Ryan Bridge: Why is New Zealand so bad at infrastructure?

Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

There's a reason politicians can't agree on much of anything.

Luxon is in Australia at the moment, he's on an infrastructure whistle stop tour.

The question - why are we so bad, and the Aussies seemingly so much better at it?

There are many reasons like public, private partnerships and user pays. In New South Wales, they've used asset sales to fund this stuff, but it's also crucially bipartisan agreement on what to build.

Luxon says that the Nats and Labour need consensus on what projects will get cash.

"The challenge in New Zealand is you get a change in political cycle or economic cycle, and you get on off, on off, on off and nothing's happening."

So the construction industry, they need to know the pipeline of work that's in front of them or it's not going to be viable. You know, the roads of national significance they were on and then they're off, and they're on and then they're off.

And another example was Energy Resources Aotearoa on this show calling for bipartisan Agreement on Oil and gas exploration.

But here's the thing, it's not going to happen in either case, which sucks because it's us the voters that ultimately pay the price in the form of electricity prices or traffic.

The reason? Well, our political system is based on the Westminster model which is purposely adversarial. We encourage competition. We literally have an opposition party to oppose the government.

It's set up to fail when it comes to agreement.

So I won't be holding my breath for our parliamentarians to suddenly start singing from the same song sheet.

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