year, and we don't
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  Speaker 3: have the system lined up, and we don't have the
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  Speaker 3: political consensus that takes these projects like CURL, which you
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  Speaker 3: know ten years in the mating. It doesn't We don't
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  Speaker 3: have the guarantee across political cycles and funding cycles to
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  Speaker 3: lock them in and get the efficiencies that are small
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  Speaker 3: actually like New Zealand desperately needs.
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  Speaker 2: Can we ever do it? Because the ideological gap, especially
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  Speaker 2: at the moment, is enormous. So if you look, for example,
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  Speaker 2: at the Roads of National Significance PPPs, Tolling et cetera.
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  Speaker 2: You look at the Labour Party. They hate roads, they
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  Speaker 2: don't like PPPs, they like late rail, they like buses,
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  Speaker 2: they're a mile apart.
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  Speaker 3: How do you depoliticize that Well, I think what we've
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  Speaker 3: got to do as a country is expect our politicians
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  Speaker 3: to get more in the same room and agree on
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  Speaker 3: some of the basics. Now some of it. No, we're
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  Speaker 3: always going to have some disagreement, and I think that's positive.
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  Speaker 3: That's good. That's why we have different political parties. But Mike,
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  Speaker 3: it's the system, it's the funding. We don't have a
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  Speaker 3: mature system. It's very scattergun. We don't agree on principles
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  Speaker 3: like actually Shawn Sweeney very accurately said, we're obsessed about price.
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  Speaker 3: But actually what we've got to do is focus on
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  Speaker 3: quality and value because quality lasts forever. And there is
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  Speaker 3: we've got one party tracker said, and let's drive the
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  Speaker 3: cost of everything down. We don't measure the economic benefit
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  Speaker 3: we get from infrastructure. We don't consider that well enough.
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  Speaker 3: And I think this is about maturity. And I can
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  Speaker 3: tell you know, we've visited other countries this year and
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  Speaker 3: you can see for yourself places even closer neighbors like Australia,
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  Speaker 3: there's just more political consistency. We need a We need
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  Speaker 3: our two major parties at least to build some form
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  Speaker 3: of consensus on the way the systems built and on
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  Speaker 3: some of the big projects. When you look at countries
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  Speaker 3: like Ireland, when you look at countries like Denmark, you
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  Speaker 3: can have all political parties in a room talking and
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  Speaker 3: agreeing on the key components of what's important in infrastructure.
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  Speaker 3: That long term pipeline Sean Sweeney is a classic example
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  Speaker 3: of where talent is leaving our country skills that we
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  Speaker 3: badly need because there isn't a project pipeline that guarantees
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  Speaker 3: those people, that gives them the confidence that there's going
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  Speaker 3: to be work coming up and then to rebuild to
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  Speaker 3: bring in the people and the machine enery that costs
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  Speaker 3: even more so if we do care about product, but
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  Speaker 3: if we care about our medium to long term economic growth,
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  Speaker 3: we would get this right and we would reach across
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  Speaker 3: the aisle. Look, the government is trying earnestly to build
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  Speaker 3: the infrastructure system back up. What we've got to have
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  Speaker 3: assurance about is when there's a change of government at
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  Speaker 3: some point in the future that that government doesn't come
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  Speaker 3: in unravel things. Yeah, both on you.
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  Speaker 2: Well, said Nick. Appreciate it very much. Neck Legate Infrastructure,
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  Speaker 2: New Zealand CHUB executive. Good to see it can be
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  Speaker 2: potentially done.
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