‘Many people will be quite shocked’ by the cost to fix NZ, minister says

Tuesday, 17 February 2026

With infrastructure crumbling, and being literally washed away by yet another summer storm, Glenn McConnell reports on the cost of climate change and repairing the state.

The cost to fix New Zealand is so large, there’s no agreed price tag.

It’s estimated that local government, alone, needs an extra $52 billion to fix the things it manages - such as local roads, flood walls, and pipes. Add on the state highways and railways, as well as other central government assets, such as hospitals, prisons, emergency response services, military bases and schools, and, well, who really knows the cost?

The price tag, no doubt, is massive. Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop said estimates he had seen had the total bill for New Zealand’s infrastructure deficit at “anywhere between $100 and $200 billion”.

That is the cost to modernise and repair existing infrastructure.

It’s a figure so big that it’s effectively impossible to comprehend. And yet the Government must, and will soon, lay out what bills it plans to pay - and what projects it will back.

Later on Tuesday, Bishop is set to make a major announcement about the Government’s strategy for funding and building public infrastructure.

Ahead of that announcement, Bishop told Stuff he expected “many people will be quite shocked” to see how badly public assets have been managed, and therefore how costly the maintenance bills will be.

Many people might be - but others, in Wellington, the East Coast, Wairarapa, Christchurch, and Hawke’s Bay, will have seen the dire situation with their own eyes.

This announcement was being made on the same week that railways and roads were closed (yet again) due to summer storms. Wellington effectively ground to a halt on Monday because the train lines were blocked due to there being too much wind, in a city famous for its wind.

The capital’s council-owned water company, Wellington Water, then pumped more untreated sewage onto the southern coast that same day.

In Christchurch, some good news, of sorts, because a “boil water” notice was lifted after an emergency alert warned people not to drink tap water over the weekend. But as one boil water notice was pulled, another was issued - this time, for some in the Wairarapa.

Meanwhile, many schools in the lower North Island had to close due to flooding fears - or because the roading and public transport networks connecting them to their communities had failed.

The bills to maintain this infrastructure keep coming as “severe weather events”, fuelled by climate change, become more common.

Government to release infrastructure plan

Bishop said the Government would need to make trade-offs.

“It’s really quite sobering,” he said.

He said the reality was that, for highways, it would be impossible to protect every road. The Government operates about 11,000km of state highway. And the National Party has promised to build even more, with 17 “roads of national significance”.

“There is, of course, a limit. Money is not limitless. And so there is a level at which we say ‘you can improve things to some extent’, but you can’t always protect every part of the state highway network from severe weather events.

“We are where we are. New Zealand is where it is. And the weather is going to keep happening. We can’t future-proof everything from the weather, but where it’s cost effective and sensible to do that, we will do that,” he said.

With infrastructure investment, there was a tension between paying to maintain and repair - or building something new. Bishop said it was often cheaper to maintain and modernise, but sometimes there was a case for a new thing that could replace old infrastructure.

By building Transmission Gully in Wellington and the Hawke’s Bay Expressway, he said the original highways - which were prone to closures - required less investment.

But there isn’t always an alternative.

Build back better, or not at all?

Nick Leggett, the chief executive of Infrastructure NZ, an industry lobby group, said New Zealanders didn’t necessarily need to pay more to maintain and build infrastructure. He said we were paying about the right amount, even more than the OECD average. But he said we were amongst the worst, “the bottom 10%”, for getting value for money.

“It’s not about writing bigger cheques,” he said.

Without bigger cheques, he said there was a trade-off. There would need to be tough discussions.

“Adapting to more extreme weather is within our grasp, over a period of time, if we have the right mindset,” he said.

New Zealand’s recent severe weather was not uncommon.

“There are many, many parts of the world that have had far more extreme weather than New Zealand has, on a seasonal basis. Think about regular snow, cyclones and rain. We can adjust to that. But often the buckets of money required to re-instate something that gets washed out or taken out by a storm are only enough to put back what was already there,” he said.

So when infrastructure needed replacing, he said Government should look to “build back better”.

But, he agreed with Bishop; there wasn’t always a case to build back better.

“Then,” he asked, “do we even build it back?”

“Are we wasting our time in some places, and do we need to have some wider conversations? I think New Zealanders are up for those conversations,” Leggett said.

‘We can afford to fix these things’ - Green Party

Green co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said the Government could afford to build a more climate-resilient country, but chose not to.

“We can afford to fix these things if we fix the tax system, if we are willing to fairly tax polluters and we are willing to generate and direct that revenue to build our infrastructure and to build our resilience,” she said.

She said the previous Labour-Green government had started doing that, with the Climate Emergency Response Fund.

That fund used money from the Emissions Trading Scheme, which was paid by companies causing pollution, and gave it to projects that cut emissions or helped communities adapt to more extreme weather.

But the coalition Government closed the scheme in 2024.

“They decided to gut all of that and take the money to put into trickle down tax cuts … which has served precisely nobody in this country, as the cost of living / cost of greed crisis has ramped up, along with the climate crisis,” Swarbrick argued.

She said the Government wasn’t taking climate change seriously.

In October, Climate Minister Simon Watts released a four-page “National Adaptation Framework”. The previous policy, set by James Shaw as the former climate minister, had been almost 200 pages.

“I have tried really, really hard to work constructively with this Government on climate mitigation and adaptation, because, ultimately, nobody wins as politicians bicker and the planet burns. But I have no words for you about how much New Zealand has been screwed around by this,” Swarbrick said.

“The minister seems quite happy to wave around a pamphlet when what we needed was a fully funded plan.”

Watts said the framework was serious and “clear”. He said it led to the creation of a national flood map, which would help people build and prepare better.

“What we have seen, already, as a result of earlier weather events, is that infrastructure is being rebuilt with more resilience.

“The events we’ve seen in the last 48 hours reinforce that this is an area of priority for our Government,” he said.

On the question of funding, however, he said that would need to be sorted out in future budgets.