If you happened by the NRC building at the right moment this week you would have been bemused to hear the sound of cheering emitting from my office.

Members will be familiar with NRC’s pre-election campaign calling for a 50-year roading infrastructure plan, and the success we have had in getting a 30-year plan built into the Government Policy Statement on Land Transport.

This has now been taken further, with Minister Chris Bishop announcing the new National Infrastructure Agency (NIA) will be tasked with mapping out a 30-year plan for all essential infrastructure in the country.

The new agency will be set up by December this year by repurposing the existing Crown Infrastructure Partners (CIP) agency. In a past life yours-truly was responsible for helping bed-in the Chorus Ultra-Fast Broadband contract with CIP, or Crown Fibre Holdings as it was known back in 2011. Designed by then Minister Steven Joyce as a public-private partnership, it contracted four fibre-optic network providers to deliver much needed broadband to reach over 87% of the population. As a PPP and a project it was a huge success, and as a taxpayer we got one the best fibre network coverages in the OECD at one of the most efficient costs despite our long, narrow country with low population density and difficult terrain. Chorus investors were also appropriately awarded with a reasonable return for their risk undertaken in partnership with the crown. A win all round.

So having worked on the inside of a game changing infrastructure PPP, naturally I am a big supporter. With as few taxpayers as we have to service a country bigger than Great Britain we need private investment to help us build the infrastructure we need. That is what the NIA is all about – facilitating private sector investment in infrastructure, and administering central government funds. Treasury will be responsible for administering the PPPs once underway, and while the Infrastructure Commission will retain its role as the independent strategic advisor to government.

A 30-year National Infrastructure Plan will also be developed, which will seek to address one of my main biggest bug-bears: playing political football with infrastructure. Flip-flopping on pet infrastructure projects perceived as golden child projects for a particular party has cost this country hundreds of millions of dollars over the years. The NIP will assess what we need and what we can afford, set up a National Infrastructure Pipeline and identify priority projects. This approach has helped build political consensus across the isle on core infrastructure. It will save taxpayers millions by giving contractors confidence in a long-term (30 year) pipeline of work, allowing them to invest in long-term workforce and plant without fear of a project getting culled next election, or the need to price in the risk of such a culling into their contract rate.

Those churlish enough to bemoan the 60 staff employed and a modest base operating expenditure of $26m need to smell the coffee. The NIA will be working to address a $100 billion infrastructure gap, and this disciplined approach if executed well will see the NIA pay for itself, and then some, in a very short space of time.

Looking across the water – lessons learned from maritime transport regulator

This week I had the pleasure of attending a Maritime NZ event for senior leaders, to look at “the future of maritime activity in New Zealand, and our collective responsibilities in ensuring a safe, secure, clean and sustainable maritime sector”. Road freight at a Maritime NZ event, you might ask – what gives?

Well, there’s the floating part of State Highway 1 of course, and NRC have maritime members, and an efficient freight task is usually multi-modal by definition – involving road, rail, air and yes, sea.

And there were plenty of useful takeaways for those of us in the road freight part of the transport ecosystem.

What I liked most was the fact that the Board and senior management of a transport regulator were taking the time to get out and meet with stakeholders around the country, and asking the simple question “what can we do better”?

Each table was asked three questions about the risks and opportunities in the maritime sector, and how to improve outcomes. Implicit in the questions was the recognition that we have a collective responsibility to improving outcomes – not just the regulator.

Three of the main themes we discussed could have been lifted and dropped into our road freight sector:

National strategy – policy makers setting clear goals and outcomes for the regulator and industry to achieve.

Alignment – taking a collective approach to achieving those goals, with cross-collaboration between all industry stakeholders, whether government, private sector, or in-between.

Regulator as enabler – a shift from a purely compliance and enforcement focus to setting up industries to thrive. Examples discussed included unlocking future workforces by creating a career pathway through licencing that is easy to graduate up to bigger vehicle classes (for both domestic and immigrant workers), or unlocking future technology such as zero emission transport by providing regulatory standards that enable new models and products.

Sound familiar? Hats off to Maritime NZ CEO Kirstie Hewlett and the Board for thinking outside of the box and wanting to hear from all stakeholders, maritime or otherwise.

Approved Code of Practice announced for ports

Sticking with the theme of Maritime NZ, members that have port operations will be pleased to learn that the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety, Hon Brooke van Velden, and the Associate Minister for Transport, Hon Mat Doocey, have now green lighted the “Approved Code of Practice for Loading and Unloading Cargo at Ports and on Ships (ACOP)”. For transport operators, the ACOP provides improved clarity for on-port health and safety responsibilities, and one clear agency responsible for administering the Health and Safety at Work Act (HSWA): Maritime NZ.

The ACOP will come into force on 29 November 2024, and you can see it now on our website. I encourage all members with on-port operations to take the time to check it out and let us know what you think.

The Code has formal status under the Health and Safety at Work Act (HSWA), and one of the benefits of the ACOP is that it provides assurance and clarity. If a business can show what they have done is consistent with or better than the requirements in the ACOP, then they are likely to be meeting the test of what is reasonably practicable under HSWA. Crucially, the ACOP is a system lever that supports the sector to understand and put in place effective controls for safety risks in the port sector. This makes it much easier for transport operators to put in place safety-based processes they can be confident will meet the standard.

A week tinged with sadness

Lastly, this week there was a terrible accident involving a truck on State Highway 1 in Auckland where three people tragically lost their lives. This was heartbreaking for everyone concerned. Ours is a small industry, and here at NRC our team has been involved in helping those impacted by the tragedy. Our thoughts and prayers go out to everyone involved.

– By Justin Tighe-Umbers, CEO, National Road Carriers