Infrastructure News: June July 2023

BRIDGING THE FUNDING GAP

Budget 2023: Successes and shortcomings

Pre-election conversations we need to have

Safer, faster, multipurpose telehandlers

The introduction of game changing 360-degree rotating telehandlers looks set to disrupt the infrastructure, civil and construction industries

The days of needing on site a mobile crane, a boom lift or other types of elevated work platforms, a forklift and an excavator are numbered - one machine can do it all.

Rotating telehandlers may look a lot like their conventional cousins, but they are very different.

Their arrival on New Zealand work sites has completely changed the way project management is planned and the way on-

site work is completed in a safer and faster manner. They load material, pick it up, drive to where it’s needed and then unload. The rotating telehandler can then pick the load, rotate and place the materials where needed.

The concept originated in Europe, where the majority of urban construction sites are very compact and do not allow room for traditional telehandlers.

“Rotating telehandlers have taken North Ameri-

ca by storm and over the past 18 months have been attracting a lot of attention in New Zealand,” says APS general manager Darren Boon, agents for Magni, one of the most technologically advanced brands of rotating telehandlers in the world.

“As technology has improved so has the reach and lifting capacity of these

type of machines. On a multi-level construction site, a machine with a five-tonne lift and 26-metre reach would usually have been the standard,” says Boon.

“Now machines are available for bigger projects with heavy lift capability up to 13 tonnes and machines with a reach of 51 metres.”

The world’s highest rotating telehandler – RTH6.51 (six-ton lift) has an impressive 51-metre reach (not pictured)

Magni recognised early that the biggest trend in the industry is to lift safer, higher and heavier

MAGNI ROTATING TELEHANDLERS - EFFICIENCY

Proven efficiency

Replacing a tower crane with a rotating telehandler.

An Auckland private building company has purchased a Magni rotating telehandler in favour of hiring a tower crane for the construction of a four storey apartment block in West Auckland. The rotating telehandler meets most of their lifting requirements for the crane work, with a larger mobile crane only being bought in to lift the heavy pre-cast panels. Having the ability

to easily swap attachments between winch and a set of forks the machine can pick and carry around the building site for more efficient lifting or the unloading of trucks. All deliveries from the building supplier can be ordered on flat-deck trucks which means quicker delivers and savings of up to $150 per delivery by not waiting for Hiab/crane truck to become available.

MAGNI ROTATING TELEHANDLERS - SAFETY

The Load Movement Indicator (LMI) system is a load limit device. It is fitted as standard on all Magni telescopic handlers (RTH, TH and HTH ranges). It is made up of a rotation sensor, stabiliser cable reel, lifting cylinder pressure sensors and the LMI safety control board. Together, these components provide the operator with the best real-time load chart. This system continuously analyses the spatial positioning of the load and stores specific load charts for each attachment, displaying the correct load chart based on the machine’s working configuration.

The LMI system constantly monitors the movements of the machine to avoid any type of overload. If the system detects operating inconsistencies, it interrupts all aggravating movements, allowing only safe maneuvers (boom retraction and load release). This prevents operator error causing serious injury to themselves and nearby staff.

Every telehandler is equipped with the R.F.ID automatic attachment recognition system on the boom head. Whenever a new attachment is fitted to the machine it is recognised automatically and the display shows the corresponding load chart.

The safety of the operator and people nearby is paramount

Infrastructure New Zealand wants to see actual funded projects, rather than the accumulation of plans, reviews, conversations and initiatives already underway that the Infrastructure Action Plan provides.

The Plan, which represents the second part of the Government’s response to Rautaki Hanganga o Aotearoa – the first New Zealand Infrastructure Strategy has four focus areas. These include:

• strengthened partnerships with Māori, local government, and the private sector

• building capacity and capability in the sector

• ensuring that our infrastructure rebuild and new build is resilient in the face of climate change, natural disasters, and increasing extreme weather events

• improvements to infrastructure decision making and governance.

Within these, the large majority (74 per cent) of the Plan’s 331 actions are already underway within the Government’s current work programme.

There are, however, a few significant new actions included in the Plan.

• Work to be undertaken by Treasury alongside Te Waihanga – the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission to develop the infrastructure priority list, with planning and development across the next three years.

• Treasury to also review the Better Business Case framework and

Infrastructure action plan brings almost nothing new to the table

While Infrastructure New Zealand is glad to see He Whakakaupapa mō Te Hanganga o Aotearoa – the Infrastructure Action Plan released alongside Budget 2023, Policy Advisor Martina Moroney says most of its initiatives are already underway

associated investment planning products. They plan to complete this review by the end of 2025.

• Te Waihanga to build

a State of Play of the ways the government engages with iwi and Māori on infrastructure projects. Te Waihanga plans to release this

State of Play in 2024.

• Te Waihanga to work with the Public Service Commission to ensure development

of leaders is aligned across the public sector, including on the option of a major projects leadership programme. Options will be assessed in 2023 and next steps announced by 2024.

• The expectation is that Rau Paenga’s initial portfolio of projects will be finalised in 2023.

The Treasury will also continue to develop guidance on investment planning and asset management to support agencies to build their capability to plan and deliver investments.

To address recovery and resilience, The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet will also commence public consultation in 2023 on the adequacy of New Zealand’s current regulatory approach to delivering resilient critical infrastructure. The Treasury is also undertaking work to integrate consideration of climate risks and future adaptation into the guidance it publishes on investment management and state sector performance. Updated guidance will be developed by 2025.

It is encouraging to also see planned progress in 2023 for the Infrastructure Funding and Financing System project under the Government’s Urban Growth Agenda. There is significant opportunity to better utilise our existing alternative funding and financing tools, so progress in this area is a positive step forward. Further detail on the establishment and next steps for Rau Paenga to support government infrastructure delivery is also a positive inclusion.

Whilst we are encouraged

by the mention of partnership with the private sector included in the Plan, it is surprising to see limited new initiatives considering improvements to the use of private capital and the private sector’s delivery capacity. The Infrastructure Strategy itself reflects that there is an opportunity to further engage with the private sector in the procurement phase and it is surprising that the Plan lacks this focus.

More than half of the initiatives are expected to be complete in the next three years. Investments through Budget 2023, including the National Resilience Plan, will support the implementation of the

Action Plan. Te Waihanga will then monitor and report on progress towards these actions and the objectives of the Strategy and continue to prepare updated infrastructure strategies every five years.

While we welcome the Government’s focus on the Infrastructure Strategy’s recommendations, and commitment to their significant work programme underway, the urgency of New Zealand’s infrastructure deficit, and the importance of Te Waihanga’s work demands more substantive and immediate action than this Plan provides. We encourage the Government to commit to

bold progress that enables Te Waihanga to act as an independent steward of our infrastructure system, and to meet that independent stewardship with a commitment to actioning their recommendations.

Unfortunately, this Plan does very little to further advance the state of the infrastructure system past the Government’s initial response to the Strategy. INZ will continue to advocate for the improved use of private sector’s capital, expertise and delivery capacity to ensure the infrastructure outcomes that New Zealanders deserve are delivered.

52

56 Shortsightedness and poor planning lead to property buyouts

58 Campaign launched against ‘undemocratic’ RMA reform

62 National’s new housing strategy ‘a mixed bag’

Too much consultation, not enough action

Your transport agency would like to know if it’s okay to paint the side of the road with a broken yellow line. They also want your thoughts on installing a single rubber speed bump on a shared driveway and changing a sign that says ‘Clearway’ to ‘Busway’.

Auckland Transport (AT) is asking for your feedback on six projects across the city, including one that extends

the area painted as a bus lane a couple of blocks. Over the past five years, AT has consulted on 190 projects ranging from long-term land transport plans and parking strategies to small one-off projects involving just a bit of paint.

Community feedback is an important part of the planning process, and ensuring multiple perspectives are heard and incorporated into plans is critical.

If that is what was happening with the current consultation process, it would be the end of this piece. However, somewhere along the line, AT and many other public agencies across New Zealand have been stuck in a form of decision paralysis.

So many of these consultations on small projects feel like a person asking their neighbours if they should eat breakfast in the

morning.

The indecision has become so deep for AT that it needs feedback on nearly every aspect of the agency’s work. Some consultations are so minor they simply constitute the agency’s day-to-day activities – for example, consultation on adding a single rubber speed bump to a shared driveway. You’ll be happy to learn that a small rubber speed bump

Asking everyone what they think of every transport micro-decision is an enormous waste of time and resources, says University of Auckland Senior Lecturer Timothy Welch, who wants Auckland Transport to stop asking and start doing

has been installed, despite one respondent expressing “concern that the speed bump will not affect driver behaviour. People will still drive too fast. Has observed that other similar speed bumps, with stop signs, are not respected”.

Where there is a need to slow vehicles on a driveway for the safety of people on foot and bike, the council or transport agency should simply install a device rather than ask everyone if improving safety is worthwhile.

The citizens were already consulted on such improvements when Auckland’s Vision Zero plan, the local implementation of the national and well-consulted Road to Zero strategy, was enacted in 2019.

A slew of other consultations asks people to weigh in on whether several metres of broken yellow lines should be painted on the side of the road. Public input should not be required for basic road markings, even when it involves removing a car park or two;

it’s merely a maintenance item, do it and move on.

So many of these consultations on small projects feel like a person asking their neighbours if they should eat breakfast in the morning. As the person responsible for maintaining your body, you should decide as efficiently as possible if breakfast is right for you – no additional input is needed.

Things seem to have gone off the rails in two places 1) where a project is part of the delivery of a long-range plan already consulted prior to adoption, and 2) where the project is so minor it constitutes the daily activities of the agency.

Planners and engineers at AT should be vested with the authority to exercise their professional and learned judgment to implement the changes necessary to deliver projects related to the goals outlined in policy documents such as Auckland’s Regional Land Transport Plan, the Vision Zero strategy, and the Transport Emissions Reduc-

tion Pathway (TERP).

These plans detail the necessary steps to make transportation safer, more efficient, and more sustainable. For example, the TERP outlines the need to significantly increase public transport ridership to reduce transport emissions by 64 percent in the next seven years. With this urgency, things like extending painted bus lanes by 35mm in the city centre should be automatic, without a protracted public engagement process.

A cynical response to “have your say” on anything and everything would be that our public agencies purposely follow an approach that guarantees nothing will get done.

The argument to endlessly consult on every detail not only undermines the authority we’ve placed in our elected officials and agencies but reflects a mentality that is absolutely BANANAS, which is not to say the demand for lots of input is crazy, but that it is essentially an argument to

Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

A parallel issue to over-asking for feedback is that the process becomes fodder for anyone’s dissent. There are no limitations on the consultation process, in that anyone near and far or in any country can weigh in on projects as seemingly trivial as painting 15 dashes along a cul-de-sac so rubbish trucks can turn around. After a month-long consultation, the outcome was not to paint anything but erect sign reading: “No Stopping on Thursday 6am to 12pm.”

It’s a massive waste of time and resources to ask everyone what they think every time we want to paint a more extended bus lane, create a safer intersection, erect a sign, or paint a few road markings – especially when we’ve already debated the issues for years. To make progress as a city, our public agencies need to implement plans quickly and decisively and, of course, stop for consultation on the big decisions.

Second Auckland harbour crossing ‘stupidest transport project ever’

This project has had an incredibly long history, with previous versions incredibly expensive, somehow detrimental to transport outcome targets and massively environmentally damaging, Greater Auckland reports

The government is beginning public engagement on options for the Waitemata Harbour Connections project.

Transport Minister Michael Wood has unveiled five scenarios for one of the most significant city-shaping projects for Tāmaki Makaurau in coming decades, the additional Waitematā Harbour crossing.

“Aucklanders and businesses have made it clear that the biggest barriers to the success of Auckland is persistent congestion and

after years of inaction by the previous government we are on track to fix it,” Wood says.

“We want an unclogged, connected, and futureproofed transport network so Aucklanders can get to work on time, and don’t need to wake up earlier just to get their kids to school – it’s vital that we have a harbour crossing that works for the city.

“The additional Waitematā Harbour connections, for which construction will begin in 2029, will providing

a future proofed solution for people wanting to travel across Te Waitematā be it by car, bus, light rail, walking, cycling, or truck as fast as possible.

“After considering feedback from Aucklanders, we’ve developed five scenarios for future transport connections across Te Waitematā including both bridge and tunnel options. The scenarios also include ways to connect to growing residential and business hubs on the North Shore.

“Each scenario includes

a new walking and cycling link across Te Waitematā, a new light rail link that will connect to Auckland Light Rail in the City Centre, and will build generations of resilience into State Highway One for private vehicles and freight.

“Through the Government’s investment we a building a linked up rapid transit network across the city, to provide faster, safer, low-carbon travel. This connection, with Light Rail at its heart, is key to delivering this vision.

“Rapid transit already delivers tens of millions of journeys across Auckland every year through the heavy rail network and the Northern busway, but we know that we have to keep investing to build the fully integrated, linked up network we need for a modern, connected region.

“A new rapid transit connection from the city centre to the North Shore will fully integrate with other projects including Auckland Light Rail and rapid transit to the Northwest to allow

people to travel seamlessly across Auckland,” Wood says.

Feedback provided will help shape the final decision on the preferred option for the crossing which will be confirmed in June 2023.

A 2020 business case made it clear that a rapid transit connection should proceed ahead of and new road capacity, as well as also highlighting the opportunity for significantly lower costs through building the crossing as a bridge rather than a tunnel. More

recently, the next phase of planning has been digging into the details of tunnel and bridge options in more detail. Today we see the results of that.

At its heart, this consultation is a discussion of various combinations of bridge and tunnel options for road and rapid transit crossings, as well as how a walking and cycling bridge would be provided for. The performance of each option against a bunch of different criteria (including cost, at a very very high level) is

also presented. The map below shows the variety of different alignments being considered for crossing options between the city and Takapuna:

The high level assessment of bridges and tunnels continues Waka Kotahi’s long-running ’tilting of the scales’ towards tunnels, by underplaying what the cost different might be. It’s also worth noting the higher embodied carbon emissions from constructing a tunnel – as we know from the Auckland Light Rail

work that tunnels can take many decades of mode shift benefits before they offset the increased emissions from their construction.

• Option 1 has tunnels for both road and rap -

id transit, with walking and cycling provided for on the existing Harbour Bridge’s clipons. The assessment of this options gives it five dollar signs for

cost (each apparently equating to $5 billion increments), which suggests an eye-watering total cost of around $25 billion. The route via

Belmont and Hauraki to Takapuna is a bit odd – serving an area that seems allergic to any growth – but is definitely better than previous tunnelled rapid transit alignments that seemed to go out of their way to avoid land.

• Option 2 builds a new bridge adjacent to the current one for road, rapid transit and walking & cycling. This is by far the cheapest option, but amazingly is still forecast to cost around $15 billion. Presumably this cost includes extending the light-rail up to Albany, even though this isn’t shown on the map.

• Option 3 builds a new bridge from near Wynyard Quarter over to Northcote Point for road and active modes, and then supplements this with a tunnel via Birkenhead and Northcote town centres. This option is forecast to cost around $20 billion as it has four dollar signs in its cost assessment. The idea of serving Birkenhead and Northcote with rapid transit is new, compared to any previous work, and potentially has some

merit. The Onewa Road corridor is a very busy public transport route and makes up quite a large part of future bus volumes from the North Shore to the city centre – so taking pressure off this will have some major benefits. Then Northcote, which is growing a lot through Kainga Ora redevelopment, is a bit of a ‘black hole’ in terms of being served by good public transport. It will be interesting to see what the public think about another bridge across the harbour that isn’t right next to the current one.

• Option 4 is a bit of a merge of options 1 and 2 by the look of it. A smaller new bridge is built next to the current one, with a road tunnel also built. It’s not clear how many lanes would be in the road tunnel(s), as presumably unlike option 1 walking and cycling is provided on the new bridge, meaning the current clip-ons don’t need to be reallocated for active modes. It would be a worry if this option had more than 5 peak direction traffic lanes, as this is what resulted in previous work flooding the city centre with cars.

This option also appears to cost around $20 billion.

• Option 5 is almost identical to option 4, except the new bridge for rapid transit, walking and cycling comes off the end of Wynyard Quarter, rather than being tucked in next to the current bridge. It also is expected to cost around $20 billion.

As per the earlier table looking at bridges versus tunnels, the more detailed analysis of the options seems to play down cost compared to other factors. While most of the work seems to have focused on the crossing part of

the overall project, there appears to have been some thinking about what happens north of Takapuna for rapid transit.

Perhaps what stands out the most here is the absence of information about costs. Are the costs for this part of the project already included in the $15-25 billion option costs? Or are they even more than that? How does the cost of upgrading the busway to light-rail compare against an incredibly long tunnel through Glenfield? It’s hard for the public to provide feedback when so much information is missing.

Looking ahead, a timeframe slide suggests that the earliest construction

could commence is around 2029, with each option having a 10-15 year total construction horizon.

Somewhat bizarrely, the Government has taken this and now said that they intend to begin construc-

tion in 2029 – bringing the project forward from what previous work suggested was needed. While it’s

always good politics to say that you’re bringing a project forward and getting on with making it happen, this is a bit of a punch in the face for other projects that are clearly much more urgent – like proper rapid transit to the Northwest.

On the one hand, it’s good to see a proper analysis of different bridge and tunnel options for the first time in a very very long time, and a clear shift away from the “combined road and rail tunnel” that Waka Kotahi have been pushing for the past decade.

It’s also good to see some new rapid transit options that serve new areas like Birkenhead and Northcote being thrown in the mix.

But on the other hand, the extremely high costs of this project – especially when you consider it alongside the madness of $15-30 billion Auckland Light Rail – makes the whole thing seem extremely fanciful. Especially at a time when Auckland Council is considering cutting back on extremely basic services and the government needs to spend billions on rebuilding basic transport infrastructure following Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland floods.

It will be hard to take seriously the selection of any option other than the lowest cost option 2.

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Big changes to common construction contract

New Zealand’s standard contract for the construction of building and civil engineering projects has been revised and released for consultation

The NZS 3910 is the contract most commonly used in New Zealand’s construction industry. However, recent industry and government reports have pointed to significant issues with the contract’s use that may erode relationships between clients and contractors. Such relationships play a critical role in driving construction sector productivity as well as value-for-money in public sector infrastructure spending (around $10 billion each year).

“There’s been overwhelming consensus from the construction sector that the contract needed a comprehensive update”, says Tracey Ryan, co-chair of the Construction Sector Accord.

“The proliferation of special conditions of contract that are often added to address shortcomings in the standard contract was a big focus. The fairness of some special conditions and the continual fiddling with the standard contract has caused big problems for the construction industry.”

In response, the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission, Te Waihanga and the Construction Sector Accord jointly commissioned a comprehensive revision of the contract with support from many within the sector. Standards New Zealand was appointed in late 2021 to lead and manage the revision process, which was done by a committee of

representatives from across the construction sector.

This review of 3910 is the biggest revision the contract’s had since 1987, and the draft version of the revised NZS 3910 is now out for consultation.

“This revised contract aims to bring NZS 3910 in line with the current legislative environment and market conditions,” says Accord co-chair Andrew Crisp.

“The goal is a balanced contract that is fair and reasonable for all parties. This is expected to reduce some need for parties to insert their own lengthy and complex special conditions and help ensure that the contract is fit for the industry in 2023 and beyond.”

The revised contract is only a tool, however, and its use must be accompanied by a major culture shift, says Ross Copland, Chief Executive of the New Zealand Infrastructure Commis-

sion, Te Waihanga.

“While these updates to NZS 3910 are an important enabler of better construction relationships, I want to emphasise the importance of a cultural shift in our industry from a mindset of contractual ‘winners and losers’, to one where public and private client-side leaders champion fair risk allocation and strive to eliminate, manage or accept some risk, rather than just transferring it.

“In order to rebuild a strong domestic construction industry and attract the talent we desperately need the sector needs to be profitable, fair and sustainable. Over the past decade we have seen far too many leading New Zealand construction firms fail and clients are most certainly worse off as a result. Client behaviour will make the biggest difference, so I’m asking our construction

industry leaders to take this opportunity to think about their contract and procurement processes and become champions for better contracting practice”.

The consultation document with the proposed revised standard form contract is now available on Standards NZ website and consultation on it closes on 30 June 2023. All feedback needs to be submitted through the Standards NZ consultation tool.

Register here for a webinar to hear from some of the review committee members on the key changes.

Why are the Construction Sector Accord and Te Waihanga involved?

A 2018 report by consultancy Entwine identified significant issues with public sector procurement and contracting of major in-

frastructure projects which impacted the construction sector.

Following this, the Government and industry signed a Construction Sector Accord in April 2019, acknowledging the challenges facing the sector and signalling a shared commitment to transform it. This included a commitment to a more visible pipeline of work and procurement practices that are fair, efficient and predictable. A guiding principle for the Accord is the building of trusting relationships.

In February 2019, the Government announced it would establish the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission, Te Waihanga to help improve how New Zealand coordinates and plans its infrastructure, makes the most of the infrastructure it already has, and ensures that investment in infrastructure delivers what New Zealand needs.

The Accord and Te Waihanga are working to improve how government and the private sector work together to build public infrastructure. Their joint commissioning of the NZS 3910 revision is one example of this work.

What is the NZS 3910 review working to address?

Some key things raised in the Entwine report that this review is aiming to address include:

– Large numbers of special contract conditions effectively make contracts bespoke and these are often not reasonable or well understood by both the public sector and industry. These modifications, along with the use of unfamiliar contract terms, can lead to misunderstanding, confusion, and ultimately, litiga-

tion.

– Specific concerns regarding special conditions that are becoming more common in public sector construction contracts relate to the use of time bars, the lack of liability caps, and the impartiality of the role of the Engineer to the Contract.

– Risk should sit with the party best placed to manage it. The common aggressive approach to risk transfer often means that all risk sits with the contractor. Contractors may also face ‘risk transfer by stealth’ where risk is transferred through appended contract documents such as design specifications. This is not sustainable.

Why is this so important?

In 2019, the construction sector contributed seven percent to New Zealand’s GDP and employed 10 percent of the national workforce. A thriving sector is vital to New Zealand’s social and economic wellbeing. Additionally, the public sector is a major client of the construction sector, spending around $10 billion a year on procuring infrastructure – an amount that could increase significantly in coming years, as we work to address the infrastructure gap identified in Rautaki Hanganga

o Aotearoa New Zealand Infrastructure Strategy. Given such investment, it’s vital that New Zealanders get the best value from this public spending.

Timeline for: Conditions of Contract for Building and Civil Engineering Construction (NZS 3910)

lished following a major revision of its predecessor NZS 623.

2003 – contract updated to align with Construction Contracts Act 2002. 2013 – contract underwent a limited scope review.

2018 – report by Infrastructure New Zealand identified significant issues with public sector procurement and contracting of major infrastructure projects.

Creating Value Through Procurement: A Report into Public Sector Procurement of Major Infrastructure Projects (Entwine, 2018)

2019 – report by Treasury Infrastructure Transaction Unit found a ‘culture of mistrust’ between public sector (clients) and private sector (contractors). And that this results in lots of special conditions that modify standard construction contracts and lead to misunderstanding, confusion and,

ultimately, litigation. It also found a number of related issues.

An examination of issues associated with the use of NZS Conditions of Contract (Treasury Infrastructure Transactions Unit, August 2019)

2021 – Te Waihanga and the Construction Sector Accord jointly commission the revision of NZS 3910 as part of addressing issues raised in the 2019 report. The revision is carried out by a committee appointed by Standards New Zealand and that represents the range of industry and client interests.

9 May 2023 – revised NZS 3910 contract out for consultation.

30 June 2023 – consultation closes.

October 2023 – Standards New Zealand aims to release the final NZS 3910:2023 contract.

SLABX200 is specifically designed to deliver high compressive strength and improve insulation under concrete slabs.

Developed by trusted Kiwi insulation experts EXPOL, this exciting new innovation has quickly become the product of choice for specifiers and others in the construction industry.

Why do I need to insulate the concrete slab?

Slab insulation is important not only to save on energy bills for future owners and tenants, but also to improve comfort.

Insulation will reduce heat loss and make the slab easier to heat. It offers a layer of projection against moisture and will provide a thermal mass to regulate temperatures.

If embedded floor heating is incorporated in a concrete slab-on-ground, the slab must be insulated so that heat from the slab is delivered up into the space above and not lost to the exterior and ground below.

Wayne Watson

EXPOL doing a visual check of SLABX200 to ensure it meets EXPOL’s high technical specifications.

Kiwi innovation leading the way in concrete slab insulation

A new generation of Expanded Polystyrene Board insulation has arrived

What makes SLABX200 different?

We chatted to Wayne Watson a Structural EPS and GeoFoam Consultant at EXPOL to see what makes SLABX200 different.

Wayne told us that due to its compressive strength rating of 200Kpa there is no comparable product on the market. He states “SLABX200 is specifically designed for insulating concrete slabs.

It has a rating of 200kpa at 10 percent compression or 20 ton per square meter.

Its high performance specs are designed to give Engineer’s peace of mind so that they can recommend this product with 100 percent confidence”.

The team at EXPOL recognised that there was nothing on the market that offered a cost-effective yet high performance solution to concrete insulation. So they set about to develop a product with New Zealand residential and commercial projects in mind.

The durable nature of SLABX200 means that it won’t degrade over time, keeping its integrity for the life of the structure.

Due to the lightweight nature of Expanded Polystyrene the product is also easy to handle and install making quick work of slab insulation on site.

How does this product compare to Healthy Homes standards?

The Healthy Homes insulation standards across New Zealand states than underfloor insulation should have an R-Value of 1.3 or

greater.

With several thicknesses available SLABX200 ranges from an R-Value of R 1.5 at 50mm thickness through to an impressive R6.0 at 200mm thickness.

Therefore, all thicknesses offer R-Values over and above the standards to ensure healthy and efficient homes.

How does this product work in my sustainable building project?

The team at EXPOL are committed to the environment. In a true closed loop process 100 percent of manufacturing waste is recycled in their seven recycling plants nationwide.

Expanded Polystyrene offers great eco credentials and at the end of a products life it can be turned into other EXPOL products.

The high performance of the SLABX product also ensures that your building project is sustainable to heat and cool and therefore leading to less energy consumption over the life of the building.

If you’d like to learn more about the SLABX200 product, the team at EXPOL are happy to have a chat. Visit their website on www.expol.co.nz or give the Technical Manager at call on 0800 86 33 73.

Technical Manager

The latest report from Auckland-based BWA Insolvency shows a steady increase in business failures across the country, with the triple whammy of price increases, supply shortages and decreasing demand affecting a range of different sectors.

In Q1 2023 (Jan 1 – Mar 31), there were 355 formal insolvency proceedings lodged in New Zealand compared to the corresponding period in 2022 when there were 277. That’s an overall increase of 28%.

The data offers a snapshot of the health of the business sector and New Zealand’s significant year-on-year increase in insolvencies is part of a global trend.

Governments worldwide were blind to the inflationary consequences of the free money dished out in Covid. Now the medicine to deal with the issue has become the poison and a 28% increase is consistent with the notion that an economy awash with liquidity while producing nothing camouflaged poor performing fundamentals. Many of these companies that have closed will have had issues for years, so when the tap was turned off, the underlying issues could not be managed.

Construction (90) and property and real estate (39) had the highest number of formal insolvency proceedings by sector in Q1 2023. Construction insolvencies were up 53% yearon-year, an inevitable result given the impact of price increases and reduced demand starting to bite. In the construction sector, you might need the money from Project B to finish off Project A but if Project C doesn’t come in, the whole thing starts to fall over.

Compared to the previous

Construction insolvencies up 53% in one year

It is no surprise that the construction had the highest number of formal insolvency proceedings out of any sector in Q1 2023, followed by property and real estate, BWA Insolvency founder Bryan Williams says

quarter, total insolvencies were down by 22% in Q1 2023, and this is more a timing issue than being reflective of a trend.

Manufacturing had a 61% drop to 14 and business services was down 42% to 31, while the retail sector had one of the highest increases for the quarter, up by 21% to 29.

While the year-on-year increase in insolvencies does not come as a surprise, the economy has not fared as badly as many expected. While inflation looks to have peaked along with the Reserve Bank’s interest rate hikes and Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland floods are likely to provide a boost in the construction sector

as there is high demand for repairs and rebuilds, insolvencies are expected to continue to rise this year as companies that have held on by the skin of their teeth through the Covid era now confront the headwinds of anti-inflationary measures.

The companies that will survive are those that have management capability and economic scope to allow them to shed expenses and adapt their business. The more captured the business is by fixed costs, the more difficult it is to rescale.

During tough times, it’s even more important for businesses to keep evaluating their operations.

Often failure can be avoided if directors con-

stantly review and refine the fundamentals of their business. You’ve got to cut your coat to suit your cloth and often a good way of designing that garment is to get help as soon as seems it is required.

BWA Insolvency has been tracking the data on liquidations, receiverships and voluntary administrations since 2012. The Registrar of Companies Office records the filings of companies that have gone into a formal state of insolvency. BWA then does a deeper investigation on each company and categorises them to show trends across different industries and regions.

How BIM Will Impact Your Future Infrastructure Projects

For nearly 40 years, building information modelling (BIM) has been a mainstay in architecture circles within the industry. But it’s only really gained ground in actual construction over the last two decades. If your company is among these near-future BIM adopters, what impact can you anticipate for your projects?

Financial efficiency with better use of capital project data

Having to rely on traditional construction practices involving 2D drawings and decentralised project details can be very limiting. Think of all the data that starts rolling in from day one. And it continues to accumulate when the completed project has been handed over to the owner’s operations and facility management team. It can be somewhat of a challenge, not to mention overwhelming, to track and understand everything.

Buy that’s where BIM can help. What often makes it stand out is the BIM model’s ability to link directly to all the details associated with each individual element within it, from the smallest nail to the largest volume of concrete. Those include all usable and actionable data, including size, current cost, replacement value, lifespan, warranty information and more. These specific details — or project intelligence

— can be leveraged again and again throughout the project’s construction and beyond from within its own common data environment (CDE).

The key is to enter all that data into the BIM model during the estimate phase so it can serve as an interactive reference going forward. That’s when it becomes the foundation for data-driven decision making. Based on the model-linked data, the owner, contractors and other stakeholders can evaluate and agree on the most appropriate material and equipment options to invest in for the project based on cost effectiveness, durability and/or repair record, for example.

Optimised design phase efficiency

Building your project through BIM before real

construction begins opens up opportunities to experience things you hadn’t been able to with traditional design methods. For instance, designing a structure through BIM modelling frees you up to experiment with variations on materials, exteriors, door and window placement, layout configurations, and more. You’re able to virtually

for change orders for anything from minor alterations to full-on budget-eating rework down the road. You preserve not only the original cost and schedule estimate, but your profit margin.

Maximising design phase efficiency with BIM means being confident that those choices you make for your future capital projects are cost-efficient with regard to the construction estimate and to future maintenance after handoff.

Interactive data to foster interactive teams

walk through a model for a realistic view of the flow, the aesthetics, the space, and even any design mistakes to fix on the spot.

The BIM process also acts like a risk mitigation tool enabling you to discover structural and spatial interferences through automated clash detection. Catching these early enables you to correct them at the design stage — before they’ve had a chance to be built into the structure, which would set the stage

Being able to access and interact with all your projects’ constantly updated details at such a granular level is the kind of transparency that sets the stage for better understanding of the build and more effective communication among project teams, including those disciplines that may not normally have had a seat at the design table.

With all the data linked from the model housed in BIM’s CDE, it serves as a central hub where everyone can interact with the wealth of information it contains. Teams can interact with each other — sharing updated models, asking and answering questions, suggesting modification ideas, reviewing solutions to problems oftentimes before they occur.

Tech needed to drive construction productivity

These challenges are already driving construction company insolvencies in Australia and technology is needed now more than ever to drive productivity in the industry, Autodesk says.

Its APAC Industry Strategist, Sumit Oberoi says the construction sector has unfortunately seen a number of collapses, with at least 20 construction companies in Australia folding in 2022.

“There are multiple factors involved such as a challenging procurement environment, labour and material shortages, extreme weather and supply chain disruptions.”

And yet, a total of $255 billion in Australian Government expenditure has been allocated to infrastructure over the four years between 2022-23 and 2025-26 – a three per cent increase over last year’s allocations. Additionally, in the October 2022-23 budget, the Australian Government announced an investment of almost $1.4 billion for vital land transport infrastructure projects in NSW alone to improve safety and reduce travel times.

“Government infrastructure and private commercial construction spend is increasing with the need to deliver more vital land, transport and housing projects across the country, and yet we’re seeing more construction companies under stress despite this increase in work,” says Oberoi.

“The industry is at a crossroad, and greater operational efficiencies are required to maintain competiveness. We have found that when a company adopts technology there is a direct positive impact on their revenue.”

This month, Autodesk announced the launch of its joint report with Deloitte, The State of Digital Adoption in Construction Report 2023, which surveyed 229 construction and engineering executives across Australia, Japan and Singapore’s architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) sector about how digital adoption affects them and what their outlook is in the face of such uncertain times.

Deloitte Access Economics Partner David Rumbens says the survey showed nearly nine in ten AEC businesses are investing in new technologies, and businesses with higher levels of digital adoption are more optimistic about the future and more likely to have international operations.

“Additionally, 61% of AEC businesses see using new technology to deliver projects as a key source of growth. Nearly two in five businesses are using Building Information Modelling (BIM) and cloud manage -

ment software, while over a quarter of businesses are expecting to implement these technologies in the future.”

Oberoi says it is clear construction companies across Australia increasingly understand that to remain competitive in today’s marketplace, they need to innovate.

“However, some of the challenges to increasing technology adoption in the industry will require addressing, including upskilling staff, change management and budget allocation.”

Additional key findings included:

• 96% reported that previous digitisation efforts have boosted their business.

• For nearly half (45%) of businesses, the impact from digitisation efforts has already been high or very high

• Firms using more tech than average are 30% more likely to be optimistic about the future

• Just under two in three of (61%) businesses said using new technology to deliver client work would be a main source of revenue growth

• Nearly half said that growth would also come from using digital tech to improve internal processes

• Singaporean businesses are most concerned about high material costs and labour shortages

• Australian businesses are most concerned about uncertain economic conditions

• Japanese businesses are most worried about economic uncertainty and lack of skilled workers.

About Autodesk

Autodesk is changing how the world is designed and made. Our technology spans architecture, engineering, construction, product design, manufacturing, media and entertainment, empowering innovators everywhere to solve challenges big and small. From greener buildings to smarter products to more mesmerising blockbusters, Autodesk software helps our customers to design and make a better world for all. For more information visit autodesk.com or follow @autodesk.

The construction industry is at a crossroad, with the need to deliver increasing infrastructure, transport and housing projects but in the face of global supply chain disruptions, extreme weather and increasing material and labour costs

In a new study, participants showed more empathy for an online anthropomorphic artificial intelligence (A.I.) agent when it seemed to disclose personal information about itself while chatting with participants. Takahiro Tsumura of The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI in Tokyo, Japan, and Seiji Yamada of the National Institute of Informatics, also in Tokyo, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on May 10, 2023.

The use of A.I. in daily life is increasing, raising interest in factors that might contribute to the level of trust and acceptance people feel towards A.I. agents. Prior research has suggested that people are more likely to accept artificial objects if the objects elicit empathy. For instance, people may empathize with cleaning robots, robots that mimic pets, and anthropomorphic chat tools that provide assistance on websites.

Earlier research has also highlighted the importance of disclosing personal information in building human relationships. Stemming from those findings, Tsumura and Yamada hypothesized that self-disclosure by an anthropomorphic A.I. agent might boost people’s empathy toward those agents.

To test this idea, the researchers conducted online experiments in which participants had a textbased chat with an online A.I. agent that was visually represented by either a human-like illustration or an illustration of an anthropomorphic robot. The chat involved a scenario in which the participant and agent were colleagues on a

Can an AI trick you into trusting it?

lunch break at the agent’s workplace. In each conversation, the agent seemed to self-disclose either highly work-relevant personal information, less-relevant information about a hobby, or no personal information.

The final analysis included data from 918 participants whose empathy for the A.I. agent was evaluated using a standard empathy questionnaire. The researchers found that, compared to less-relevant self-disclosure, highly work-relevant self-disclosure from the A.I. agent was associated with greater empathy from participants. A lack of self-disclosure was associated with suppressed empathy. The agent’s appearance as ei-

ther a human or anthropomorphic robot did not have a significant association with empathy levels.

These findings suggest that self-disclosure by A.I. agents may, indeed, elicit empathy from humans, which could help inform future development of A.I. tools.

The authors add: “This study investigates whether self-disclosure by anthropomorphic agents affects human empathy. Our research will change the negative image of artifacts used in society and contribute to future social relationships between humans and anthropomorphic agents.”

The Pasifika Medical Association Group emphasise

that AI has some limitations and that every researcher using it should check the output carefully.

While AI language models such as ChatGPT can help researchers write scientific articles, for instance by identifying potential collaborators, conducting a literature review, writing sections of articles, and producing abstracts, AI models can provide incorrect answers, or can introduce bias if information about a topic is left out of its data sources.

AI tools are not yet on par with medical writers, and while AI could probably be used as a writer for some parts of the article writing process, it shouldn’t be credited as a co-author.

AI can sometimes give incorrect answers or show signs of bias, which has the potential to be dangerous after a recent study found it is capable of eliciting empathy from humans

Adaptability, resilience & diversification –surviving as a small business

Many business owners were forced to pivot their careers in response to the pandemic. Now they may need to pivot once more, as Artificial Intelligence (AI) threatens to decimate entire workforces across multiple industries.

Small business insurance expert Sean Craigen says business owners may need to take the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and adapt their skillsets to this new environment that is swiftly changing.

“It’s important to factor in these black swan events

and technological shifts when assessing the risks they face,” says Craigen, Country Manager at business insurance service BizCover.

“While some risks can be mitigated by insurance, others will need to be reduced in other ways.”

John’s fall and the rise of Boots and All

The Covid-19 pandemic was a challenging time for many people across the world, and New Zealand small business owners like John Davey certainly felt its impact.

He and his wife, Trudi,

The pandemic brought about significant changes in the business landscape. Stories like John Davey’s may guide the way as new challenges such as AI are set to once again change the status quo

were running a successful international business that helped first year university students in 5 countries adjust to university life. Then the pandemic struck.

“It just got cut off at the knees,” says Davey.

“Covid came around and we were no longer able to do live presentations, which was our entire business model.”

Like many other industries, universities moved to an online model as lockdowns reduced the ability to meet in person.

With no customers coming through the doors, businesses had to come up with new ways to reach their customers, often through online channels.

The move was swift in New Zealand, with nearly 30% of the workforce quickly moving from centralised work locations to working from home.

Cafes started offering delivery services, while some retail stores started selling their products through online marketplaces.

But after looking to transition his business to film and distribute the videos online, Davey hit a snag with the production company and quickly fell into debt.

“We realised it was unsustainable.”

Fortitude and adaptability

Realising he had to adapt to the conditions, Davey turned his career towards his hobby, launching his handyman business, Boots and All Home Services, out of his home in Christchurch.

“Boots and All began as a response to the pandemic. It’s been two and half years now and I haven’t looked back since,” says Davey.

Being self-employed all his life, Davey knows a thing or two about what it takes to run a small business and change careers.

“I’ve made a living being a juggler, a corporate hoaxer, and a university mentor and now I’m making a perfectly good living being a handyman,” he says.

Davey’s dedication and flair even helped him win the APAC Business Awards last year, taking out the Most Creative Handyman on the South Island.

From landscaping and gardening to building repairs and everything in between, Boots and All covers a wide range of services.

Craigen says this approach helps businesses reduce the overall risk of being over-reliant on one service.

“You don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket only to find that the basket is being taken away because of reasons outside your control,” he says.

Davey says the lesson he learned throughout the pandemic was to approach his career with a sense of fortitude and adaptability in equal parts.

“You can do it – be prepared, do the research, and have a vision and stick to it.”

“But equally, when

conditions change and your vision is no longer viable, be adaptable and move your career forward with the times.”

AI job loss

Davey’s story is a testament to the resilience and adaptability required of small business owners in today’s ever-changing environment.

By pivoting his career in response to the pandemic, he was able to survive and even thrive during a time of significant uncertainty.

The same holds true for the looming threat of AI job loss.

While AI offers many benefits such as increased efficiency, cost savings, and improved customer experience, it also poses a significant risk to jobs across various industries.

Worldwide, more than 400 million workers are expected to lose their jobs to AI by 2030 – and that prediction was made in 2017 well before the rise of AI-generated search engines.

“It’s important for small business owners to recognise the risk of technological shifts and take proactive steps to adapt to this new reality,” says Craigen.

The bottom line

Assessing risk is an essential part of running a successful small business, and the Covid-19 pandemic has shown us the importance of being prepared for unexpected events.

One way to mitigate risk is through business insurance, which can help protect your business from financial loss due to unforeseen circumstances.

“Insurance is vital for my business,” says Davey.

But while insurance can help alleviate certain risks, other risks such as AI and pandemics need to be addressed proactively.

While Davey feels safe that AI won’t be taking his job anytime soon, he says he is still prepared to be adaptable and take proactive steps to adjust his business model to new technologies and changing market conditions.

“By being resilient and willing to pivot your career, like Davey did with Boots and All, small business owners can position themselves to survive and even thrive in the face of uncertainty,” says Craigen.

“Don’t wait until it’s too late – start assessing your business risks today and take steps to mitigate them.”

Visibility and AI in a world of security threats

Security breaches and incidents are occurring with alarming regularity, with the big names reported in the media, only a fraction of the actual number of beaches taking place

Chris Fisher – Head of Security Engineering APJ, Vectra

If we are to keep our people and systems safe, we must adopt a ‘not if, but when’ mindset and take steps to improve clarity of understanding and efficiency in catching and responding to threats.

Today’s world demands businesses to improve cybersecurity measures and gain greater visibility over threats and attack surfaces, else fall prey to sophisticated and targeted attacks. The more visibility an organization has, the better equipped to detect and respond in a timely, meaningful way. Luckily, with security of increasing importance,

there are more tools and solutions available, with the likes of artificial intelligence (AI) arming us with greater ability to understand our attack surface and catch threats fast.

The road to visibility and making unknowns, known

Let’s first consider unknowns. The last couple of years have led to significant changes in how we work, including a massive rise in remote working, notable changes in systems, including a huge rise in cloud adoption, greater financial

pressure, and a struggle to find talent. These changes have led to a larger attack surface, more vulnerabilities and exploits, more tools and alerts, and smaller, more overworked teams. Meanwhile, attackers are more evasive and more sophisticated in their infiltration methods.

Analysts at Gartner predict that nearly half of cybersecurity leaders will change jobs by 2025 due to mounting stresses and burnout. Part of the problem, as highlighted by Gartner VP Analyst Paul Furtado, is insider risk and the fact that traditional

cybersecurity tools lack the ability to provide visibility over threats not only from outside but within the network.

It is true that oftentimes our attack surface is far larger than we assume. Let’s say I’m leading a security team and I’m responsible for taking care of 4,500 employees. I have an asset register that has logged 4,500 laptops, 2,500 servers, and I have 7,000 assets total on my network. However, it also shows that I have 15,000 active IP addresses on the network.

It’s not an uncommon statistic to only see 50% of

assets logged as endpoints, with the additional IP addresses routers, switches, printers, cameras, telephones and other services. These additional IP addresses could be personal devices on a guest network, cloud computing services and container workloads, or even traditional server application services that are running hosts of activities that aren’t being monitored.

Security teams are now tasked with defining vulnerabilities within each of these items and executing controls in those environments. For instance, closed operating systems don’t allow endpoint control measures, but an attacker can still leverage it for an attack. As a result, having a full depth of view is critical, and this is where technology solutions can shine.

Gaining visibility over an attack surface means understanding threat vectors that sit beyond what you as a company own. Consider unauthorized access. An increasingly common term, this refers to the act of gaining access to a computer system, network or application without express permission or authorization – as the name suggests. As was reported this month, Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s Indonesian unit was recently heavily impacted by an incident involving unauthorized access of a web-based software application used for project management. Similarly, AT&T has recently publicly announced that back in January, an unauthorized person breached a vendor’s system and gained access to the company’s Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI). We can’t take this lightly. Gaining visibility and clarity through expert tooling

reduces the burden on security teams and greatly improves an organization’s ability to understand threats, while also giving the chance to remediate quickly and effectively.

The role of artificial intelligence in visibility and security

According to MarketsandMarkets, the AI in cybersecurity market size is valued at US$22.4 billion in 2023 and is anticipated to be US$60.6 billion by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 21.9% from 2023 to 2028. Meanwhile, IDC finds that cybersecurity has been identified as a top invest-

zero in on the behavioral aspect of attacks and considering all possible infiltration points. Attackers may be utilizing AI or automation to speed up their attacks, but this doesn’t inherently change their behavior. There are still certain actions they need to take to compromise a network, and these behavioral markers are what we can pick up on. Security teams are alerted to suspicious behavior, improving efficiency and helping them to sift through the noise of alerts.

We hear from many organizations that they receive far too many false positives from their security tooling and security teams are

otherwise all our clarity is for nothing. First, we determine what the attack is, and second what to do about it. Remediation is a helpful metric because it highlights that our goal is to remove the attacker from the environment but considers that there will be various ways to do this, depending on the systems and environment. There can’t be a blanket rule, we must be flexible, but we can create repeatable procedures that have flexibility built in. Metrics such as meantime to remediation can showcase the value and benefit of AI in terms of real outcomes and returns.

Moving forward we expect

ment APAC, with one of the leading categories being AI and machine learning. However, the study found that only 13% of Asia/Pacific respondents stated this was an investment priority, hinting that the region is lagging.

AI is a powerful tool in driving signal clarity and maximizing the use of our now more visible attack surface. AI enhances signal clarity by allowing us to

inundated with information that they don’t know what to do with. Leveraging AI is not about replacing a human being, it’s about making what we do far more efficient and clarified. We can automate mundane tasks to free up employees, amplify an attack, and improve our ability to respond.

When it comes to response, we must know what to do with the attack alerts that come through,

to see CISOs and security leaders invest more into tooling that improves efficiencies and supports security teams in sifting through alerts and uncovering threats in a sprawling and broad attack landscape. The solutions are there, and they’re getting better all the time, it’s just understanding what they are and how they can be integrated for maximum benefit.

Three reasons to be worried about AI

A group of doctors and public health experts are calling to suspend development of artificial intelligence until sufficient regulations are in place

The researchers cite three major reasons AI currently poses a risk to public health and safety:

• Its ability to ramp up surveillance capacity which can manipulate consumer choices, spread misinformation and social division and even enable government oppression.

• Current and potential development of military weapons that can kill entirely without human supervision

• The loss of jobs that will come as AI allows the automation of more types of work.

• Certain types and

applications pose “existential threat to humanity,” they warn.

Despite its transformative potential for society, including in medicine and public health, certain types and applications of AI, including self-improving general purpose AI (AGI), pose three sets of threats associated with the misuse of AI and the ongoing failure to anticipate, adapt to, and regulate the transformational impacts of the technology on society.

The first of these comes from the ability of AI to rapidly clean, organise, and analyse massive data sets consisting of personal data, including images.

This can be used to manipulate behaviour and

subvert democracy, they explain, citing its role in the subversion of the 2013 and 2017 Kenyan elections, the 2016 US presidential election, and the 2017 French presidential election.

“When combined with the rapidly improving ability to distort or misrepresent reality with deep fakes, AIdriven information systems may further undermine democracy by causing a general breakdown in trust or by driving social division and conflict, with ensuing public health impacts,” the researchers say.

AI-driven surveillance may also be used by governments and other powerful actors to control and oppress people more directly, an example of which is China’s Social

Credit System, they point out.

This system combines facial recognition software and analysis of ‘big data’ repositories of people’s financial transactions, movements, police records and social relationships.

But China isn’t the only country developing AI surveillance: at least 75 others, “ranging from liberal democracies to military regimes, have been expanding such systems,” they highlight.

The second set of threats concerns the development of Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS)—capable of locating, selecting, and engaging human targets without the need for human supervision.

LAWS can be attached to small mobile devices, such as drones, and could be cheaply mass produced and easily set up to kill “at an industrial scale,” warn the authors.

The third set of threats arises from the loss of jobs that will accompany the widespread deployment of AI technology, with estimates ranging from tens to hundreds of millions over the coming decade.

“While there would be many benefits from ending work that is repetitive, dangerous and unpleasant, we already know that unemployment is strongly associated with adverse health outcomes and behaviour,” they point out.

To date, increasing automation has tended only to shift income and wealth from labour to the owners of capital, so helping to contribute to inequitable wealth distribution across

the globe, they note.

“Furthermore, we do not know how society will respond psychologically and emotionally to a world where work is unavailable or unnecessary, nor are we thinking much about the policies and strategies that would be needed to break the association between unemployment and ill health,” they highlight.

But the threat posed by self improving AGI, which, theoretically, could learn and perform the full range of human tasks, is all encompassing, they suggest.

“We are now seeking to create machines that are vastly more intelligent and powerful than ourselves. The potential for such machines to apply this intelligence and power— whether deliberately or not—in ways that could harm or subjugate humans—is real and has to

be considered.

“If realised, the connection of AGI to the internet and the real world, including via vehicles, robots, weapons and all the digital systems that increasingly run our societies, could well represent the ‘biggest event in human history’,” they write.

“With exponential growth in AI research and development, the window of opportunity to avoid serious and potentially existential harms is closing. The future outcomes of the development of AI and AGI will depend on policy decisions taken now and on the effectiveness of regulatory institutions that we design to minimise risk and harm and maximise benefit,” they emphasise.

International agreement and cooperation will be needed, as well as the avoidance of a mutually destructive AI ‘arms race’,

they insist. And healthcare professionals have a key role in raising awareness and sounding the alarm on the risks and threats posed by AI.

“If AI is to ever fulfil its promise to benefit humanity and society, we must protect democracy, strengthen our publicinterest institutions, and dilute power so that there are effective checks and balances.

“This includes ensuring transparency and accountability of the parts of the military–corporate industrial complex driving AI developments and the social media companies that are enabling AI-driven, targeted misinformation to undermine our democratic institutions and rights to privacy,” they conclude.

BMJ Global Health

In 2020 the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) initiated a four-year research programme on digitalisation and occupational safety and health (OSH) with the aim of supporting evidence-based policymaking by providing deeper insights into the consequences of digitalisation on workers’ health, safety and wellbeing and how these are addressed at the research, policy and practice levels, as well as by describing examples of successful practices.

The report presents findings from EU-OSHA’s project on new forms of worker management through AI-based systems (AI-based worker management, AIWM) and OSH.

The aim was to identify gaps, needs and priorities for OSH and make recommendations for policy, research and practices in order to support decision-making discussed at a high-level workshop that concluded the project.

Based on the findings of the research, there are a number of recommendations that can be used to mitigate risks to workers’ safety, health and wellbeing that are associated with the design and use of AIWM systems.

• Making the design, development and use of AIWM systems human-centred, so

What are the health & safety risks of AI?

The introduction of AI in the workplace brings along innovative developments but also challenges and risks for workers’ safety, health and wellbeing, finds a report commissioned by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work

that they are used to support workers and leave humans in control. This would also guarantee that the compassion, empathy and care for workers brought by humans is not replaced by computer decision-making that solely tries to increase profits for a business.

• Ensuring workers’ participation, consultation and social dialogue. Workers should be included in the design, development and testing phases, and ex ante and ex post assessments, as well as usage of AI-based systems. The inclusion of workers at all stages of AI development and usage will contribute to making such systems trustworthy, human-centred and remaining under human control. This can also be achieved by enforcing the co-governance of AIWM systems, giving a say to workers on how AIWM is developed, acquired, introduced and used. This is key to preventing the possible risks of AIWM to

OSH.

• Fostering a holistic approach in evaluating AIWM systems encompasses including different stakeholders in the evaluation process, as well as ensuring that such systems are not evaluated in a vacuum; it also covers the effects AIWM might have on workers and society as a whole. The evaluation process should also be a dynamic process rather than a one-off exercise as AI-based systems are able to evolve through self-learning, which might lead to some systems that were safe in the past becoming dangerous for workers.

• Improving the design, development and use of AI-based systems by making the functioning and purpose of AIWM transparent, explainable and understandable. This might be ensured by introducing more binding requirements for AIWM providers and developers to ensure that workers’ health, safety and wellbeing

are already considered from the design stage. This should also go hand-in-hand with a strong enforcement policy ensuring that organisations comply with regulations.

• Establishing a clear line of responsibility indicating who is responsible for ensuring that an AIWM system does not cause harm to workers, break the law or malfunction. This includes establishing oversight mechanisms, remedies on how the negative effect of AIWM can be mitigated, and a course of action on what to do if managers fail to govern the AIWM system. Ensuring the line of responsibility could also go beyond simply stating that an employer in general is responsible for AIWM systems by instead requiring organisations to specifically name responsible managers.

• Improving workers’ privacy and data protection by increasing transparency about data collection and usage and introducing

better reporting mechanisms on misuses of AIWM tools. More specifically, workers should have the right to edit or block algorithmic inferences, and to contest automated decisions, and they should also be ensured full freedom to refuse to give consent to collect their data by additional provisions prohibiting lay-offs or any other negative actions against workers in these cases. This can be expanded upon by ensuring workers the right to an explanation for decisions made by algorithms. This includes what private data the algorithm used, how these data were collected and how it made its decision.

• Ensuring the right to disconnect for workers. In addition to its primary goal of guaranteeing workers the right to disconnect from work during non-working hours, it could also serve as a means to ensure workers’ privacy and personal data protection, in particular when it relates to a disproportionate amount of monitoring and surveillance not strictly necessary for a legitimate purpose.

• There is a need for knowledge exchange, dissemination and awareness building on AIWM and how it might affect OSH. This might include creating a dialogue involving relevant stakeholders, such as representatives of workers, employers, OSH

authorities, experts and AIWM tool developers. The dialogue should be open, allow all sides to express their opinions, and focus not only on what should be controlled, banned and mitigated, but also on how to ethically use AI-based tools.

• Worker privacy and data protection can also be improved by enhancing labour inspectorates’ capacities and cooperation with national data protection authorities. This includes improving their knowledge about AIWM and how it might affect OSH, as well as providing tools to labour inspectors for closer cooperation with data protection officers on questions relating to how AIWM and similar AI-based systems affect OSH.

• More education efforts that enhance workers’ and employers’ AI literacy by promoting qualification and skills development for AIWM applications. This would empower them to better understand AIWM systems and thereby be able to exert their right of consultation and participation in the design and implementation of such systems. Education and awareness-raising efforts should focus on ensuring that current and future AIWM systems put humans and their health, safety and wellbeing at the centre.

• Ensuring transparency between developers of AIWM systems and deploying organisa-

tions. This includes, but is not limited to, sharing with organisations how such a tool operates, how it makes decisions, what kind of risks and negative effects it can create, its benefits and drawbacks, and so on. However, if full transparency is not possible, any agreement should include the caveat that if a system causes harm and the deploying company has no right to demand that the system be changed, the system would be shut down at once by such system developers.

The usage of AIWM systems is steadily growing across companies and economic sectors, which can be explained by the fact that they allow organisations to improve productivity and efficiency. However, the introduction of such systems in an organisation can also lead to a large array of ethical and privacy issues, as well as to OSH-related risks.

Nevertheless, if AIWM systems are built and implemented in a trustworthy and transparent way based on workers’ information, participation, consultation and trust, and on the principle of minimisation of workers’ data collection and usage, AIWM systems may also provide opportunities to improve OSH in the workplace.

Trustworthy AIWM can be built by using a human-centred and human-in-command approach, guaranteeing equal access to information of employers, managers, workers and their representatives, and the consultation and participation of workers and

their representatives in the decisions taken with regard to the design, development, implementation and use of the AI-based management systems and in the decisions taken are key.

This also includes respecting human autonomy, preventing harm, ensuring fairness, and establishing the AIWM systems’ explicability. To a large extent, this can be achieved by considering workers and their health, safety and wellbeing from the very initial design phase of AIWM systems and related subsequent programming. This, in turn, will allow to ensure that when used, AI does not replace traditional human management practices but supports them.

Human-centric AI can also be further fostered by ensuring worker privacy and that the collected data is not abused by AIWM system developers or employers. There are also still some gaps as personal data, such as workers’ emotional wellbeing, can be derived using AIWM systems from public data, such as workers’ body language, facial expressions and tone of voice.

Worker privacy might be further fostered by ensuring that they have a right to an explanation of how AIWM systems that are used on them work. This includes an explanation on a number of aspects including what kind of data the systems collect, how this data is used, and how decisions are made based on this data.

Read the full report

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So if you're dedicated to workplace accident reduction and raising health and safety awareness, becoming a Site Safe member may be the move you're looking for.

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has been a driving force for creating a positive change in the health and safety culture of New Zealand's construction and wider industries.

Our organisational mantra is being "proud to be safe", and our ultimate goal is to reduce injury and harm to ensure Kiwi workers return home safe to their whānau at the end of each day.

To do this, we provide education and resources on best practice systems and behaviours known to improve on-site health and safety. We help develop future health and safety leaders and advise businesses on solutions that make a real difference.

First aid obligations as a contractor

A contractor’s work environment must be safe for everyone involved, which means having the proper first aid supplies and personnel in an emergency

This article will discuss some essential tips and strategies for contractors to help them meet their first-aid obligations.

Evaluate Your First Aid Needs

When it comes to health and safety on a job site, evaluating your first aid needs is the first step contractors should take. Taking the time to assess what kind of hazards may be present in any given work environment can help inform decisions about the type of first aid supplies and kits needed to keep workers safe and healthy.

The best way to do this is by checking the materials used, determining which jobs require special first aid training, and assessing the number of workers who may be working at any given time.

For instance, contractors who work with dangerous chemicals or other hazardous materials need access to emergency medical treatments like oxygen tanks and chemical suits.

Choose the Right Supplies and Personnel

Selecting the right

supplies and personnel is essential when planning and meeting your first aid obligations. Choosing the right supplies will ensure that you have all the necessary items in an emergency while selecting the right personnel will ensure that they are adequately trained to handle a medical situation.

When selecting your first aid supplies, you should ensure that you have enough of each type to treat any potential injuries. First aid kits should include bandages, dressings, antiseptics, scissors, tweezers, adhesive tape, gloves, and eye protection.

You should also consider

purchasing specialized supplies such as splints and stretchers if needed by staff members or visitors to your premises. Additionally, many workplaces are now investing in automated external defibrillators (AEDs), which can help save lives during cardiac emergencies.

Train Employees in First Aid Procedures

Training employees in first aid procedures is a critical step contractors should take to ensure they meet their obligations in providing adequate medical attention when necessary. While it may seem costly

or time-consuming, the benefits of equipping workers with the knowledge and skills to respond quickly in an emergency can help save lives and prevent severe injuries.

First aid training teaches people how to act in a medical emergency and ensures that advanced medical care is sought immediately. It equips employees with the skills to assess and respond to any type of injury or illness, including cardiac arrest, choking, strokes, heat exhaustion, snake bites, and more.

For example, if an employee falls off scaffolding or experiences any other serious injury, trained personnel onsite can help stabilize them until they get advanced medical care. Access to first aid materials such as bandages and splints can also be helpful if someone sustains minor injuries on the job site.

Create an Emergency Action Plan

Contractors should not forget the importance of creating an emergency action plan (EAP) when planning and meeting their first aid obligations. An EAP helps to ensure the safety of employees, customers, and visitors by providing clear instructions on how to respond in the event of an accident or medical emergency.

A comprehensive EAP should include detailed instructions for responders; these instructions should address critical areas such as:

• who will take charge and provide overall supervision in the event of an emergency

• who will initiate phone calls for help

• how vital medical information will be communicated

• how evacuations will be managed

• what personal protective gear (PPE) must be worn

• what type of transportation may be used

Finally, all personnel must be aware of the EAP

recording each incident and injury can provide invaluable insight into how to prevent similar situations in the future.

In addition, having a comprehensive record of all reported incidents helps contractors keep track of their progress toward meeting their first aid obligations.

Make Sure You Have Enough Supplies On Hand

before working at a job site to adequately prepare themselves in advance. Furthermore, periodic drills should be conducted to ensure that everyone involved understands their role and responsibilities in case of an actual incident.

Keep a Log of All Accidents & Injuries

When meeting first aid obligations, there is no better way than to keep a detailed log of all incidents and injuries. This method helps contractors plan effectively and ensure they meet the standards set out by their health and safety regulations. In addition,

This means they can more easily identify areas where the action is needed, such as additional training for workers or special equipment purchases. Furthermore, logging incidents can help them demonstrate compliance with health and safety standards if external audits are conducted.

Moreover, logging injuries is essential in providing appropriate care to injured employees or visitors onsite. Keeping detailed records of what happened can help ensure proper treatment is given accurately and timely. It also allows for a followup to be carried out when necessary and for other preventative measures to be implemented before further similar incidents occur.

Having a sufficient supply of first aid products ensures that any injuries or illnesses that occur can be treated quickly and effectively. This helps minimize the risk of further problems arising from inadequate treatment, such as infection or delayed recovery time.

In addition, contractors should have a comprehensive list of all the items they need to keep in stock to prepare them for an emergency. In particular, they should always have a range of personal protective equipment (PPE) such as gloves, masks, and goggles available to protect workers from potential hazards.

It is also essential for contractors to regularly check these supplies and replace them when needed. Doing this helps prevent employees from being exposed to expired or damaged products, which could pose additional risks if used inappropriately or incorrectly.

Conclusion

Meeting first aid obligations is an essential part of any contractor’s job. Proper planning and preparation can ensure that all personnel are aware of their roles, ensure sufficient supplies are available to treat injuries or illnesses quickly, and keep a record of incidents and injuries for future reference.

Following these steps will help protect workers and visitors on site and demonstrate compliance with health and safety regulations.

medshop.com.au

Company failures leave builder in wheelchair

Two construction companies have been held accountable for a cavalier attitude toward keeping people safe when working at height

The lack of planning and implementation of safety measures from both companies left a builder with life-changing injuries after they fell three metres from an unguarded second floor void on a construction site in September 2020, including a broken spine causing paralysis. The victim can no longer work as a builder as a result of their injuries and now requires a wheelchair to move.

at the North Shore District Court in March with a final decision on fine amounts and reparations delivered on 28 April.

Background

• Chunda Limited and JMK Homes Limited were both sentenced at the North Shore District Court on 9 March 2023, with the final decision delivered on 28 April 2023.

• A fine of $258,918.92 was imposed and reparations of $61,464.20 were ordered for Chunda Limited and a fine of $175,000 was imposed for JMK Homes Limited, and reparations of $46,386.20 ordered.

• Both companies were charged under sections 36(1)(a) and 48(1) and (2)(c) of the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015.

• Being a PCBU, having a duty to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers who work for the PCBU while the workers are at work in the business or undertaking, including while undertaking construction work did fail to comply with that duty, and that failure exposed workers to a risk of death or serious injury caused by falling from height.

• The maximum penalty is a fine not exceeding $1.5 million.

“The injuries the victim suffered were entirely preventable if controls, including edge protection had been in place to address the risks of a fall from height. They are inexpensive, easy to obtain, and easy to set up,” says WorkSafe’s area investigation manager, Danielle Henry.

workers using construction materials available on site. It was confirmed to WorkSafe this only happened after the incident. This is an indictment on the business and further underlines how avoidable this injury was.”

Chunda Limited had a worrying history around protecting its workers, and WorkSafe had taken a number of enforcement actions against the company since 2017 to influence the company to do better. This included seven prohibition notices, two sustained compliance letters, one directive letter, and two improvement

notices.

“WorkSafe had a number of interactions with Chunda Limited, and they were on notice to up their game and keep workers safe. This included providing them with guidance and information related to risk management. This is why this incident is, in our eyes, unforgiveable and inexcusable given the track record,” says Danielle Henry.

Read WorkSafe’s guidance on working at height

The employer, Chunda Limited, and the property developer, JMK Homes Limited, were sentenced

“This was demonstrated in the immediate aftermath of the incident when edge protection was installed by

Industry leader in soft fall protection on construction sites

Massey University rigorously tested all elements of the Safety Nets NZ system

With the enactment of the Health and Safety at Work Act (2015) it became apparent that there was a need to assure customers that they comply the requirements of the Act in safety measures for fall arrest.

“We needed to have our system independently analysed, engineered and ultimately certified. This meant that not only did the individual components of the safety net fall arrest sys-

tem have to be tested, the performance of the safety fall arrest system as a whole also needed to be studied,” says General Manager Craig Daly.

A team at the School of Engineering and Technology at Massey University tested a variety of drop heights and weights, different bracket centres, various net sizes and points where the load strikes the net.

“It even tested nets of different ages and repaired

nets, with the results being collated and analysed to effectively confirm that our safety fall arrest system works,” says Daly.

“This enables PCBU’s to discharge their responsibilities in regard to the requirements of the in the use of a system that is without risk to the health and safety of it’s workforce.”

When the nets have been installed and inspected by a Safety Nets NZ team and a handover certificate

completed by our certified rigger, the client can then commence works above the safe area of the net.

“All of our safety documentation has been produced in such a format as to ensure that it complements the overall site safety policy and manual that the Principal Contractor is required to establish on all projects,” says Daly.

Click here to read inspection guidelines

The newly released New Zealand Guide to Temporary Traffic Management sets out how road work sites should be managed, replacing the Code of Practice for Temporary Traffic Management.

The way we manage traffic around road work sites is changing to be based on managing specific risks for each site. The new approach has the potential to be more efficient and cost effective, at the same time as keeping road workers and road users safe.

Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency has said the new guidance aims to drive a culture change to improve safety for road workers and road users to work towards its vision of zero deaths and serious injuries on New Zealand’s roads.

People continue to die and be seriously injured at TTM sites. Between 2017 and 2021, there were 43 fatal crashes and 287 serious injury crashes at worksites – compelling evidence that a new approach was needed to temporary traffic management across New Zealand.

Waka Kotahi NZTA had listened to industry throughout the past years in triggering these systemic changes, reconciling more than 1,200 submissions of feedback as part of a Code of Practice review in the leadup to the creation of the new Guide and acknowledging the role industry must play in taking responsibility for safer outcomes.

There was a strong case for change, and the new Guide followed on from WorkSafe guidance for road and roadside workers issued late last year, which set out how to manage health risks, safety risks, and practices when setting up and operating traffic

Code of Practice replaced for road work sites

New guidance will see road work sites managed based on assessed risks, rather than the previous compliancebased approach, Civil Contractors New Zealand Chief Executive Alan Pollard says

control around road work sites.

The existing Code of Practice is intended to be gradually phased out of contracts, with transition to the new Guide anticipated to be largely completed by July 2024.

Road workers are used to working in the road corridor and are well-placed to understand and manage the direct risks. This is a fundamental shift to the way we think about traffic management, so it’s not going to happen overnight. But companies are used to

managing road work sites, so this change comes down to how we interpret new requirements in a practical sense.

Despite the case for change, these are significant updates and would take some time to embed, with the shift in thinking and practice requiring time and effort from civil construction companies.

Collaboration with clients in both the private and public sectors would be needed going forward, and CCNZ would be supporting members in addressing

any transitional challenges with good technical guidance and advice, alongside a new Industry Steering Group stood up in March 2023 to support the implementation of the Guide, which had its first meeting on 18 April.

The New Zealand Guide to Temporary Traffic Management is available at https://www.nzta.govt.nz/ roads-and-rail/new-zealand-guide-to-temporary-traffic-management.

The great unlearning

Safety News and AsiaPacific Infrastucture publisher Mike Bishara accepts an invitation from Optimum Training to join a four-hour safety training session

Iharboured a fervent hope that 25 years of development and refinement of Wayne Milicich’s injury prevention model might contain a few surprises.

The prospect of four hours in what I suspected could be a moralising lecture about how to lift a box was not enthralling. I could see, as we shuffled into the training centre, that the rest of the class felt the same, with a range of resigned, bored and cynical faces.

We were wrong. Boy, were we wrong. Participants soon learned “it was all about them” and their individual quality of life. And how 30 seconds after the training would break the harmful muscle memory that had taken over the way we did things.

“The programme is about unlearning what we learned between the ages of about eight to 13 years old and restoring all the movement patterns that we learned naturally during the first five to eight years of our life,” says Milicich.

For example, children all demonstrate best balance, unlike most adults. About 80 percent of the adult population “half breathe” from the apical area of the lungs as opposed to the diaphragm and lower lobes of the lungs, according to Milicich. “Children all naturally breathe from their belly, diaphragm, unless they are stressed.”

The most hardened cynics in our group quickly became engaged in the programme through a series of

practical truths, illustrated by a range of interactions, sometimes with a workmate.

We emerged half a working day later wondering who to sue for the preventable harm I have inflicted by following instructions. Life quality did not require lifetime dedication, just a reordering of basic instincts and tossing out a few myths. For our group, the quality of life had become anchored forever around balance and the 70/30 weight split between heels and toes.

We were converts to breathing out like weightlifters, sticking out our butts and letting tummies and abdominals do their thing - we discarded posture misinformation and stress and replaced it with comfort, a safe and secure back and no pain.

Optimum’s programme is of suggested solutions, not imperatives. “When we do this training, it is to benefit the individual. The company

clips the ticket and gets a benefit only when the individual benefits.”

“You cannot stand on a platform and tell people they are wrong. When a person’s belief is challenged, they will do anything to defend that truth as it is what they believe and know and have lived by. The only way to expose the false belief is to lead someone to find the truth for themselves.

In most cases following instilled poor habits is akin to

tapping yourself lightly on the head with a hammer for years. Do it enough times and you will end up permanently damaged.

You cannot separate work safety and whanau safety – they are two sides of the same coin, according to Milicich. Health and safety at home and work are just a component of our life quality. Not something that is separated out with its own rules to be applied at specific times and locations.

To a person, we emerged

70/30 balance is at the core of a quality of life

Optimum Training manager Dwane Stewart with an eager team of learners

ready to retrain our misguided muscle memory with the 30-secondsa-day-worth of drills to reprogramme our muscle memory that had taken us just four hours to master.

“The training empowers people to work out the truth for themselves and trust themselves. You are the only person who can determine what works best for you. Trust yourself to make a good call,” says Milicich. With no pen, paper or tables in the room, this programme is “pure adult facilitation of kinesthetic learning followed by cognitive understanding. It is simple to restore what was once in the muscle memory when we were five to eight years old. The original neural pathways just open up again,” he says. We learned and now retain what we learned.

“Stress is recognized as a major cause of MSD and auto-immune disease. We help people understand how their body manifests stress and equip them with the understanding and tools to manage themselves during stressful times,” says Milicich.

Optimum’s facilitation process has four specific steps. When applied correctly to the session, most often the learner has no idea of what

has happened, but they do recognise that their life has changed for the better.

Our session began with participation exercises which showed the overriding importance of balance.

The 70/30 rationale was enough to consign to the bin, along with a flurry of other medical myths, the long-held and totally wrong “bend your knees and keep your back straight” doctrine.

It soon became apparent why Optimum’s quality of life programme is used by many of the country’s most astute corporations in an age where time “off the floor” is critical to the bottom line and many companies look only to tick the boxes of compliance.

The benefits are equally cost effective, available and absorbed by SMEs. My class had only nine other participants so having a cast of thousands is not essential – or even recommended.

“Move Smart Think Smart is about addressing the underlying causes of muscle and joint pain that occur as we interact with inert objects both at work and at home. Home injuries affect the workplace. Workplace injuries affect the home and family,” says Milicich.

“Either way the quality

of life of a person is compromised. The traditional medical model calls the problem ‘nonspecific back pain and occupational overuse’. In fact, the pain is about inadvertent personal misuse of the body -- it is very specific.”

The bio-medical model reckons back pain is normal. “No, it is not normal,” says Milicich. “It is common, and the medical model is unwittingly part of the problem.

“Good posture” is nothing more than an old wives’ tale based on the military model of control and it is still believed today. A teacher tells children to sit up straight as a means of controlling the class. It is now portrayed as good posture.

“The medical field is littered with information and advice that was eventually proven wrong and retracted. Some of our western cultural beliefs are based in nothing more than decades or centuries old beliefs and mores.

The sad thing is that more than 80 percent of MSD's are inadvertently and unwittingly self-inflicted. People hurt themselves as they interact with inert objects, and they don't even realise it, says Milicich.

“The only way a box can hurt someone is if it is flying

through the air and strikes them. Or if it is moving on a conveyor and they put their hand where they should not.

A spade and the ground are both inert. To suffer pain while digging a hole is the person hurting themselves as they interact with the spade and ground.

The pain is a direct result of poor skills and technique of movement -- self-inflicted pain.

Most people blame something or someone for this self-inflicted injury. At that point, only the symptom can be addressed with drugs and therapy.

The problem returns as they repeat their old thinking and poor technique once the symptom has eased.

“No one deliberately hurts themselves. Given the opportunity, everyone makes the right choice,” says Milicich.

To a person, everyone was engaged for the full duration of training, always relevant, interesting, practical and beneficial to each person. We felt equipped and empowered to take back responsibility for ourselves. I personally still muse over and apply the learnings. My years of knee pain has gone.

30-second daily drills to re-programme muscle memory

How to attract, retain and support good staff

How has the Certification industry been disrupted by the Covid environment and what have we done to combat the changes

Ayear ago I wrote an article on this very same topic. At that time New Zealanders, and in particular those of us up in the Northern part of the North Island, had just come out of an extended period of restrictions.

Little did we know that we would return from the Xmas break and be pushed back into another series of restrictions.

As the year unfolded New Zealand finally threw open the doors and allowed both its people and international visitors to start the process of travelling freely up and down country again.

By the time this all came into being we had all spent more than 2 years managing Covid through an initial eliminate strategy, and ultimately a learning to live with the virus world

In the previous article I focussed on the core operational levers that we had been required to review and amend to allow our business to operate and effectively survive.

Now a year later all of the changes we had determined to make are either locked in or in the throes of being locked in.

The sticking point

There is one area that continues to be a significant struggle for all businesses throughout New Zealand, and we at Telarc are not isolated from it. This area is the way in which we attract, retain and support people in a post Covid world.

We are a normal business by New Zealand standards. We employ just under 50 people. We have workers

based from Auckland in the north down to Dunedin in the south. We have clients on Stewart Island all the way to Kaitaia in the north.

Five years ago the business employed predominantly European males with an average age of late 50’s to mid-60’s.

Covid’s arrival saw a number of those employees retire. When seeking to replace the retiring wave we had in front of us we found ourselves increasingly looking at and employing really good candidates from offshore.

So when you look at our business today it is a completely different demographic.

Half of the current team identify as NZ European. We now find ourselves with the balance of the team being born and educated in

places such as Iran, Pakistan, South Africa, Zimbabwe, India, Korea, UAE, Croatia, Germany, Canada, Fiji, the UK and Australia.

Encouragingly as we have on-boarded these people the male/female split is now lifted to 60/40. And our remuneration is based on role and competence within the role as well as performance.

Real world experience

Where have the workers gone? The change is not something we had planned for. What we discovered as we looked to replace our ageing workforce was that there weren’t many New Zealanders with the experience and qualifications we needed who were looking for work.

You may ask why? The challenge we have is that we need people with real world experience. We audit predominantly infrastructure management, manufacturing and construction companies. The building of those entities took place, in a good proportion of cases, many years ago.

As we, in New Zealand, have automated processes and downsized traditional operational training grounds for new talent coming into the industries sectors mentioned earlier we have seen the pool of “could be” auditors diminish.

On the other hand, in the countries I mentioned earlier, from whom we are sourcing qualified people, we are able to access people who have been involved in, or supported, the development and management of large-scale infrastructure projects. This is both in their own countries as well as within the regions they

have resided in / travelled to.

By having the experience they do, and also having been exposed to management system auditing, they arrive really well qualified to support the growing certification market that New Zealand is experiencing.

We still find the odd diamond in New Zealand who brings the work experience we need to the job. In most cases, though, the people who do successfully come to us do have a number of years of experience in a variety of operational roles.

This leads to our having to jointly invest between 9 and 12 months to be trained, and supported, to be confident when they start their stand-alone auditing journey. We continue to support and on-board local people, but as I have said the journey to being confident is a long one.

The other aspect to weigh into this equation relates to “where have all the New Zealand workers gone”. We hear all sorts of reasons including – early retirement, overseas experience (delayed or just the right time for it), moved to another country for higher pay or lifestyle, became a real estate agent or property developer pre-2022.

The list of reasons is getting longer and, to be honest, it is not something we can influence change in overnight. It is what it is and as a result we solve for today’s problems with the most suitable resource we can find. And on the whole the best qualified come to us from offshore.

New approaches needed

With the on-boarding of people from all over the

globe we have found ourselves facing dilemma’s that we wouldn’t have predicted in a pre-Covid world.

A good example of one of the challenges we face is dealing with spoken and written English. For a number of the people who have joined us English is the second, or third and even sometimes fourth language of choice for them.

So things that would normally be taken for granted, such as writing or defining orally a concisely worded observations or recommendation, can initially be a struggle for some of the new people we have employed.

Add into this the idiosyncrasies that make New Zealand business, and social banter, challenging for new arrivals results in both our clients and our new auditors ending up being a little frustrated in finding com-

mon understanding.

We recently ran a structured approach towards better understanding some of the dilemma’s auditor’s face when getting out into their first “stand alone” engagements.

One of the biggest insights related to keeping the onsite auditing engagement calm. When managing an audit the last thing the auditor wants is for the audit to turn into a “voices raised” and “defensive” engagement. Finding ways to put all parties at ease is a skill. And when achieved allows the engagement to proceed with minimal flare ups or disruptions.

Even for New Zealand born and raised auditors, out on their first “stand alone” audits, keeping the engagement calm is challenging.

They come to the engagement understanding

Telarc is a Jas-anz Accredited Certification Body which provides qualified, competent, New Zealand auditors, who are industry coded to provide relevant and impartial intervention for a large range of New Zealand business regardless of the business size.

The body is able to provide New Zealand business with an individual or a team of auditors capable of assessing one or multiple standards across one or multiple sites.

While the key priority of any commercial relationship is to deliver a product or a service, there is an increasing need from businesses to have confidence that their tendering parties and suppliers are managing their business in a manner that won’t negatively impact the supply relationship.

There are increasing demands from buyers for their suppliers to provide confidence that they are operating their business in a manner that is delivering good quality and environmentally

aware products (ISO 9001 and ISO 14001) while managing workers in a way that protects worker well-being and safety (ISO 45001).

There is more demand across other areas such as ethical work practices, Asset Management (ISO 55001) and IT Management (ISO 27001).

Accredited Certification looks for gaps, risks and improvements in the way that work is actually done versus the way it is planned and communicated.

This provides visibility of where work practice and or documentation anomalies lie in all levels of the business. This then leads to improvement activity so Certification can be granted.

The second growing area that is driving minimisation of risk through Certification is through board and senior leader directives.

Over the last decade, legislation and regulations have looked to push culpability for sub-optimal work practices towards senior leaders and boards.

the idiosyncrasies of New Zealand and its language. So when a recent arrival to New Zealand who is operating with English as a 2nd or 3rd language is trying to i.) Interpret the spoken word while, ii.) trying to keep the client calm and engaged, the world can turn messy very quickly.

I haven’t even touched on the writing of reports in this overview as this then creates the next downstream challenge for the new arrivals.

For those of you reading the article you probably are thinking why bother, if it is going to create all the frustrations alluded to above?

Enthusiasm for the job

What we have found is the people we are hiring from off shore are intelligent, motivated, qualified, “keen as” workers who want to live in a country where they can safely raise their family while working hard.

When I was growing up, the qualities I see in the people moving here is what differentiated New Zealand from other countries and made our people successful all over the world.

To that end increasingly we are going to become more reliant on workers coming from countries around the globe. Understanding their culture and their difficulties when integrating into the New Zealand way is going to be a challenge we will have to solve for.

The above is one example of the challenges we are facing in a post-Covid world. There are a number of others, but for this exercise I think it is better to focus on one area to highlight the changes we will all have to deal with over the

next few decades.

Goodbye good old Kiwi business

Once an organisation accepts that the days of being the “good old kiwi business” are gone and that the new world order requires a very open, culturally diverse mind-set the overarching people management ethos changes, significantly.

The key is to embrace the change and find ways to adjust our mind-set to remain successful, rather than fighting it.

Which is a nice segue into the final point of this overview.

The greatest challenge post Covid is mind-set. Trying to bring back the past, trying to replicate what we want and trying to carry out work in a way that was successful before is not going to be easy.

Mind-sets need to change and need to adjust to a new world order in which the globe is becoming a huge resourcing opportunity, and that we should get the best people we can before someone else does.

Risk comes in many forms and

certification

helps over a variety of levels

Philip Cryer is CEO of Telarc, a Crown Entity subsidiary with a vision to provide its clients with end to end, impartially audited Food & Wine and Management Systems Certification and Training services.

Over half of NZ workers exposed to carcinogens

Findings from a recent WorkSafe report may shed light on why cancer and respiratory diseases contribute to 70% of all work-related deaths in New Zealand

WorkSafe, in collaboration with the Occupational Integrated Database Exposure Assessment System (OccIDEAS) team and Research New Zealand, conducted the New Zealand Carcinogens Survey to estimate the current exposure to carcinogens among New Zealand workers.

Carcinogens are agents that, according to research, are known or likely to cause

cancer in humans.

The recently published survey report found that:

• Over half (57.5%) of workers are probably exposed to at least one carcinogen at any level

• 3% are probably exposed to five or more carcinogens at any level

• Over half (53.1%) of workers are exposed to at least one

carcinogenic agent at a low level

• Nearly three in ten (28%) workers are probably exposed to at least one carcinogen at a high level.

In New Zealand, carcinogens and airborne substances are probably associated with one-third of work-related harms. Cancer and respiratory diseases contribute to 70% of all work-related deaths.

Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA), businesses have a responsibility to protect workers from this exposure.

Findings from the survey will support the Government Health and Safety at Work Strategy 2018–2028 and WorkSafe’s carcinogens and airborne risks programme.

View the full report

Ensuring adequate respiratory protection

Worksafe NZ's Clean Air programme was their first targeted intervention on workrelated health. Their goal was to reduce the risk of respiratory ill-health caused by exposure to airborne contaminants in the workplace.

A key part of the programme is to raise awareness and eliminate or control the health risks of silica dust, organic solvents, welding fumes, wood dust, carbon monoxide and agrichemicals.

In New Zealand cancers and respiratory diseases from airborne substances account for at least 31% of total work-related harm and

an estimated 650 deaths per year. They account for 79% of the estimated 750 – 900 people who die annually from work-related health causes - Source: Worksafe NZ. More information here: https://www.worksafe.govt. nz/topic-and-industry/ work-relatedhealth/ carcinogens-and-airbornerisks/

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• Change filters regularly.

• Only use the filters supplied by the manufacturer of the respiratory mask to stay compliant.

• Get “fit tested”.

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It is incumbent on PCBU’s to ensure that workers are not exposed to carcinogens and airborne risks

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Chemical safety relies on meaningful cooperation

Expanding government-industry partnerships to help business operators should be a no brainer. Inviting enquirers to read the regulations falls well short of educational expectations

Increasing community concerns about vulnerability to unwanted chemical exposure and damage to our fragile environment places additional pressure on both suppliers and users of the chemicals.

We all need to sustain and improve our quality of life and these products must be safely managed throughout their life cycle.

places, by responding to workers’ suggestions about improvements.

Conscientious business operators can add value by sourcing accurate, cost-effective workplace chemical safety advice and compliance tools from their suppliers, industry partners and Responsible Care NZ.

However, they all obtain their chemical requirements from suppliers and can benefit from product stewardship advice and cost-effective industry compliance initiatives.

Today, chemical suppliers and their customers continue to adjust to the Covid operational environment.

They struggle with supply chain delays, the loss of experienced staff, frustration with unanswered queries to risk-averse authorities, inflexible and prescriptive regulations, rising compliance costs, diminishing resources and increasing public chemical safety expectations.

While 130,000 businesses are reportedly captured by the Hazardous Substances and Major Hazard Facilities regulations, the official mantra of “600-900 persons seriously harmed each year by unwanted exposure to chemicals in their workplace” presumably applies to all of the country’s 530,000 workplaces.

Downgrading the flawed but effective HSNO Certified Handler requirement has inadvertently undermined an invaluable capability.

The action deprived businesses, particularly SMEs, of an immediate and recognisable source of workplace chemical safety and compliance advice -- a safe chemical handling capability and emergency response knowledge – critical when a chemical incident occurs.

PCBUs and SMEs must now devise their own solutions to ensure employees are competent to safely handle the chemicals with which they work.

Chemical industry leaders are moving away from relying on lagging indicators of safety performance in favour of identifying safer work practices and work-

A proven strategy is government agencies collaborating with proactive industry associations to best achieve workplace safety aspirations. The problem is that SMEs rarely join associations.

Responsible Care NZ extols less regulation in favour of enabling business operators to be increasingly self-sufficient, using cost-effective products and services such as site compliance assessments and specialist training.

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Chemical suppliers continue to help customers achieve workplace chemical safety aspirations through product stewardship initiatives.

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Responsible Care is a global voluntary chemical industry initiative developed autonomously by the chemical industry for the chemical industry.

New Zealand’s infrastructure deficit — can the private sector bridge the gap

Cyclone Gabrielle and other extreme weather has had a big knock-on effect on transport and infrastructure plans, as previously signed-off transport priorities look set to be rearranged, says Infrastructure New Zealand Policy Director

Michelle McCormick

The Government has strongly indicated that its draft Policy Statement on Land Transport 2024-2034 is now likely to pivot away from climate change mitigation measures and towards resilience and rebuilding damaged roads, highways and bridges.

These swirling priorities make it difficult for councils to develop their Regional Land Transport Programmes that’s for sure. In* essence green projects such as cycleways and bus lanes look like they may be de-prioritised in order for us to reconnect our regions and make our roads more

resilient.

The National Land Transport Fund which was already under pressure with a two billion dollar deficit is running on empty.

There’s clearly not enough money to go around. The fact that we have to choose one thing over another is worrying, and a cause for

concern when considering our future infrastructure needs. What it does do, is shine a big spotlight on the question of how we pay for all this.

At the turn of the year we were already grappling with a $210 billion infrastructure deficit, severely hampering our resilience and progress

as a nation. Now, things look even worse.

Governments must react and change direction of course sometimes, but infrastructure shouldn’t, and doesn’t need to be, a political issue. The ongoing list of unfunded announcements and vanity projects needs to stop. A pipeline of essential work should be guaranteed outside of election cycles, with the associated funding locked in. It is time for our leaders and politicians to really answer the question of how we as a country will fund the infrastructure we so badly need.

Right now we are in crisis management, prioritising opening up lifeline roads and reconnecting isolated communities. There is a likeable energy from both the Government and opposition parties around building back better and coming together to make infrastructure a bi-partisan issue.

If only that same drive, creativity and can-doattitude was extended to the long term planning of infrastructure. Decades of underinvestment have left us playing catch up. Our future infrastructure bill is eye-watering even without considering the recent damage caused by extreme weather events. There may also need to be a conversation around the levels of service, quality and standards, a gravel one-lane connection maybe all we can afford now in some places.

Our current approach to funding and financing infrastructure is not working. Today, we are spending around 5.5 per cent of New Zealand’s GDP on building public infrastructure. To meet the identified

infrastructure deficit, this would need to increase to nearly 10 percent of GDP or $31 billion annually.

The Government has committed to almost $80b over five years for a raft of large infrastructure project construction, but it simply

infrastructure. When we do invest, too often our critical infrastructure projects, or large programmes of work, are identified without a robust funding plan. Resulting in a scramble for government money from one of the many capital

of alternative financing opportunities out there that we are simply not leveraging.

Overseas, private funding of infrastructure has become commonplace. In 2022, it was another record year for global unlisted infrastructure fundraising, with funds raised in the first three quarters of 2022 exceeding the full year for 2021. New Zealand is and can continue to be an attractive destination for international infrastructure investors, but only when there are actually deals to be done and projects to deliver.

The public and private sectors of course have different motivations when it comes to infrastructure projects. Generally speaking, the former is focused on public benefits like the provision of goods and services such as water, transport, communication and education. For the private sector, a commercial benefit sits alongside its expertise in project delivery.

will not be enough. We must also remember it’s not just the cost of building the infrastructure but also the ongoing costs and maintenance. It is clear no government can pay for everything; part of the answer almost certainly lies within the private sector.

Private investment needs to be an attractive option if we are to make the progress required. Aotearoa needs a sustainable flow of funding and financing for

funds.

One way to encourage private sector funding as part of any project’s development is to ensure it is at least considered right from the start, as any business case develops. The gap is not the tools or money itself, it is that we are not using them.

While public-private partnerships (PPPs) have been advanced here, to varying degrees of success, there is an abundance

In reality, however, public and private interests can rub along together just fine. As the global pandemic showed us, delivering tangible socioeconomic benefits is in everyone’s interest and there needs to be a balance of expected returns from the investment and an appropriate harmony of risks and benefits.

The private sector should be considered from the outset. Private businesses across the world are indeed addressing the most challenging problems of our times, from climate change to chronic disease, social exclusion, and material poverty. Infrastructure should be no different.

Shortsightedness and poor planning lead to property buyouts

The failure of successive councils and governments to prepare for inevitable flood events has left ratepayers and taxpayers burdened with bailing out the owners of weather-affected properties

The Government will enter into a funding arrangement with councils in cyclone and flood affected regions to support them to offer a voluntary buyout for owners of Category 3 designated residential properties. It will also co-fund work needed to protect Category 2 designated properties.

Minister of Finance Grant Robertson says the facilitation work that the cyclone taskforce had been engaged in to undertake risk assessments has been completed.

“From here the councils will lead engagement with their affected property-owners. This will help councils get the right solution in the right place and avoid significant financial hardship for property owners.”

For properties designated Category 2 (where it is determined community and/ or property level interventions are feasible to manage future severe weather event risk) the Government will work with councils to help them build flood protection and other resilience measures. The initial support for this is already in place with $100 million initial funding announced in Budget 2023. People in homes designated as Category 3 properties

(where future severe weather event risk cannot be sufficiently mitigated) will be offered a voluntary buyout by councils – the costs of which will be shared

Finance Michael Wood says initial indications are that across all regions there will be about 700 Category 3 properties, and up to 10,000 homes in Category 2 areas.

dented, but they were not unexpected.

Last year, then Associate Minister of Local Government Kieran McAnulty received a report titled Vulnerable Communities Exposed to Flood Hazard.

between the Government and councils.

“The focus of today is on residential properties. We are working with sectors, such as the horticulture sector on possible targeted support for commercial operators, and on regional plans that will provide overall support for recovery and rebuild,” Robertson says.

A parallel process is also underway to engage with Māori, including on appropriate processes for whenua Māori. Engagement with those communities will be led by the Cyclone Response Unit, Te Arawhiti and local councils. The process will ensure that there are equitable outcomes for these communities.

Associate Minister of

Robertson says there is no precedent for the response required, but there will be more events like this in the future.

“As a Government we have to strike a careful fiscal balance between supporting affected communities and not making all taxpayers bear the cost.”

This is a cost that could have been avoided if it were not for decades of underinvestment in infrastructure, poor planning and the shortsightedness of building homes in flood-prone areas without the necessary flood protections.

Proactive, rather than reactive policy is what is needed here. Robertson may call this year’s extreme weather events unprece -

“This report identifies 44 communities that have a high level of socio-economic vulnerability and are exposed to flood hazard, are not planning to build flood protection infrastructure according to council LTPs, and communities in the wider district may have limited financial capacity to fund responses to flood risk,” it says.

“More than half of the vulnerable communities exposed to flood hazard are in the upper half of the North Island.”

This is not a new problem, with the report making reference to the July 2021 flooding of Westport, which revealed the challenging mix of flood hazard and financial limitations the community and councils face.

The report spelled out to the Government that what happened in Westport could happen in the North Island unless action was taken.

That action is at last being taken, but it is too little, too late.

W i t h y o u r s u p p o r t w e c a n c o n t i n u e t o p r o v i d e p ra c t i c a l h e l p , c a r e a n d c o m f o r t .

A c c o m m o d a t i o n a n d h o m e v i s i t s a r e j u s t t w o o f t h e w a y s w e s u p p o r t N e w Z e a l a n d e r s a f f e c t e d b y c a n c e r.

Campaign launched against ‘undemocratic’

RMA reform

Creating Regional Planning Committees to take over local councils’ planning responsibilities will only result in higher building costs, more red tape, no local control and more co-governance, the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union says

Under the Government’s plan to cut red tape created by the Resource Management Act, which has driven a housing and infrastructure crisis, three new pieces of legislation will be introduced to replace the Act.

The Natural and Built Environment and the Spatial Planning Bills are already in the select committee process, with the committee’s report due 27 June. Submissions

closed 5 February.

Environment Minister David Parker says the two bills will work together to cut red tape, lower costs and shorten the time it takes to approve new homes and key infrastructure projects.

“More than 100 RMA plans will reduce to just 15 regional-level plans across the country. The time taken to prepare them will reduce from 10 years under the current system to a maximum of four years.”

What this means is, like with Three Waters, decision-making powers will be stripped from local councils and centralised. Fifteen co-governed, unaccountable Regional Planning Committees will dictate the planning rules for houses, businesses, farms and the environment. At this rate there won’t be much left for local councils to do.

For taxpayers, the proposed regime is even worse than the RMA. The

legislation’s contradictory objectives and undefined Treaty obligations will open up the new authorities to constant court action. The result is higher costs and more red tape, making it harder for New Zealanders to get things done, meaning we all end up poorer. A petition has been launched by the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union calling for the new Regional Planning Committees to be scrapped based on the following arguments.

No local control

A democratically elected local council may only have a single representative on a Committee of 20 or more representatives.

For example, decisions on a new housing development in Waitaki may be taken by a Committee in Christchurch where there is only one representative from Waitaki.

Federated Farmers warn that this will “reduce democratic engagement” while Greater Wellington Regional Council argues that “the… Committees have little democratic accountability and risk side-lining regional council functions”.

These Committees must also produce a plan for the whole region that complies with a National Planning Framework dictated by a Minister sitting in the Beehive. A local council can then only grant consents if they adhere to this plan.

Castalia contends that the increase in centralisation will “increase the likelihood of errors”.

Higher building costs

These new rules and plans will give far more grounds to object to the granting of a resource consent.

Consents will also only be granted for 10 years, which Federated Farmers argue is “not long enough to provide investment certainty

for investors to make meaningful decisions”.

Councils are also likely to be even more risk-averse than they are now given the presumption in favour of environmental protection.

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court also warns that “extensive legislative reform is usually followed by a period in which the meaning and effect of the new legislation is litigated through the courts”. This will likely come with a significant legal bill and result in higher costs of development. This new bureaucracy will have to be paid for by ratepayers, despite councils having next to no control over what these Committees do and no way of opting out.

More red tape

The Committees are required to consider 18 ‘system objectives’ such as affordable housing, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and promoting a variety of land uses.

The Committees must “actively promote the[se] outcomes” along with four other decisionmaking principles such as “integrated management of the environment”.

The legislation does not prioritise these objectives but rather gives that power to the Minister to decide.

Business NZ argues that having this means that there is “little or no ability to make cost/benefit decisions in terms of trade-

offs between potentially competing, or in some cases even conflicting, system outcomes.”

If the Minister’s prioritisation is unclear, the default requirement is to exercise caution and favour environmental protection over all other factors.

Unconstitutional cogovernance

A minimum of two unelected iwi and hapū representatives will be on each of these Committees, but the composition must be mutually agreed with councils.

A recent Waitangi Tribunal report argued that 50/50 co-governance should be required on these Committees in order to comply with the Treaty.

The new National Māori Entity will put pressure on the new Committees to ensure they abide by Treaty principles. The Entity can also review decisions anyone made by any person or body acting under these new laws, including the Environment Court, which the Supreme Court Chief Justice, Helen Winkelmann, has warned is “inconsistent with New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements”.

The local iwi and hapū can issue statements on Te Oranga o te Taiao – or the natural wellbeing of the environment – to the Committees for which there is no provision for appeal in the new laws. The New

Zealand Initiative warns that such statements are “untested, undefined and unpredictable”.

How will it work in practice?

Building or Adapting

Your Home:

• Central Planning Committees will decide where and how you can build and make changes to your home. These Committees will have to promote 18 competing ‘system outcomes’ that are ill-defined and create complexity. This would likely mean decades of legal challenges before there is any certainty around what you can and cannot do to your own property.

• The National Planning Framework must also comply with the Emissions Reduction Plan, which the Federated Farmers have warned could see the “Committees implementing rules requiring residential buildings to reduce emissions (presumably reduce use of natural gas for heating and cooking).”

• If you don’t like a decision made by these unelected Committees, you won’t be able to vote them out.

Major Projects:

• The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union believes the proposed laws are vague, complex and often contradictory. Industry-leading organisations have expressed strong concerns that it will become near impossible to undertake any major infrastructure development if these law changes go through.

• The Electricity Sector Environment Group warns that the proposals would mean it would be significantly more difficult to get consent for major renewable energy projects such as wind, hydro and geothermal power and therefore means “consumers would ultimately pay more for power from existing generation sources, as well as higher prices for

power from new generation”.

• Decisions will also be taken far away from the communities they affect. For example, whether a new geothermal power plant in Taupō gets consented will likely be decided by unaccountable bureaucrats in Hamilton.

Environment:

• The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union thinks the conflicting objectives in the proposals will end up leading to worse environmental outcomes than under the status quo.

• With a law change as significant as this, it is important that it is done well to ensure that it achieves its intended outcomes. The Commissioner for the Environment recommended against rushing the proposals through before the

election due to their “failure to ensure that environment outcomes are of primary importance through the addition of a raft of competing additional outcomes.” The Government has said it wants to proceed anyway.

• The proposed laws lack the ability to efficiently and effectively reduce things like water and air pollution. Kevin Counsell, an expert in environmental economics has warned the Government’s approach “seems likely to make it even more difficult for externalities to be internalised.” Without ensuring that those who pollute bear the cost of doing so, environmental outcomes are likely to get worse.

Businesses:

• These Committees will

create 30-year plans to determine where you are allowed to do certain activities. If land is designated as an area specified for a particular kind of farming, for example, it will be very difficult to change the land use to something else.

• According to Contact Energy, the proposals “simply provide more ammunition than ever before to frustrate and stall, obfuscate and delay critical investment”.

• The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union thinks that the end result is a New Zealand where it is even more difficult, and expensive, to do business or build quality infrastructure.

Read the full report by the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union

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National’s new housing strategy ‘a mixed bag’

It’s important to start with the primary outcome of a National-led government implementing this plan – the ability for Councils to opt-out of the MDRS. Instead, National plans to introduce ‘Land for Housing Growth Targets’ for Tier One and Two urban areas in New Zealand. This gives Councils the ability to opt out if they provide “30 years’ worth of developable housing capacity” in the short term, elsewhere through higher density in centres and walking catchments, or in greenfield developments.

This doesn’t go far enough. Many councils will not have to do much to meet 30 years of theoretical capacity in their district plan. It does not mean we will actually get the capacity where we need it, which is in the most central locations close to jobs, education and services. National’s plan provides an opportunity for councils to opt out of this if they face challenges from the existing residents. Furthermore, full implementation of the MDRS in district plans, would almost deliver more than 30 years theoretical capacity. For the development market to function effectively, there is a need for significantly more theoretical capacity, to ensure that enough financially feasible sites can be purchased and

developed. As a headline, 30 years can seem to be enough but a majority of the supply will likely not be realised. Therefore, it needs to go further. To meet the 10-to-30-year demand will require significantly more capacity again. I think we should be going much further now and the MDRS, ideally with some improvements, would be a step in the right direction.

Secondly, this policy doesn’t necessarily ensure housing supply where it is required or ensure variety of typologies and sizes of dwelling can realistically be built to meet varied demand. We should be seeking to enable an abundance of housing capacity, which will support higher housing supply and choice, in terms of typology and location.

However, while they are backing down to some extent on the MDRS, which is disappointing, there are some good new policies in this plan.

Mixed-use development around rapid transit

Firstly, National intends to strengthen the NPS-UD requirement for councils to zone for at least six storeys in the walking catchments of rapid transit stations and major town and city centres, to enable mixed-use development.

This would be excellent.

Enabling mixed use development, particularly for retail and commercial floors to residential buildings is critical to supporting medium to high density living, with access to daily needs provided through proximity. The only concern I have with this policy is its potential to slow down the “fast track” plan change processes underway to enact the NPS-UD. In the medium term, we should be aiming for small scale retail and commercial to be a permitted activity in all residential neighbourhoods to promote local living.

Removing greenfield subsidies

National also plan to require local councils to ensure that infrastructure for new greenfield development will be funded from rates and levies applied to the new development, instead of being subsidised through rates from other communities. As I have previously covered, given the incredibly high infrastructure costs of greenfield development, the current subsidies for greenfield development make little sense, when it also contributes to higher emissions from our transport system. I think this would be a seriously positive climate perspective, as it could further shift demand towards urban intensification and allow

councils to concentrate on the existing urban area.

Strengthening central government powers and financing mechanisms

The second section of their policy focuses on infrastructure financing tools. All of which vary from fine to good. National plan to reform the Infrastructure Funding and Financing (IFF) Act, which enables the use of Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) to raise debt and fund infrastructure. I have previously covered the use SPVs in Tauranga which was extremely positive in my view but is a rare example. It is not clear why there has not been greater uptake of this financing mechanism but National is proposing to put it all within the management of Crown Infrastructure Partners, in aim to simplify the process. National also plans to introduce value capture mechanisms for major projects that unlock housing growth, as major projects tend to increase land values in the surrounding area to the benefit of existing land owners, at cost to the public. This could be really positive for major transport infrastructure projects and based on previous comments from other parties, this could have strong bipartisan support. My primary concern is the wording of

Though National’s decision to somewhat back down on the Medium Density Residential Standards (MDRS) comes as a disappointment, there are some good new policies in this plan, Better things are possible author Malcolm McCracken writes

An 8 storey, mixed-use development in Greenlane, Auckland with a small supermarket on the ground floor, shows exactly the sort of development we should be encouraging around our rapid transit stations.

the document, which seems to suggest public transport infrastructure is only required for existing urban areas. If we are to have greenfield expansion of our major centres, this needs to include rapid transit.

The third section of Going for Housing Growth focuses on incentives for councils. Build for Growth is a $1 Billion fund that will be distributed based on the number of building consents Councils issue above their 5-year average. This does offer a serious incentive for Councils with $25,000 for every dwelling they consent above average. According to National’s policy document, this means Auckland Council would have been eligible for a payment of $152 million last year, while Tauranga, who did not exceed their 5-year average, would not have been eligible for any payment.

This fund has a lot in common with the Infrastructure Acceleration Fund and in principle, I support the idea of incentives to shift Council’s to be pro-growth. However, I worry this could end up favouring Councils who historically have not consented enough, whereas areas like Auckland, which

has much higher consent rates on the back of the Auckland Unitary Plan, may find it harder to surpass the historical average. Especially in a slowing market.

The funding for Build for Growth, seems to be proposed to be redistributed from various existing funds managed by Kāinga Ora. My key concern here is how this will limit the ability of Kāinga Ora developments to keep alive the medium to high rise construction market in a slowing housing market, which is impacting new build sales. It would also take funding which allows Kāinga Ora to buy new land, in towns and neighbourhoods where they don’t have existing land holdings, reducing the ability to provide social housing where it is needed.

National also say they will legislate to give central government reserve powers to rezone land where required to achieve Housing Growth Targets. This generally seems positive given the historical failings of local government and political blockade that can occur, like in Christchurch in 2022 , where the Council refused to adopt the MDRS.

Other changes

There are a number of other changes, here is a high level summary:

• A “Refocused National Policy Statement on Highly Productive Land”. National plans to update the NPS-HPL to keep protection of the most productive soils (LUC 1 & 2), while allowing for LUC-3 category land to be opened up for development.

• Requiring future zoned greenfield land to be live zoned now. It is unclear how this

is intended to balance the need for commercial and industrial land in greenfield areas. It could also create conflict with the (excellent) requirement for greenfield infrastructure to be self-funded. The details are unclear on this from what is a high-level policy document.

• Encouraging additional density in transport corridors would be great but the 30-year requirement is unlikely to be enough to push councils into any major changes.

Conclusion

In summary, providing the opt-out from the MDRS is likely to lead to a reduction in housing capacity and housing choice. I don’t think providing the choice coun-

cils will necessarily lead to more or better housing supply. However, there are some strong policies on mixed-use development, reducing public subsidy of greenfield development, and infrastructure financing, that would be positive if implemented. The best outcome for housing and climate would be an improved MDRS, alongside these more positive proposed policies from the National Party.

Malcolm McCracken is a Transport Planner with Sustainable Transport Consultancy, MRCagney. Malcolm has diverse experience in transport planning & strategy, policy development, and transport and land-use integration. He is also currently undertaking a Masters in Public Policy at the Auckland University. Better things are possible

Planning for and providing urban green spaces of any description, public and private, should not be optional,” the Commissioner says in a new report.

“The environmental services green spaces provide – such as temperature regulation, stormwater management, air filtration and habitat provision –don’t just benefit individuals. They benefit everyone around them. They are a form of infrastructure every bit as important as pipes and roads.

“The ability of our trees and parks to filter stormwater flows and cool their immediate surroundings can mitigate some of the heat and excess water that impervious surfaces generate. These services will be in even higher demand as our cities become hotter and more subject to extreme rain events in a changing climate.”

The Commissioner’s report, Are we building harder, hotter cities? The vital importance of urban green spaces, presents new data on how public and private green space in Auckland, Hamilton and Greater Wellington has evolved over the decades.

“New Zealand cities are currently well-endowed with green space, though some suburbs are greener than others. But our data show that urban green space has been declining over time. Between 1980 and 2016, green space per person fell by at least 30% in Auckland, and at least 20% in Hamilton. Nearly all of this loss occurred on private residential land,” the Commissioner says.

The report found two main factors have driven this trend. The first is infill development – the conver-

New Zealand cities losing their leaves

As

densify our cities

accommodate

sion of yards and sections into houses and driveways in existing urban areas. The second is a shift towards larger houses on smaller sections in new subdivisions.

Many councils are struggling to improve the quality and availability of public green spaces to compensate for the loss of private yards and gardens.

The trends documented in this report were already playing out before recent Government moves to promote further intensification. The Medium Density Residential Standards will place particular pressure on private residential green space in years to come.

The Commissioner offers several proposals to ensure that the contribution green space can make to urban environments is fully accounted for in future urban design.

One solution lies in building upwards rather than via low-rise infill development. Building upwards uses urban land more efficiently and reduces pressure to develop green spaces elsewhere in the city.

More attention could also be given to counteracting the loss of private yards and gardens by improving nearby public green space. In the short term, this could be done by adding patches of larger shrubs and trees in local parks, road reserves and other neglected corners of public land.

The difficulty of retrofitting green space into existing neighbourhoods highlights the importance of adequately providing it from the outset in new subdivisions on the city fringe. Councils could take a more proactive approach to land acquisition for future parks and reserves to help achieve

this.

Green spaces provide benefits over potentially very long time horizons. Looking forward, the ongoing shift towards more densely populated cities and the emerging impacts of climate change will very likely make urban parks, reserves, gardens, vegetation and street trees even more valuable.

The difficulty of re-establishing green space once lost makes it all the more important that planning and providing for urban green spaces is mandatory for local authorities just like it is for traditional ‘hard’ infrastructure. This could help avoid development decisions that create less liveable environments that we will have to live with –and in – forever.

we

to

population growth, we must not lose sight of the environmental benefits that urban green space provides, warns the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Simon Upton

Pre-election discussions we need to be having

Ahead of the 2023 election, Infrastructure New Zealand is developing a set of policy positions which will act as the starting point for conversations on how to improve the current state of play in the infrastructure sector, Policy Advisor Martina Moroney says

At present, Aotearoa New Zealand faces a number of challenges to meet current and future infrastructure needs. To unlock the level of investment needed to address these, and deliver the infrastructure that we so urgently need, the challenge we put forward is the need to change our political, planning and funding sys-

tems to deliver better longterm, sustainable outcomes for New Zealanders. But we must not lose sight of what we have. We can do better at utilising private capital and leveraging partnerships between Māori, central and local government, and the private sector to address a range of ongoing challenges, including our existing infrastructure deficit.

Policy positions at a glance

• Improved utilisation of private capital

• Better local government

• Better use of current tools

• Simplifying capital funds

• Transport Pricing

• System Stewardship

Infrastructure New Zealand Position Paper: Better Use of Current Tools

Current problem

New Zealand has a significant infrastructure deficit

Underinvestment in our crucial infrastructure is one of New Zealand’s greatest long-term economic challenges. Aotearoa is spending around 5.5 per cent of New Zealand’s GDP on building public infrastructure. To meet our current infrastructure deficit of $210 billion, this would need to increase to nearly 10 per cent of GDP or $31b annually.

Our current approach to funding and financing is not working

Current investment in infrastructure is only just beginning to address the results of historic underinvestment and is not moving the needle on the level of investment needed to deliver the infrastructure that we deserve.

Local government in particular is responsible for about half of all infrastructure spend . However, many councils are unable to borrow more money to finance the infrastructure they need to keep up with population growth, large asset renewals or service quality upgrades. In particular our cities have faced significant growth pressures over the last decade and have struggled to respond.

Part of the problem is that we are not good at using the tools we already have

The problem is well recognised and over the last few years we have seen new tools introduced, such as special purpose vehicles through:

The Infrastructure Funding and Financing Act which enable special purpose vehicles to fund infrastructure projects that support housing and urban development.

Specified development projects through the Urban Development Act which bring together multiple (and otherwise separate) processes required for urban development and enables them to be accessed through a single, integrated process.

However, we have not seen these tools being used and significant scope existing for their use. After being introduced in the middle of 2020, it was only late last year that the first Infrastructure Funding and Financing project was confirmed for Tauranga towards thirteen transport projects across the region.

We are yet to see any specified development projects confirmed, although Kāinga Ora are currently assessing two projects – Western Corridor in Tauranga and the Northern Growth Area. However, it has been over 6 months since these have been selected for assessment.

Infrastructure New Zealand’s Position

Aotearoa needs sustainable funding and financing of infrastructure

In order to move towards a sustainable pipeline of projects, we need a sustainable way to fund and finance. A bit part of this better leveraging and using the tools we currently have.

Over the last few years we have seen enabling legislation being established and the funding and financing tools being enabled. We need to now use them. The Infrastructure Commission’s strategy also recommended that central government needs to investigate opportunities to utilise the Infrastructure Funding and Financing Act 2020 and explore other Special Purpose Vehicles as a mechanism for new infrastructure investments.

Being in place for over two years, and only one project in the pipeline, it highlights the need to review these tools and simplify the processes for using them. We also need to see better support for councils considering their application and navigation of the steps is also required. Enabling greater accessibility and useability of current tools will be critical to improved infrastructure development.

Further, there is a need to look closely at Kāinga Ora’s role in enabling urban development projects through the Urban Development Act. Kāinga Ora have a significant role to play in partnering with private developers to bring forward complex projects.

We need to tackle bigger issues if we want these tools used more

More fundamentally, we need to acknowledge the misalignment of incentives. As we have outlined in our 2019 report ‘Building Regions’, for councils the cost of growth for communities is prioritised over investment in infrastructure to meet that growth.

Key Recommendations

Central government should invest in helping users navigate new tools such as the Funding and Financing At 2020 and the Urban Development Act 2020.

Central government needs to review the use of legislative tools (such as the Funding and Financing At 2020 and the Urban Development Act 2020), the application processes to ensure they are fit for purpose and the role of Kāinga Ora.

Image: Milldale Development, Auckland. Crown Infrastructure Partners

Infrastructure New Zealand Position Paper: Private Capital

Current problem

New Zealand has a significant infrastructure deficit

The New Zealand Infrastructure Commission: Te Waihanga considers that the country would need to spend $31 billion on infrastructure each year for the next 30 years, to build ourselves out the existing infrastructure challenges New Zealand faces. Underinvestment in our crucial infrastructure is one of New Zealand’s greatest long-term economic challenges.

We cannot get out of this alone

The Government cannot deliver everything simultaneously itself and will not be able to fund its way out of the current deficit. Constraints around capacity, capability and levels of direct Government borrowing have required prioritisation of projects. This has resulted in the delayed delivery of important public and social infrastructure and inhibited the Government’s ability to progress on some of its commitments.

Private capital is underutilised

The private sector’s capacity to deliver the required level of development and help address New Zealand’s infrastructure deficit is currently under-utilised and provides valuable opportunity to help overcome the current challenges.

Last year there were no PPPs in the pipeline and Government policy meant there would be no partnerships progressed in relation to the construction of prisons, schools or roads. Te Waihanga warned in their PPP review that the current gap between projects creates a risk that the relevant experience and expertise on both the Crown and private sector side is not retained within the market.

Our current policy settings mean that the delivery of public infrastructure primarily sits with the public sector, where infrastructure initiatives are initiated and driven by local or central Government, with the private sector remaining pigeonholed at the back end of the delivery chain.

Further, regulatory flux and uncertainty as a result of a substantive reform agenda has made private investment more unattractive. This should subside as changes to the resource management system, three waters and local government bed in overtime and market participants adjust to these new settings.

Infrastructure

New Zealand’s Position Government needs to better enable and harness the use of private capital

While there are some cases where private capital is being used to deliver public infrastructure, we think there is an opportunity for the Government to expand this approach and make it work more effectively.

A partnership approach between the Government and the private sector would enhance delivery capability, transfer key risks of deliverability to the private sector as well as the ability to bring forward significant infrastructure projects that do not currently have funding committed. Government could still retain responsibility for delivering important social services (e.g. health, corrections) under this model, while leveraging private capital to construct and finance important infrastructure that we need now.

The private sector is well-placed to provide significant support in delivering the country’s infrastructure needs through its significant delivery capacity and capability; flexibility to scale up quickly up where it sees increasing demand; size of finance pool; commercial discipline and sophistication; and industry and technical know-how.

There are many ways the government can do this

Using private capital can come in many ways, such as:

A public private partnership is typically a long-term contract for the delivery of a service that involves the construction of new or improved infrastructure that is financed from external sources. Full legal ownership of the assets is retained by the Crown. PPP’s allow the project cost to be spread over an extended period of time, alleviating the need for significant up-front capital expenditure. When paired with charging mechanisms (e.g. tolls or road pricing) that can partly or fully fund concession costs, PPPs can free up public funds to be used for other infrastructure priorities. Opportunities may also exist around assigning commercial rights to offset concession costs.

A leasing model would see the public sector in charge of master-planning, setting the sector strategies, and the project pipeline and retaining ownership of both the infrastructure assets and underlying land. The private sector would – via a competitive tender process – be responsible for financing and delivery (including building and maintaining infrastructure assets) and then leasing the assets back to the Government for a fixed period (e.g. 20-25 years). The private sector operator would then hand the asset over in an acceptable condition at the end of the lease period. Leasing models make greater use of private equity to accelerate infrastructure that would not otherwise be delivered using Crown investment and debt.

Soft loans (and grants), that require zero to low interest rates, can also be used to attract private capital. In some cases, the cost to Government can be limited to the interest cost as repayment of any Crown funding could be a condition of the loan (as was the case with the Ultra-Fast Broadband roll out which leveraged $1.7bn of Government funding to attract $5bn of private capital). This approach has more recently been used in the Government’s Shovel Ready stimulus programme and should be used more widely as part of the Government’s toolkit.

Key Recommendations

Local and central government do not have the capacity to fund all of Aotearoa’s infrastructure needs. Accessing private capital provides an ability to both bring forward projects that would otherwise have been delayed for several years, and release funding for public – and often social – infrastructure that would otherwise not occur.

To do this, Infrastructure New Zealand recommends that:

The Government should review its current approach to using private capital for public infrastructure, with a view of facilitating greater utilisation of private capital while still ensuring ownership remains with the Crown.

When looking at how to deliver new infrastructure projects, the Government should explore the potential of different models to attract private capital to enable it to deliver a much larger portfolio of infrastructure projects.

Infrastructure New Zealand Position Paper: Better Local Government

Current problem

Aotearoa faces a number of challenges to meet current and future infrastructure needs. As a result of decades of underinvestment, we have an infrastructure deficit of at least $210 billion. This will only grow as ongoing deferred maintenance and renewal, as well as the impacts of recent and future climate change events continue to take a toll on our infrastructure assets. We have many of the tools to build a sustainable, and much needed, pipeline of work. The challenge we put forward is the need to change our political, planning and funding systems and to leverage our existing toolkit and partnerships to deliver better long-term, sustainable outcomes for New Zealanders.

Local government settings create a separation between planning and funding functions

Our local government arrangements separate and isolate two of the most powerful governing responsibilities. Planning is almost completely delegated to local government, while fourteen out of fifteen tax dollars are collected by central government.

This creates incentives that are fundamentally misaligned fiscally, financially, and structurally. Central and local government both face different (and often competing) motivations. Local government’s primary source of revenue – rates – is detached from council performance and is instead linked to voters’ priorities, which often focus on vertical infrastructure with tangible outcomes and near-term impact. These priorities can crowd out much needed investment in horizontal infrastructure that can at times be less visible but is no less important. This misalignment of incentives often leads to situations in which local government is not adequately equipped to plan for or fund infrastructure needed to address local challenges such as growth and rising sea levels. This puts local government at odds with central government who gets direct benefits from improved economic performance and is incentivised to proactively pursue economic growth.

As a result, we lack a certain and built-out pipeline that would allow the sector to gear up to deliver on the infrastructure that New Zealand urgently needs. Infrastructure New Zealand (INZ) has long advocated for system change to align incentives to deliver the infrastructure outcomes New Zealanders deserve. In 2019, our report entitled Building Regions: A vision for local government, planning law and funding reform outlined a vision for a governance and funding system that leverages regional coordination and reallocates roles and responsibilities.

Fragmentation hinders regional outcomes

There is also a misalignment of incentives at a regional level. Central government entities with national objectives are performing functions with localised impacts. Local government entities without scale or resources are providing services with regional and national impacts. Neither are optimised to respond to the communities they are affecting, and no one is delivering regional outcomes.

Councils are disincentivised from investing in long-term projects with diffuse benefits and pursuing collaboration with other governance bodies in the region where benefits don’t accrue immediately, or only, to local constituents.

The Resource Management and Three Waters reforms will go some way to addressing planning fragmentation and lifting investment in water infrastructure. However, without changes to the way roles and responsibilities are allocated, we will struggle to deliver the infrastructure New Zealand needs now and into the future.

Infrastructure New Zealand’s Position

We need to reallocate roles and responsibilities in the system to align incentives

There is a need to fundamentally re-align incentives. INZ recommends empowering regional government with functions that have spatial effects, with local governance being refocused on community wellbeing and service delivery. Land transport (excluding rail and a well-defined strategic national road network) planning, funding and delivery, housing, regional economic development, and spatial planning should ultimately become regional activities, subject to demonstrated capability and capacity.

We need to take a joined-up approach to funding and financing our infrastructure

To support the delivery of infrastructure outcomes by regional and sub-regional entities, system change needs to be met by joined-up funding and financing that enables infrastructure delivery and certainty for the sector. Regional deals, based on city deal-style arrangements, would allow regional bodies to engage with central government to agree regional outcomes, negotiate greater certainty of funding and drive growth in the long-term through the delivery of infrastructure projects which increase the region’s economic capacity. Stronger alignment on regional outcomes can provide a basis for central Government to explore new funding tools such as bed taxes or sharing of GST on new builds.

However, neither central nor local government can fund New Zealand’s infrastructure needs alone. We must involve private sector capital to support infrastructure delivery through approaches that involve private sector capital and delivery capability by more effectively using existing, and creating new, alternative financing tools, as well as other funding and financing approaches.

Key Recommendations

Roles and responsibilities across local, regional, and central government need to be reallocated to ensure that incentives are effectively aligned to deliver infrastructure outcomes.

Government should explore tools and opportunities to improve the incentives facing councils so that they strive to enable growth by getting the benefits, not just the costs.

A joined-up funding and financing approach that includes regional, city-deal style, arrangements should be common practice.

Infrastructure New Zealand Position Paper: System Stewardship

Current problem

New entities have been created to drive and deliver infrastructure investment

Over the last decade, Aotearoa’s infrastructure deficit has come into sharp focus. Infrastructure investment has also a been key investment lever in the recovery from the economic effects of the pandemic. As a result, new entities have been stood up and repurposed to help address the issues we’re facing.

For example, Infrastructure New Zealand (INZ) advocated for the 2019 establishment of Te Waihanga – the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission. The Commission’s work has since demonstrated the importance of understanding the drivers behind infrastructure delivery and having a national strategy to guide our infrastructure sector going forward.

The system lacks accountability and oversight

However, as the infrastructure advisory and delivery environment has matured, we now have a complex web of agencies and lack an infrastructure steward which is adequately empowered to hold other actors in the system to account. As a result, the system as a whole lacks accountability and oversight.

This plays out right across government. Local government bodies lack accountability because local authorities can point to central government’s role in funding transport, monitoring water quality, determining immigration settings, increasing regulation, and otherwise transferring costs to ratepayers. Conversely, central government can point to local government’s dominant role in urban and environmental planning and infrastructure delivery as reasons for poor housing and transport outcomes. In areas where central institutions provide end-to-end services, decisions by previous administrations make associating outcomes with the Government of the day difficult.

Bespoke entities, like Crown Infrastructure Partners and Rau Paenga Limited (the repurposed Ōtākaro Limited) will sit alongside infrastructure advisory functions at the Treasury and Te Waihanga, including its major projects team, as well as the functions of delivery agencies like Waka Kotahi and Kāinga Ora.

In some parts of the infrastructure system, we have agencies that are empowered to hold – often monopoly – delivery agencies to account. Electricity and gas transmission and distribution are regulated by the Commerce Commission. Water sector reform proposes a similar approach. However, the transport, health and education sectors lack external checks and balances and instead rely upon a combination of internal investment approval processes, investment approval by ministers or Cabinet and assurance by the Treasury.

As investment continues to grow, there is a need to focus on building system-wide capability and a coherence of direction in line with the Te Waihanga’s New Zealand Infrastructure Strategy - Rautaki Hanganga o Aotearoa. To do this, a system steward is required to actively promote accountability and cross-entity collaboration by taking a leadership role in the system as a whole.

Infrastructure New Zealand’s Position

A system steward is required

At Building Nations in 2022, the then Minister for Infrastructure, Grant Robertson, announced that Ōtākaro Limited would be repurposed into a national Crown deliver agency – Rau Paenga, to project and contract manage large vertical infrastructure projects for a selection of government agencies.

In adding to the web of entities advising on and leading infrastructure delivery across the system, there is an opportunity to step back and reflect on the entities operating at the national level. In particular, there is an opportunity to clearly identify and empower a system steward with a whole-of-system remit who can support and actively steer the disparate functions of entities and enable greater accountability and transparency across the system.

Te Waihanga should be empowered to take on this role

Te Waihanga is well-positioned to perform a system steward role but needs to be empowered to do so.

Thus far, the establishment of Te Waihanga has gone some way to creating greater oversight and a fuller evidence base in the system. Its Strategy, infrastructure pipeline and review work, as well as the provision of its major projects advice and requirement for its procurement best practice to be adopted for projects with a value of $50 million or more are examples of its impact in the sector. These functions also highlight the benefits of its whole-of-system vantage point.

There is an opportunity to further leverage Te Waihanga’s expertise. Given that the existing level of politicisation of the infrastructure project pipeline continues to create uncertainty for sector actors – including private investors, enabling Te Waihanga to proactively nurture clarity and collaboration across the system would be beneficial. In this role, Te Waihanga could build on its strategy and infrastructure pipeline work to lead the system and encourage strategic accountability. To do this, Te Waihanga requires the mandate to become the system steward.

Key Recommendation

Te Waihanga – the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission should be empowered to take on a system steward role to guide the sector in line with its strategy and to encourage accountability and collaboration.

Infrastructure New Zealand Position Paper: Simplifying Capital Funds

Current problem

Central government investment has been spread over multiple funds

Over the last decade, central government has invested over $32 billion in the direct provision of infrastructure through around 17 different infrastructure-related capital funds. Some of the largest funds have included the $1b Housing Infrastructure Fund (2016), the $3b Provincial Growth Fund (2017), the $14b New Zealand Upgrade Programme (NZUP) (2020), the $3b COVID-19 Response and Recovery Fund: (2020), the $3.8b Housing Acceleration Fund (HAF) (2021) and the recent $1.5b Better Off Funding (2024).

There are significant duplication and inefficiencies

While this investment has resulted in many successful infrastructure projects, each fund established has had its own: administration bodies who are responsible for the funds; application process (including forms, information requirements, assessment processes); repayment terms (such as grants versus loans); and reporting requirements.

Agencies, sometimes with limited initial capability, have had to establish and disestablish teams/units and systems to administer these funds. Cross government sharing of expertise and resource has not been effectively harnessed. As a result, we have seen infrastructure expertise spread thinly across agencies where these funds are located.

There is no strategic approach to central investment

More fundamentally, these different funds are cutting across the same areas of investment but with different priorities and criteria. There has been no strategic approach from central government towards this investment, rather it has been ad hoc and lead by different whims of the day.

For example, housing and urban development infrastructure has been a large recipient of different one-off government funding through various funds. Between 2020 and 2022 a total of $13.6 billion has gone directly towards housing and urban development infrastructure across three different funds with different priorities and approaches (the HAF, NZUP and the COVID-19 Response and Recovery Fund).

Recipients (often local government) are left navigating the myriad of potential funding options, spending large amounts of money on various applications.

Infrastructure New Zealand’s Position

Strategic approach to central government investment

As we can see, central government is allocating significant spending to infrastructure across New Zealand. However, we need to start being strategic about how it is allocated. We cannot continue to see various funds being established with different approaches.

Aligned with Te Waihanga’s recommendation in the New Zealand Infrastructure Strategy, INZ recommends that a consolidation occurs, and a set of clear infrastructure capital funds is established. This would enable the Government to prioritise investments based agreed priorities, with a focus on national significance and net benefits and enable greater public transparency of infrastructure capital funding decisions.

This approach has been taken overseas

A strategic approach to central government investment has occurred overseas. In Australia and New South Wales, the Restart NSW Fund enables the delivery and funding of high-priority infrastructure projects that improve the state’s economic growth and productivity. The fund:

is paid for by the NSW government’s asset recycling programme is administered by Infrastructure NSW who assess and recommend projects.

In Canada, the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program delivers funding to communities to support the Investing in Canada Plan. The programme:

is delivered by Infrastructure Canada is funded through bilateral agreements between Infrastructure Canada and each of the Canadian provinces and territories.

Set infrastructure funds administered by one agency

A set of infrastructure funds should cover areas such as transport, housing, and urban development, and like the international examples, should be administered by one agency. These funds should have standardised application forms and assessment criteria.

Key Recommendations

A set of infrastructure capital funds are established to ensure a strategic approach is taken to central government’s capital infrastructure spend.

These capital funds should be administered by one central agency.

Infrastructure New Zealand Position Paper: Transport Pricing

Current problem

We know that we are not paying for the true cost of transport

Motorists currently pay for the use of roads through a range of methods, such as petrol taxes, road user charges, vehicle registration fees and council rates. However, these charges do not consider the time or location of travel — for example, driving on a congested motorway in rush hour versus driving along a quiet road late at night. The true cost of these two journeys is very different — driving at peak times adds to the congestion on the road, which affects, or has a ‘cost’ to, other road users. These costs also impact:

the economy — for example, by adding to freight travel times and costs, and individuals — for example, people have less time at home with family.

A 2017 study by NZIER estimated the benefits of decongestion in Auckland alone would be between $0.9 billion and $1.3 billion per annum (approximately 1% to 1.5% of Auckland’s GDP). These estimates represent the economic and social benefits to Auckland if the road transport network was operating within its capacity, Monday to Friday.

There have been many attempts to implement congestion charging

While there is increasing agreement that we cannot build our way out of congestion, tangible to progress implementation of congestion charging tools, especially in Auckland, has languished.

Over the last 10 years we have seen many attempts to introduce transporting pricing in our cities. Most recently, in 2021 the Transport and Infrastructure Select Committee investigated congestion pricing and made several recommendations to the Parliament. The Committee recommended that the government: progress legislation to enable New Zealand cities to use congestion pricing as a tool in transport planning. implement a congestion pricing scheme in Auckland.

However, there has been no decision from government since.

Infrastructure New Zealand Position Paper: Transport Pricing

Current problem

We know that we are not paying for the true cost of transport

Motorists currently pay for the use of roads through a range of methods, such as petrol taxes, road user charges, vehicle registration fees and council rates. However, these charges do not consider the time or location of travel — for example, driving on a congested motorway in rush hour versus driving along a quiet road late at night. The true cost of these two journeys is very different — driving at peak times adds to the congestion on the road, which affects, or has a ‘cost’ to, other road users. These costs also impact:

the economy — for example, by adding to freight travel times and costs, and individuals — for example, people have less time at home with family.

A 2017 study by NZIER estimated the benefits of decongestion in Auckland alone would be between $0.9 billion and $1.3 billion per annum (approximately 1% to 1.5% of Auckland’s GDP). These estimates represent the economic and social benefits to Auckland if the road transport network was operating within its capacity, Monday to Friday.

There have been many attempts to implement congestion charging

While there is increasing agreement that we cannot build our way out of congestion, tangible to progress implementation of congestion charging tools, especially in Auckland, has languished.

Over the last 10 years we have seen many attempts to introduce transporting pricing in our cities. Most recently, in 2021 the Transport and Infrastructure Select Committee investigated congestion pricing and made several recommendations to the Parliament. The Committee recommended that the government: progress legislation to enable New Zealand cities to use congestion pricing as a tool in transport planning. implement a congestion pricing scheme in Auckland.

However, there has been no decision from government since.

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