Draft National Infrastructure Plan

3.1. Context: We’re building on what we’ve already got | Horopaki: Kei te whakapiki mātau i runga ake o ngā huarawa o te wā nei

New Zealanders benefit from investments made by past generations. Many of the dams and bridges built years ago are with us today and still have a role in shaping the way we live. A large proportion of our electricity generation is renewable thanks to our hydroelectric power stations and transmission grid. We can travel and move goods to even the most remote parts of the country, often across challenging geography. We have water networks, schools, hospitals and much more.

Our existing infrastructure measures up reasonably well against other high-income countries with similarly challenging terrain and small and dispersed populations (Table 2). We have about as much road network, electricity generation and water and wastewater pipes per person as our peer countries.^[33] In some cases, like fixed-line broadband networks and school infrastructure, we have more or better-maintained infrastructure than our peers.

We see problems related to the quality of our infrastructure and how we use it. When we compare ourselves with our peers, we see that too many people die on our roads. We have more power outages than many other countries. We use more water and, in some places, have issues with the quality of our drinking water. We have been fast to roll out fibre broadband, but our mobile broadband networks are comparatively underdeveloped. And, while it is hard to compare how well maintained our infrastructure is, we know that we will face costs due to a long history of deferred maintenance, especially for water pipes and hospitals.

Notes on the table below: Comparator countries were chosen based upon different characteristics for each network, but often included measures of population, population density, land area, terrain ruggedness, and per-capita incomes. Differences from the comparator country average are composed of a simple average of various available metrics without weights. For instance, road network quality measures include metrics on congestion, road smoothness, travel speeds and safety, which are normalised and averaged to make a single measure. Source: Draft Infrastructure Needs Analysis, Infrastructure Commission (2025).

Some of our infrastructure networks compare better than others

We need to continue investing to ensure our infrastructure is fit for the future. We must continue adapting and growing networks in the face of increasing and changing needs. As outlined in Section 1, our population is growing and ageing. Our service level expectations are rising due to economic growth and development and infrastructure technologies are changing. Along with this, climate change is creating the need to lift the resilience of our infrastructure and transform it to reduce carbon emissions Perhaps more importantly, we must continue maintaining and renewing the infrastructure we already have and ensuring that it’s resilient against natural hazards.

As a country, we need to be mindful of affordability constraints. In Section 1, we outlined the fiscal constraints facing local and central government and the affordability constraints facing households. Given the long-term financial constraints arising from an ageing population and slowing productivity growth, we need an investment approach that is affordable for New Zealanders while balancing competing demands between different types of infrastructure, different places and different outcomes.

This section presents the Commission’s ‘forward guidance’ on a sustainable level and mix of infrastructure investment. It represents what we believe to be an affordable path for New Zealand given future economic, demographic and climate scenarios and informed by what we have been prepared to spend on infrastructure in the past.

This analysis is not prescriptive and does not recommend (or reject) specific projects. Rather, we lay out a system-wide view that supports a strategic approach to investment across portfolios. This view can be used to inform things like fiscal strategy, asset management and investment planning, spatial planning, and workforce development policy.