Can Auckland's infrastructure ever catch up?

From Nine To Noon, 9:09 am on 26 March 2018

Civil contractors say Auckland's infrastructure planning is woeful, and chaos in the city will continue for years. 

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Photo: 123RF

As the population grows, Auckland is playing catchup and is now at risk of losing its workforce if nothing changes.

Those working on the infrastructure believe the vision for Auckland needs to be bolder or the city will never keep pace and constantly be trailing behind. 

They have said central and local government need to take a greater planning role in housing development. 

Chief Executive of Civil Contractors New Zealand Peter Silcock told Nine to Noon's Kathryn Ryan it was a problem that was far from new.

He said everybody needed to be working together and have a lot more ambition, pulling everything together and utilising it to make Auckland a much better place to live.

Mr Silcock said significant housing developments were popping up in areas that were not well served with public transport, and there were questions over whether to upgrade water infrastructure to cope with more in-fill housing.

He said building a lot more houses would require taking a planned approach, rather than things being done in isolation as they currently are.

With the private sector doing things where they think is best, local and central government needed to work together to do developments in areas which are well serviced, he said, and it was this connected thinking that was not currently being used.

"We are tripping over ourselves in a rush to build houses, rather than thinking about that bigger picture."

He said he would like to see a strong pipeline of transport work in future.

Mr Silcock said the city was now at risk of losing thousands of contractors to overseas work.

The new government's public transport focus had created quite a bit of uncertainty among his members, he said, and traveling abroad for work would become a very attractive option for people, with strong competition coming particularly from Australia. 

He estimated there were between 10,000 and 15,000 contractors working within his sector in Auckland City at the moment, with 200 or 300 workers doing the bulk of the work in civil infrastructure. 

"We've already got workers asking what's next," he said.

Auckland Chamber of Commerce chief executive Michael Barnett said decisions needed to be made to keep the workforce in New Zealand "because, if we made the decision today, we're going to have to rebuild the workforce".

"The biggest problem is, and I feel sorry for Lester Levy, I feel sorry for the council, for the government, because what they're dealing with is not a problem with growth today, they're dealing with the inaction of successive governments in Auckland making decisions."

Mr Barnett said the flow-in of people - 70,000 arriving in New Zealand each year with most coming to Auckland - could be the cause of the problem. He said perhaps we need to stop that flow.

"We've still got the lack of decision making, the lack of shovel-ready jobs and the loss of talent occurring in Auckland because we can't make decisions, these are things we've lived for the last five years, we've still got them today, we need somebody, we need a government to make some decisions."

He said this needed to largely come from central government as Auckland Council's debt ratio showed it could not spend the sort of money that was needed to catch up.

He believed government was using the wrong funding model of rates, it was broken and needed fixing. 

"The model we've got is wrong, it's all the old way and some of the new ways that are available to us and the speed of decision making needs to change," he said.

With the size of the problem being what it was, Auckland needed special purpose vehicles to fund some of the work.

He said it would not be just one answer, but a range of answers. 

Auckland Transport chair Lester Levy said that from a transport point of view, Auckland had a range of plans that needed to be united to move ahead more quickly. 

"The reality is, we can't run the same race faster, we have to run a different race," he said.

With a change in government came a shift in paradigm being brought to transport. It was probably reasonable for that process of setting up such a system to take some time, he said.

Mr Levy said he wrote about the problem in the most recent annual report saying the implausibly slow decision making is one of the key factors that is leading to more congestion.

"When you talk about shovel-ready, one of the real problems we have is the complexity of the process and how we can actually compact that, and that's something that I guess we're working on."

Mr Levy said in terms of housing developments, Auckland needed a rapid transport system that would be a spine across the city, something it was currently lacking.