Call for clarity on construction work

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

Summer is going to be the season of the great recovery operation, not least in this region, but a recent report raises doubts about the ability of New Zealand to achieve even modest goals for improving our infrastructure.

The latest Civil Contractors NZ and Teletrac Navman survey shows only 7 percent of respondents believe the country’s infrastructure can cope with extreme weather, a fall of 10 percentage points from last year.

Civil Contractors NZ chief executive Alan Pollard says the industry needs clearer project pipelines from central and local government as we build resilience to climate change.

Too often there are a lot of promises made about funding from both sides of the political spectrum, he says, but what is actually needed is for new infrastructure to be built; so schedule the projects, fund the projects, commit to a time frame and actually get on with it.

One key issue highlighted in the survey is the impact a lack of confidence in things actually being done is having on the broader sector.

Contractors are often among the first responders in a natural disaster; 47 percent of people who took part in the survey had been involved in emergency or disaster response over the past year.

Mr Pollard says the industry is working on a big overseas recruitment drive and some people, like forestry workers, have also changed tack to pick up construction jobs. But he still worries there will not be enough hands on deck.

At the same time infrastructure experts are projecting that almost 15,000 extra construction workers could be needed at the peak of the recovery efforts.

The Infrastructure Commission Te Waihanga released projections out to 2029 of the scale of recovery needed from cyclones Gabrielle and Hale and the Auckland Anniversary floods, showing that at its peak — the last quarter of 2025 — 14,860 extra workers would be needed for the roading, rail, water and energy projects on the go.

Te Waihanga general manager of strategy Geoff Cooper said now the figures were laid bare, the decision-makers in the sector could assess workforce capacity against the work that lay ahead of them.

He also pointed out these were not estimates but projections that could change as information was digested and factored into planning.

The major severe weather events in quick succession have placed a huge burden on Gisborne District Council with the final costs not known yet.

The council has estimated that the initial clean-up costs will be around $120 million while the total costs of repairs which are still being investigated could range from $465m to $725m.