Repair work on West Auckland's Scenic Drive after Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023. (File photo) Photo: RNZ / Nick Monro
A new study tracking infrastructure over time shows just two thirds of New Zealand's road existed in 1925, with the majority of today's infrastructure being built in the 40 years following the second World War.
New Zealand was committing more money than ever before to building, renewing and maintaining networks, but in relation to the size of the economy, investment in public construction was said it be relatively stable.
The Infrasturcture Commission released a new study publicly in the hopes of giving the public a clear understanding of the age of our infrastructure networks and help prioritse the areas where money needs to be spent on maintenance and replacements.
Peter Nunn, general manager of strategy at the commission, told Nine to Noon, there were no periods where New Zealand spent less than 5 percent of its GDP or more than 7 percent of it on infrastructure.
Investment currently sits at 5.8 percent of GDP.
Nunn said most of our infrastructure was built by about the 1970s with "very little" since then.
"We moved at that point, where we had the infrastructure, into continuing to maintain it, obviously we didn't always do that, so now we're in a catch-up phase."
The "big boom" for infrastructure hit from the 1920s to 1970s, Nunn said when the road network was paved and motorway networks were created.
"We're continuing to infill, expand the networks, pace with the population... we've gone through the work phase.
"We go through that cycle [where] we add capacity to the sites [like hospitals and schools], that we've already got rather than adding more sites."
It was important to look back in time to understand how much we needed to invest tomorrow, he said.
Nunn said in terms of public hospitals, the number of hospital beds peaked in 1945 and then slid through until the 90s and 2000s.
The number of hospital beds in the country peaked in 1945, Nunn said. (File photo) Photo: RNZ / Simon Rogers
"We haven't been growing the size of the hospital network since the 70s or 80s.. now the phase we're entering into at the moment, highlights the population is going to shift quite dramatically... we're going to get a lot older and the need for hospitals is going to rise."
New Zealand's electricity network would need to look at generating a lot more power in coming years, Nunn said.
"Which means more wind farms, more solar farms, more battery storage, and in terms of distribution it depends on where things are located and whether new links need to be built or existing links updated."
Nunn said New Zealand needed to think about technology going forward, and needed to prepare for the investment.
The Infrastructure Commission published all the data it had compiled and produced so other people could look at it, Nunn said.
The data was collected by drawing pretty heavily on Stats New Zealand year books, he said, and filled in with other sources.
"It's a bit of a passion project for me, we spent a lot of tie tracking down other sources to fill it [the data] in."
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