Transparency within large publicly funded New Zealand infrastructure projects

It’s not easy for the public to see how large, public infrastructure projects in New Zealand are performing, with key project documents often being not publicly available or hard to understand.

This research looks at the accessibility of key documents for 27 large projects across central and local government. These range in cost from $50m to more than $1b and have a collective value of over $70b. These do not just relate to current projects: they span a wide timeframe - for example, one project began construction in 2012 and 21 projects are still ongoing.

While large, public infrastructure projects are subject to normal official information processes, web and plain language standards, they‘re not required to proactively publish key documents. This research showed that around half of all the Business Case and Assurance Case documents in these big, public projects were not accessible, and that reviews were not accessible for completed projects. When project activities and decisions are transparent, New Zealanders are better able to hold government and delivery agencies to account.

We commissioned Massey University to conduct this research.

Key findings

• The study gave projects overall ratings out of nine for accessibility of their project documents. For key documents, 37% of projects scored nine out of nine, while 63% scored only three to five.
• All of the highest-scoring projects were run by an independent board, rather than by a government agency or council, and nearly all were in the $500m plus project category.
• Projects greater than $500m in value outperformed projects between $50m and $500m in value across all areas assessed for accessibility.
• Having a board or a big budget didn’t always mean key documents were ‘accessible’. Because, of the study’s 17 low-scoring projects, 41% also had a board and 23% were in the $500m plus project category.
• Accessing information about infrastructure projects was time-consuming and the accessibility of key documents was poor overall. 55.5% of business case documents and 51.8% of assurance plan documents were inaccessible.