Wayne Brown wants a new harbour bridge. Winston Peters wants rail-enabled Cook Strait ferries. Simeon Brown wants 15 big new highways, Chloe Swarbrick wants a massive domestic solar rollout and Shane Jones wants to “drill baby drill”. Wellington wants , Auckland wants free-flowing traffic and Nicola Willis says there isn’t any money.
Chris Bishop is a man with a plan for building better infrastructure: Will it work?
Infra Boy Bish: the Minister of Infrastructure, Chris Bishop. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Opinion by Simon Wilson
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
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“It was cool. It was great.”
Chris Bishop, Minister of Infrastructure, is a fan of Sydney’s new light rail.
He visited in December 2022, along with his colleagues Simeon Brown, now Minister of Transport, and Simon Watts, now Minister for Climate Change. It was a fact-finding mission: they wanted to know how Australia gets its big infrastructure projects done.
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Bishop and Brown went back this year, to Sydney and Melbourne, along with Resource Minister Shane Jones and the man Bishop calls “the Boss”: Prime Minister Christopher Luxon.
“We’re the Infra Boys,” he said last month at the big Building Nations conference, hosted by Infrastructure NZ in Auckland.
“Although I suppose we do need some women.”
Bishop’s default smile is a lopsided bashful-rueful grin, and he flashed it then at the nearly 900 delegates crowded into the Viaduct Events Centre.
The Infra Boys learned a lot about Australian infrastructure. First, they have a lot of toll roads. When it comes down to it, that’s often what the Government means when it says “new funding and financing tools”. Tolls, to repay investment from here and overseas, will be a feature of big new roading projects here.
They also saw just how much both cities have invested in mass and rapid transit, especially light rail.
Because it carries the most people and is fast, reliable and frequent, transit in Sydney and Melbourne offers an attractive alternative to driving.
Bishop likes it. And he really likes the way Sydney’s new Metro got built: with cross-party support that kept the project moving, despite cost overruns and other problems, regardless of which party was in power.
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It’s a far cry from the world we live in, where politicians lob their pet projects at each other - Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown’s proposed new harbour bridge being a classic example - with little attempt to engage in coherent strategic planning.
The Sydney Metro is an underground light-rail line, currently 52km long and destined to be joined by others that will more than double the length. Trains turn up every four minutes.
“I think many people will go to Sydney and ride it and go, ‘This is phenomenal,’” he told journalists at Building Nations.
Okay then. But Infra Boy Brown has ruled out light rail completely. Does that mean he and Infra Boy Bish don’t see eye to eye?
I sat down for a long interview with Bishop in Wellington recently. It was a question he ducked.
But he did talk enthusiastically about the photo op provided by the Metro grand opening: there was a “striking image” of the Labour premier of New South Wales along with former Liberal premiers, all together for an inaugural ride.
Politicians from across the divide, united in the larger purpose of city building.
I’m not sure such a thing has ever happened here, but Bishop wants to change that. Long-term cross-party agreements, he has announced, will be the new foundation for getting things built.
Is this an outbreak of political maturity, or just more politicking?
THEY MOBBED him at the Local Government Conference in Wellington in August. Clustering around after his speech, each with their “we met when ...” introduction, keen to talk. He had a scheduled appointment but it took him half an hour to get away.
Smiling, bashfully-ruefully, moving away and getting collared again. Satchel across his shoulder, suit and tie but somehow a bit shambolic, the shirt almost properly tucked in. For the National Party, this is a little bit uncommon.
I went to see his opposite in the House, Labour’s Kieran McAnulty, who told me, “I have a lot of respect for Chris Bishop. I think his heart’s in the right place.”
Did he mean it?
“Yeah, I do, we get on. I mean, I never considered inviting him to my wedding, but I do think he wants to achieve things for people.”
In a TV profile before the last election, Bishop said, “I love cricket, love music, love food. If I wasn’t an MP I’d maybe try and be in a band or play cricket or open a restaurant.”
Maybe. Policy development and reform consume him now, along with a flair for management. One imagines there is no higher virtue, as far as the Boss is concerned.
In addition to Infrastructure, Bishop is the Minister of Housing, Minister for Resource Management Reform, Minister of Sport and Recreation, Associate Minister of Finance and Leader of the House. He ran the party’s very successful 2023 election campaign.
He’s the Minister for Making Things Happen. Steven Joyce had that role under John Key; Bill Birch also, as Robert Muldoon’s Minister of Energy and National Development overseeing the “Think Big” projects.
Does he see himself as the Steven Joyce of this Government?
“I don’t see myself as anything other than just Chris Bishop, working hard every day to do whatever the Prime Minister asked me to do.”
Solid answer. Except, when it comes to infrastructure, it’s not entirely clear what that is.
Being Minister of Sport is a bonus, though: he went to the Olympics and the Paralympics and even got to hand out some medals.
At Building Nations he sat on stage for questions from the effortlessly debonair conference moderator, TVNZ’s Jack Tame.
Bishop wore a blue suit, pale pink shirt and blue patterned tie, so far so good. With one foot hiked up across the other knee, pale shin awkwardly bared, highlighting the scuffed brown shoe, the brightly patterned sock, the dangling foot that wagged compulsively.
If there’s a ruthlessly disciplined side to Chris Bishop, which surely a senior minister is supposed to have, he hides it well. He bites his nails, although he swore in his wedding vows he would stop. He spent the first Covid lockdown growing a mullet, which he then wore to Parliament.
Did it for the charity Good Bitches Baking, he says, and raised $10,000.
THE NEED is dire: New Zealand has one of the most expensive and least efficient infrastructure sectors in the developed world.
Geoff Cooper, head of Te Waihanga, the Infrastructure Commission, has told RNZ that New Zealand is among the biggest spenders on infrastructure in the OECD, but also among those with the least to show for it. We’re spending a lot and not building very much.
Te Waihanga is an autonomous Crown entity set up by the Labour-led Government in 2019. Now, Bishop is beefing it up. That’s a bit of cross-party collaboration, right there.
Sean Sweeney, outgoing boss of the country’s biggest project, the City Rail Link (CRL) in Auckland, has also weighed in. He shocked the industry last year with a graph showing New Zealand was the most expensive country in the world in which to build new infrastructure.
Sweeney blamed the lack of a construction pipeline – an ongoing series of projects – which means all his tunnellers have left the country instead of going on to another job here.
Cooper says we have a “just in time” mentality. We don’t build anything until the need overwhelms us, so everything from buying land to finding and training a new workforce costs more.
And that, say Bishop, Sweeney, Cooper and pretty much everyone else in infrastructure, is down to a lack of reliable long-term planning.
Political parties push big decisions into the next decade or the one after, or else they announce grand schemes, often without funding attached. Those projects that do reach the planning stage take too long to develop and cost much more than expected, and political opponents cancel them the first chance they get.
“It’s a collective problem,” said Bishop. “It’s both National and Labour governments in the past 30-40 years”.
“We just need to be honest about that and face the reality, which is that there’s a $100 billion deficit.”
It was the big question the Infra Boys asked in Australia: How did they do it?
In Sydney, the key was Infrastructure NSW, an independent agency set up in 2012 to advise the state government. In its first year, with cross-party support, it delivered a 20-year State Infrastructure Strategy.
Bishop wants to do the same here. He’s instructed Te Waihanga to develop a 30-year strategy and a priorities pipeline. And he will have a new National Infrastructure Agency (NIA) in place by December, established with $5 million in funding in this year’s Budget.
The NIA, independent and run by experts, will act as a “shopfront” for unsolicited proposals, organise private-sector investment, administer Crown funds and provide commercial advice.
Te Waihanga and the NIA will work together. Political parties, councils and the private sector will be able to feed them projects, so their merits can be assessed against the 30-year strategy, independently of the politicians.
Te Waihanga is edging us towards this with a just-published report called “Paying it forward: Understanding our long-term infrastructure needs”.
Cooper says, “We want a debate not on ‘left’ projects and ‘right’ projects, but on good projects.” That, he believes, will produce a “menu of options”: a list from which the government of the day can choose.
Bishop puts it this way. “If you have an independently verified list of projects that infrastructure experts have said, ‘This is what the country needs,’” said Bishop, “then political parties can then get behind those projects in government or in opposition.”
Boss Luxon said, “That’s what we want to do … take the politics out of infrastructure.”
But that’s not what they’re actually doing.
BISHOP GOT into politics through university debating, at which he was world-class, and he has a first-class honours degree in law with a BA in history and politics. He met his wife-to-be Jenna Raeburn in the debating society; they now have a 2-year-old and another child on the way.
Both had Wellington beltway jobs, Raeburn in public relations and Bishop as a tobacco lobbyist and a ministerial adviser to Gerry Brownlee and Steven Joyce. He entered Parliament on the list in 2014 and, in 2017, became the National Party’s first electorate MP for Hutt South, beating Labour’s Ginny Anderson in a seat long held by Trevor Mallard.
An enthusiastic campaigner, his fans called him “Mr Everywhere Man”.
I asked Bishop if he’d read the Herald profile of Education Minister Erica Stanford, in which she says she “cleans the whole house” on Sundays, including “all the toilets, all the floors, all the laundry, everything”, because she feels guilty.
“I do housework on Sunday,” he said. “I do, I do, I do laundry and cleaning on a Sunday.”
How does he decompress?
“I enjoy taking Jeremy swimming.” Although it wasn’t really “learning how to swim”, but “comfortableness around water”.
Any other relaxation?
“We go out to gigs. Curry on a Friday night when we can. It’s difficult to find the time.”
Bishop’s father, the late John Bishop, was a journalist and a founding member of the Taxpayers Union: he was solidly on the right.
His sister Eleanor is a renowned progressive-feminist theatre director. His maternal grandparents were “Methodist social activists”: “Nana” was arrested during the 1981 Springbok Tour for blocking the Hutt Rd.
How does Bishop describe his own politics?
“I’m a market liberal, a market and social liberal.”
Does he distinguish that from libertarian?
“I think you could have a philosophical debate about the difference ... I believe in free markets. I believe in free people, I believe in lower tax and small government.”
He also believes in a subtler approach to societal issues than some of his colleagues. Did Māori cede sovereignty in the Treaty of Waitangi?
“The Crown has sovereignty,” he said recently. “And it was done through the Treaty of Waitangi.”
That leaves open the possibility, denied by the Boss, that while the treaty was a mechanism used by the Crown to assert sovereignty, it doesn’t follow that Māori agreed to it.
“YOU ARE not serious people,” says Logan Roy to his own children in the hit TV drama Succession.
Serious people, in Roy’s world, know how to seize power, hold on to it, do things with it. Chris Bishop got his chance to become a serious person on July 14, 2020, and despite the mullet, he took it.
He’d supported the liberal Amy Adams for party leader in 2018, but she lost to the socially conservative Simon Bridges. Then, in May 2020, he joined Adams, Nicola Willis and Nikki Kaye as leaders of the coup that rolled Bridges in favour of the liberal Todd Muller.
All four had senior roles in Muller’s shadow cabinet, but stories of infighting abounded, the policymaking seemed incoherent and confused and media relations were disastrous. After just 53 days, citing “severe anxiety” and “panic attacks”, Muller resigned.
The bonfire of reputations quickly consumed both Kaye and Adams, who left Parliament a few months later. Muller followed in 2023.
Willis and Bishop did not crash and burn. She is now the Finance Minister; he runs the bulk of the Government’s change programme.
It was as if they said to themselves: Never again, politics is not a game. Winners are serious people. And they decided to become serious people.
Mind you, Shane Jones, who cracks more jokes than the other 122 MPs put together, has taken to saying the same thing. About himself. “The serious people are in charge,” he told Parliament this week.
Bishop’s speech to the Local Government conference contained no jokes. It was the densest 20 minutes of information I think I’ve ever heard. It was so solid, he didn’t even finish.
When I told his assistant I was surprised at the density, he said, “You should try writing it.”
Bishop wasn’t fazed. “I like speeches,” he said. “It’s not a very New Zealand thing to say, but speeches allow you to articulate an argument. And ultimately politics is about an argument.”
The Green Party’s Julie Anne Genter told me she thinks that’s his weakness.
“He’s just a debater,” she said. “He argues to win but is there a coherent understanding of the world? He likes the idea of cities, so he wants more housing, but he doesn’t support public housing because that’s not part of his worldview, even though the evidence says we need more.”
Still, when he speaks he eases his way into his sentences, thinking hard about what he’s going to say. Interviewed by Kim Hill at the Wellington conference, there was one moment when he left a long silence before producing an answer.
LABOUR POLITICIANS have already said yes: they too want a cross-party accord supporting an independent agency. The problem is, both Labour and National point to bad faith on the other side.
From light rail to four-lane highways to water reform to interisland ferries, both have cancelled each other’s projects. Before the last election, National even pulled out of the bipartisan accord on urban housing density it had created with Labour.
And while the PM, Bishop and other ministers talk up the value of a new accord now, there’s no sign of any attempt to seek an accommodation in transport, energy or mining, and there’s not much more agreement on housing or water.
The Government is pushing on with its programme. Restarting oil and gas exploration has been introduced to Parliament, despite the Greens promising to close it down again.
And Bishop told the National Party conference in August: “Labour and the Greens will have to get over their fixation that all roads are bad, because we are going to build highways and they will have to get on board with that.”
You might agree with the Government that drilling for oil and gas and building more “Roads of National Significance” (RONS) are good things. But that’s not the point. Consensus isn’t likely if one side misrepresents the other so cynically (no one thinks “all roads are bad”) and insists things must be done their way.
“What does it take to find the Holy Grail of bipartisan planning?” former Green Party co-leader James Shaw asked at Building Nations.
He reminded the crowd he spoke from hard-grafted experience, as the minister who established the cross-party agreements over the Climate Change Commission and the Zero Carbon Act.
Shaw’s answer: “It requires compromise. From both sides. On things they think are pretty important.”
Labour’s Kieran McAnulty agreed. “We’re up for that and I think Bishop’s up for it as well. But you’ve got to be willing to meet in the middle. Otherwise, what’s there to work with?”
But is Bishop up for it? He told me: “There will always be politics. Politicians are accountable for billions of dollars of public money. So the idea that everything becomes completely bipartisan and depoliticised, and experts decide what New Zealand builds, that is unrealistic and frankly undemocratic.”
Was he saying there would be no compromises?
“We are going to deliver the projects that National campaigned on, there is absolutely no doubt about that.”
But he also wants to develop “consensus over 30 years”.
No compromises now, but maybe in the future? He said he had written to the other parties, suggesting they receive a briefing from Te Waihanga. “And I invited them to meet with me to talk about where we can work together.”
Bishop believes that if there’s cross-party agreement on a long-term plan developed independently by experts, it will probably have strong public support. That would put pressure on political parties to conform.
“What I’m trying to do is develop a long-term plan and strategy that people can get behind. But if parties want to say the strategy developed by the independent experts is wrong, well, this is a democracy and they’re entitled to do that. And they will have to explain it to the electorate.”
Ironically, National itself might be such a party.
Cooper says all the projects on his “menu of options” will “have to have a cost-benefit ratio [BCR] better than 1.0″. But many of the RONS have never had a business case that meets even that minimum standard.
The last time NZTA published one for a four-lane highway from Auckland to Whangārei, for example, there were nine options. One had a BCR of 0.6-1.0; all the others were worse.
A Treasury report released this week redacted the RONS current business-case data.
I asked Bishop: If the independent experts don’t put National’s promised roads on their list, will they still be built?
He said again: The Government is going to build what it promised to build.
ALL OF which throws up some big hurdles for the Government’s new cross-party planning approach.
The first is that it doesn’t seem to apply to the Government.
The second is the problem with business cases. The Treasury report says they’re so unreliable and so expensive to prepare, they’re not fit for purpose. The Government knows this: in transport, Brown has given NZTA until the end of the year to come up with a new way to assess costs and economic value.
Which leads to a third hurdle. None of the Infra Boys has yet talked about the criteria, or principles, for deciding the value of new projects.
This is not straightforward. While a business case is important, many projects are valuable for other reasons. The best argument for a better road to Whangārei is equity, not economics. The people of Northland deserve a better connection to the rest of the country.
But if equity counts, that should also mean much better public transport in the outer suburbs of Auckland.
And there are environmental issues, in particular our climate commitments. They’ve been removed from Brown’s new transport plan, but that won’t be possible in a 30-year strategy.
“The criteria will be worked through as part of the priorities list,” Bishop said. “We’re leaving it to the commission to do specifically‚” and it’s “one of the things where political parties may disagree”.
Geoff Cooper from Te Waihanga hasn’t been much more forthcoming. “We will use an independent and standardised review process to ensure [projects] meet New Zealand’s strategic objectives, represent good value for money and can be delivered,” he told Building Nations.
![Te Waihanga chief executive Geoff Cooper. Projects will have to "meet New Zealand’s strategic objectives, represent good value for money and [be able to] be delivered".](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/resizer/v2/RVLHEPAHN55ZBCSNAAKWPG77EU.jpg?auth=877e649cc56d7bdd48838905bb43cf6a7002796e970cc5aa4962c06b79948624&width=16&height=11&quality=70&smart=true)
What are those strategic objectives? Do we get a say? To put it another way, what kind of country are we going to build for ourselves over the next 30 years?
I asked Bishop: Wouldn’t it be better to get cross-party agreement on the criteria first?
Imagine if the politicians could agree on a way to balance economic, equity and environmental values – if they could adopt a common framework for assessing projects. The debates over pet projects and petty squabbles about this road or that cycleway might just fade away. We’d know how well or badly they fitted in.
“But not everything is agreed. The Greens, unsurprisingly, are going to focus more on climate change with their view that it’s an existential threat to the planet.”
Didn’t he think it’s an existential threat, too?
“Well, I do, but their view is that everything else should be essentially supplicated to the climate. We’ve got a more balanced view of the world. But that’s fine, that’s democracy.”
In that “more balanced view”, does he believe economic goals should be aligned with environmental goals? Should we aim for prosperity in a low-emissions economy?
“At a high level, yes. We have ambitious economic goals and we have climate goals.”
So in setting up the framework for that, won’t they need Shaw’s compromise all round?
“We’re trying to find the sweet spot where politicians who are democratically accountable for the expenditure of public money are able to put forward competing views of the world. And where they can do that anchored by a long-term strategic vision and plan for the country.”
Genter said, “You can’t have a 30-year agreed cross-party infrastructure plan that does nothing to achieve climate mitigation and adaptation.”
And yet, no one in government has suggested what that “long-term strategic vision” might be.
The Greens’ Julie-Anne Genter told me, “You can’t have a 30-year agreed cross-party infrastructure plan that does nothing to achieve climate mitigation and adaptation.”
THE PLAN has attracted other criticisms.
“I would say the medium for long-term vision is exceptionally good,” said Alan Pollard, from the Civil Contractors Association. “But I think the advice would be: think of the now. If we don’t stimulate some activity in the next few months, then by the time those other projects come on screen, there won’t be enough people to do them and there won’t be enough equipment to do it.”
Genter agreed with that. “Where’s the plan for now?” she asked. “You can’t deliver big infrastructure projects in three years. You can’t even start them. When National announced the RONS [in the Key Government], none of them even got consent until their second term and contracts weren’t signed until second or third term.”
Bishop said the project pipeline was in good shape.
“There is massive interest in investing in New Zealand right now and there’s $147.6 billion in the infrastructure pipeline. That number grew 20% in the last quarter, by the way. So this idea the pipeline’s been demolished and nothing’s happening, it’s just nonsense.
But it’s not all greenlit or even funded. Bishop has high hopes for “new funding and financing opportunities”, but Professor John Tookey from the School of Future Environments at AUT has sounded a warning.
“The amount of public infrastructure that’s required maxes out the ability of private finance to be able to fund it.”
Bishop is undeterred and very busy. On top of infrastructure, he’s reforming housing, resource management and consenting law. (Stories on all these will follow.)
In his maiden speech to Parliament, he set out the kind of politician he wanted to be: “I think good politicians listen, reflect, read and think deeply about the world. And if necessary, change their minds.”
He’s just done that with the Fast-track Approvals Bill, which he’s about to bring back to Parliament without the widely criticised clause that gave ministers the power to override independent experts.
But critics are still far from happy, as Forest and Bird’s Nicola Toki made very clear this week. How does the fast-track proposal fit with a cross-party approach.
Or to ask the question in a different way: Has Infra Boy Bish become a serious man?
A long-term strategic planning accord could lead to the most significant works programme we’ve seen in decades. For the built environment, for the natural environment and for how we live.
The Government’s determination to build what it promised, with Fast-track legislation to enable it, could do the same thing. But in very different ways.
They’re a pair of horses pulling the cart in different directions, and we’re riding that cart, hoping it doesn’t get pulled apart altogether.
Geoff Cooper revealed to RNZ that while Cabinet is debating what to do about the Cook Strait ferries, the project has not been sent to Te Waihanga for evaluation.
That suggests the decision will be entirely partisan. This goes well beyond making good on election promises: the future of the ferries wasn’t mentioned in the election at all.
It puts the credibility of Infra Boy Bish on the line. Are we going to have a cross-party approach to long-term planning, or are we not?
Still, there is scope for optimism, because we already have some consensus on a big infrastructure build. It’s the CRL, a transit line which enjoys bipartisan support.
When it opens, probably in 2026, political opponents will be able to have a photo op, just like their counterparts on the Sydney Metro, riding the train together.
Will they all have enough “comfortableness” around trains to take it and what will it signify if they do?
This story was updated on September 26 to reflect recent pronouncements and events.
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
