A new study tracking infrastructure over time shows just two thirds of New Zealand’s road existed in 1925, with the majority of today’s infrastructure being built in the 40 years following the second World War.
New Zealand was committing more money than ever before to building, renewing and maintaining networks but, in relation to the size of the economy, investment in public construction was said to be relatively stable.
The Infrastructure Commission released a new study in the hopes of giving the public a clear understanding of the age of our infrastructure networks and help prioritise the areas where money needs to be spent on maintenance and replacements.
Peter Nunn, general manager of strategy at the commission, told RNZ there were no periods where New Zealand spent less than 5% of its GDP or more than 7% of it on infrastructure.
Investment currently sat at 5.8% of GDP.
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Nunn said most of our infrastructure was built by about the 1970s with “very little” since then.
“We moved at that point, where we had the infrastructure, into continuing to maintain it. Obviously we didn’t always do that, so now we’re in a catch-up phase.”
The “big boom” for infrastructure hit from the 1920s to 1970s, Nunn said when the road network was paved and motorway networks were created.
“We’re continuing to infill, expand the networks, pace with the population… we’ve gone through the work phase.
“We go through that cycle [where] we add capacity to the sites [such as hospitals and schools], that we’ve already got rather than adding more sites.”
It was important to look back to understand how much we needed to invest tomorrow, he said.
Nunn said, in terms of public hospitals, the number of hospital beds peaked in 1945 and then slid through until the 90s and 2000s.
“We haven’t been growing the size of the hospital network since the 70s or 80s.. now the phase we’re entering into at the moment highlights the population is going to shift quite dramatically… we’re going to get a lot older and the need for hospitals is going to rise.”
New Zealand’s electricity network would need generate a lot more power in coming years, Nunn said.
“Which means more wind farms, more solar farms, more battery storage, and in terms of distribution it depends on where things are located and whether new links need to be built or existing links updated.”
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Nunn said New Zealand needed to think about technology in the future, and needed to prepare for the investment.
The Infrastructure Commission published all the data it had compiled and produced it so other people could look at it, Nunn said.
The data was collected by drawing pretty heavily on Stats New Zealand year books, he said, and filled in with other sources.
“It’s a bit of a passion project for me, we spent a lot of time tracking down other sources to fill it [the data] in.”
rnz.co.nz
