BARRIE SAUNDERS: Engineers – your country needs you

The essence of the 226 page Infrastructure Commission report is that NZ spends enough on infrastructure, but the value we get is poor compared with like countries. No doubt the terrain and small population thinly spread, will partly explain our underperformance, but I think there is a critical extra element.

This is the paucity of qualified engineers in key decision making roles. Cabinet and Councils are constantly making big decisions having to rely on consultants etc rather than by using their practical real world experience. Excessive reliance on consultants is foolish and expensive.

I have tried to find out how many qualified engineers there were in Parliament and ChatGPT gave me just ACT MPs David Seymour and Simon Court. There are other MPs with STEM qualifications but I do not know whether any have civil or other engineering degrees and experience. This is a massive intellectual/experience deficit for decision makers.

I asked ChatGPT for the number of Mayors with engineering qualifications which came up with just Auckland’s Wayne Brown and Nelson’s Nick Smith. There maybe more.

Parliament on the other hand has many MPs with law degrees who are drawn to the political process for obvious reasons as well as many in the social area, including teaching and unions. A few farmers from the practical world.

In Wellington the lack of engineers at governance level has been exposed in three different areas. First the struggling “Wellington Water” had just one engineer on its board who replaced a CEO who departed after performance issues were raised. That left the board with no engineers which was remedied by the appointment of one new director with engineering experience. In my view there should be at least two engineers with relevant experience on the board of this entity and its successor from July 1, 2026.

The Moa Point disaster and the truly massive cost blowouts for the adjacent sludge minimisation plant also indicate a failure at governance level. It’s no good just blaming the Moa Point operator Veolia. The job of directors, in this case the WCC, is to hold contractors to account. The WCC failed.

Of course it would be rather helpful if the WCC senior management team included a City Engineer. Someone who would sit next to the CEO along with the CFO. The Grant Thornton report showed the WCC is hopeless at managing contracts which mostly explains the massive cost overruns on projects like the old Town Hall rebuild etc, etc. Hopeless management like this means the WCC is inevitably rorted by contractors. Not one new project of consequence should be started until the WCC becomes a competent contractor.

NZ is not alone in having so many lawyers instead of engineers in its Parliament. It's a similar situation in Europe according to a BBC podcast I heard. China on the other hand is led by an engineer in President Xi and it shows. Auckland City has Wayne Brown who has used his real world engineering experience to upgrade the city.

My hope is NZ’s political parties will produce more engineers for Parliament so practical people can help make the critical infrastructure decisions necessary.

Business as usual won’t cut the mustard.

Barrie Saunders: For 25 years I was a Government Relations consultant retiring from Saunders Unsworth in 2015. Earlier work included journalism in New Zealand, Australia and the UK, public relations roles in Parliament, manufacturing and the meat industry – also in the late 1980s the North American Director of the NZ Meat Producers Board based in New York. I was President of the Wellington Chamber of Commerce 2000-2002 and was Chairman of the NZ Taxpayers Union from 2018 until March 2021. Barrie Saunders blogs here