A number big enough to buy the whole shopping list
New Zealand has wasted between $11.8 billion and $17.6 billion on infrastructure since 2000, according to The Cost of Stop-Start 2000-2024, a report by economist Shamubeel Eaqub commissioned by Civil Contractors New Zealand, Infrastructure New Zealand and Water New Zealand. The central estimate is $11.8 billion; the low end is $6.1 billion.
To make the top figure tangible, $17.6 billion would have paid for Auckland’s City Rail Link, Wellington’s sludge treatment plant, Christchurch’s Te Kaha stadium and Dunedin’s new hospital – with enough left over for four more Te Kaha stadiums. Even the conservative number, as Eaqub put it, “buys you a lot of kit in New Zealand.”
This is not a story about a lack of plans. New Zealand is drowning in infrastructure plans. It is a story about the political discipline to actually build them.
The waste isn’t where you think
The intuitive assumption is that delay costs money because prices rise while you wait. That channel is real but small – about $1.074 billion in the central estimate. The dominant driver, at roughly $8.6 billion, is the productivity penalty. When a project pauses, the skilled workers leave, the supply chains disband and the expertise disperses.
The scale of that drain is stark. When a major roading project worth over $500 million is paused for two years, about 65% of the direct project workers leave the industry. Recruiting and retraining replacements costs around $18 million and drags on productivity for months. Even a modest $10 million council project paused for a year wastes half its value.
That is the point the sceptics miss. A Newswire analysis makes the fair methodological argument that the accompanying calculator ignores opportunity cost – paused money funds something else, so the true cost is the stopped project minus its next best alternative. Correct, as far as it goes. But you cannot redirect your way out of a workforce drain. The $8.6 billion productivity hit is not recovered when the money returns, because the engineers have already gone. Even the Newswire piece concedes “the basic claim that stop-start construction is expensive is valid.”
The blowouts everyone remembers
The report catalogues the greatest hits. Auckland’s City Rail Link ran $3 billion over its original budget. Transmission Gully climbed from $850 million to roughly $1.25 billion. Dunedin’s hospital went from $1.88 billion to $2.05 billion – for a downsized build. Auckland light rail and the Interislander ferry saga round out the list of costly indecision.
The cost that never makes headlines is duplication. Taxpayers and ratepayers often fund the same work twice when projects are redesigned, or pay for the design of projects that never get built at all. Every cancelled scheme leaves a paper trail of paid-for work that goes in the bin.
Why business should care more than government
The public bill is $11.8 to $17.6 billion. The private cost is harder to count and probably larger. Private developers who rely on public infrastructure as enabling investment cannot commit capital to a pipeline they don’t trust. A road that keeps getting cancelled cannot anchor a logistics hub. A hospital that keeps being redesigned cannot anchor a medical precinct. Stop-start doesn’t just waste public money – it lifts the risk premium on every private investment decision that touches government infrastructure.
Richard Templer, chief executive of Engineering New Zealand – Te Ao Rangahau, was blunt: “Promised, planned, postponed, pulled – for far too long that’s been the recurring pattern of major infrastructure projects as governments from both sides cycle in and out of power.” The uncertainty, he said, “cripples our engineering and construction industries,” leaving the country “thousands of engineers short.”
The fixes are boring, which is exactly why they’d work
The report’s recommendations are structural, not ideological. Ring-fence maintenance budgets so they can’t be raided during fiscal tightening. Commit to a funded, genuinely visible multi-year pipeline. And require a formal assessment of the full cost of stopping before any project is paused or cancelled. None of these favour a party – they impose discipline on whoever holds the chequebook.
There are signs the current government is at least watching the pipeline. Te Waihanga now publishes regular pipeline snapshots, and Treasury’s investment reporting tracks $86 billion in medium and high-risk Crown investments with cost pressures flagged as a systemic problem. Visibility is a start. Nerve is the missing ingredient.
Templer wants this year’s election to mark a “step change” in how big projects are delivered. The industry has now put a dollar figure on business as usual. The open question is whether any party will sign up to the discipline – or whether the next government simply writes chapter 26 of the same 25-year story.
Sources
- ‘Promised. Planned. Postponed. Pulled’: Stop-start politics ‘wasted’ up to $17.6b (2026-08-03)
- Auckland light rail, Interislander ferries: Infrastructure delays cost New Zealand $11.8b (2026-06-04)
- Stop-starting infrastructure investment estimated to cost $11.8b over 25 years (2026-06-04)
- The Cost of Stopping report and what its calculator misses (2026-06-07)
- The Cost of Stop-Start 2000-2024 (full report)
- Cabinet Paper EXP-25-SUB-0095: June 2025 Quarterly Investment Report (2025-10-21)
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