New Zealand’s first National Infrastructure Plan, released last week, has already produced a flurry of headlines about leaky hospitals, mouldy barracks, tolled bridges and unaffordable mega-roads. It deserves that attention. But for my money, the most important thing written about the plan so far is Danyl McLauchlan’s Listener column this week, “All pitch, no policy”, which slyly turns the report into a takedown of how our whole political system now runs on PR, not on governing. It is the clearest, gutsiest take so far, of how we ended up spending more than almost any other rich country on infrastructure while our pipes, roads and hospitals fall apart around us.
I’ve been writing for years about the rise of spin doctors and the way professionalised politics has slowly eaten away at democratic accountability. What McLauchlan has done is take this big, technical, 226-page infrastructure report and read it the way citizens should: as “an autopsy of the past 30 years of New Zealand comms-driven politics”, as he puts it. Instead of treating the report as just another media item on the Beehive’s “comms grid”, he shows how that very grid – the machinery of political communications – is what has broken the system the report is describing.
The Grid that ate policy
McLauchlan starts, not in Wellington, but with Alastair Campbell in Downing Street. As he reminds us, Campbell is generally credited with “the elevation of comms grids into the organising framework of modern politics”, turning what sounds like harmless diary management into a “way of controlling policy design”. The “Grid” was simply the timeline of announcements, of what gets made public, by whom and when. Under Blair, the grid stopped being an organisational tool. Instead, according to McLauchlan, “Blair’s office demanded ‘announceables’: media events that would generate favourable coverage for the government, and at the same time deliver positive optics: the PM or ministers in a high-vis vest, a hard hat or both; interacting with children or animals; sitting at a round table, either with business leaders or the hard-working small business owners who will be saved by a generous new rebate scheme.”
The key sentence in McLauchlan’s piece is worth quoting in full: “The actual policy work – asking what will we do? What will it cost? Will it work? Does it make the slightest sense? – sits downstream from the announcement.” Once you accept that logic, politics stops being about getting things right, and turns into a daily television show. For Campbell and Blair, McLauchlan notes, the order traditionally went “Monday – Health; Tuesday – Education; Wednesday – Transport; Thursday – cost of living; Friday – regional visit.” The point was that the government always “set the news agenda with a steady drumbeat of positive stories”, while the opposition was left trying to shout from the sidelines.
Dominic Cummings, who watched all this from the Conservative side, later complained that Blair’s government had transformed the Cabinet from an executive branch of government into a media and entertainment centre, where, as McLauchlan puts it, ministers would ask “what’s on the grid?” instead of “will this policy work?”
McLauchlan’s argument is that New Zealand politicians have imported this model wholesale. Our political class, across both main parties, has internalised the idea that the first question about any issue is not what’s right or necessary, but what can be announced next week and how it will look.
Announceables in the Beehive
Once you view politics that way, so much of our recent mess clicks into place. McLauchlan notes that Ardern “liked to hold media conferences at which she announced that at a future date she would make an announcement.” It was grid-fodder, designed to keep the cameras on her even when the substance was still being worked out. The Labour governments she led and then handed to Chris Hipkins were awash with “announceables”: light rail, polytech mega-mergers, bold health reforms, child poverty “targets”, endless working groups and taskforces. The follow-through was often threadbare, but on the grid the boxes were ticked.
The current government is no different. In McLauchlan’s words, when Christopher Luxon and Louise Upston recently announced a $70 million subsidy scheme for major international events, they were not just engaging in economic development, they were “buying $70m worth of press conferences with the public’s money”. Each big sporting or entertainment event that could be unveiled with a splashy media call – “State of Origin is coming to Eden Park!” – was an “announceable” in its own right, whether or not the numbers stacked up. The business case was downstream; the photo-op came first.
Shane Jones’ Provincial Growth Fund is another example McLauchlan zeroes in on. Crown Regional Holdings recently revealed that more than half of its $433 million in loans are at risk or in default. That is a disaster if you think of the fund as a serious regional investment tool. But as McLauchlan acidly observes, it looks like “a brilliant deal if you regard it as a mechanism for generating positive media coverage”, as Jones “tours the provinces scattering money like a feudal lord dispensing alms on a feast day”. The point isn’t that nothing worthwhile was ever funded; it’s that the comms logic drove the programme far more than any careful, long-term investment strategy.
The Infrastructure plan as an autopsy
The Infrastructure Commission’s plan is written in the dry language of technocrats, but McLauchlan reads it as a kind of post-mortem on grid politics. He notes that the report itself says “too often, projects are announced without going through a proper planning process, and maintenance gets routinely deferred in favour of the new and shiny”. About half of all investment proposals in the last three Budgets, the Commission found, “lacked complete business cases when they were allocated funding”. There are 11,925 projects in the national pipeline, collectively worth $275 billion, and “$193b are not fully funded – yet all of them have been announced.”
The Commission notes that New Zealand has been spending about 5.8 per cent of GDP on infrastructure – “the most on infrastructure of any OECD nation” over the last two decades – yet we rank near the bottom on value for money and asset management. “We spend the most but get the least,” as McLauchlan bluntly puts it. It is hard to imagine a more damning sentence about a country that likes to see itself as pragmatic and fiscally responsible. McLauchlan links this directly to the politics of announceables: we keep launching new things for the cameras while quietly failing to look after the assets we already have.
His favourite section of the report (and mine) is where the Commission “openly begs ministers to spend more on existing infrastructure such as hospitals and schools: 60 cents of every dollar we spend should go on maintenance and renewals just to keep the lights on.” That is not a glamorous vision. It means reroofing “forlorn provincial schools”, recladding grim hospital blocks, upgrading sewage plants and stormwater drains. McLauchlan captures the psychology of our political class when he writes that senior politicians have “fought their way to the top to build the nation, conquer the future, write their way into the history books.” Delivering Budgets where they “merely refurbish the toilets in some district court” feels beneath them. “None of it is even announceable!”
A Politics that no longer works, even on its own terms
What makes McLauchlan’s column so powerful is that he doesn’t just say this model is wasteful or shallow; he argues it has stopped even delivering the political returns it once did. “We’re decades into this mode of politics,” he writes, “and there’s no evidence the announceable/grid-based framework still works. Governments that practise it today are very unpopular!” Voters are no longer dazzled by the next big road or hospital concept drawing; they have lived through too many broken promises, too many cancellations and cost blowouts.
National’s campaign slogan (“Fixing the basics. Delivering the future.”) neatly illustrates the trap. McLauchlan suggests the first half of the line acknowledges the mood for competence and maintenance that the Commission is “pleading for”. But the second half, “ominously, ‘Delivering the future’”, signals a desire to keep doing the old mega-project politics at the same time. He warns that this points towards “another three years of the basics deferred”, as high-vis photo-ops win out over the dreary grind of asset management plans and renewal schedules.
In the end, he says, the infrastructure plan itself risks becoming “just another item on a media grid” – released with a ministerial press conference, briefly chewed over by commentators, then filed away while ministers get back to fighting over roads and harbour crossings. That line should sting, because it captures precisely how New Zealand has treated previous big reviews and inquiries. We hold a launch, promise a reset, and then slip straight back into comfortable habits.
When the comms people run the show
All of this sits on top of a deeper structural change that has been obvious in Wellington for some time: the rise of the political communications class. McLauchlan’s story of Alastair Campbell’s “grid” intersects with my own research on New Zealand’s spin doctors and the revolving door between media, ministerial offices and lobbying. The people who now wield enormous influence over what governments say and do are often former journalists, political editors and senior producers who have migrated into the Beehive and then on to corporate PR.
In contrast, when Keith Holyoake was prime minister in the 1960s, he had one press secretary, who also doubled as his private secretary. By the time Jenny Shipley was PM in the late 1990s, she had set a record for the biggest crew of communication staff ever hired by a prime minister. Helen Clark’s government employed 80 party professionals in communications roles. Under John Key, the PM’s Office contained more spinners and advisers than at any previous point in history. By 1998, media professionals working for parties already outnumbered journalists in the parliamentary press gallery.
Now, press secretaries, “directors of communications”, and chiefs of staff sit at the centre of power. They decide which issues can be fronted, which interviews are granted, which phrases are tested in focus groups, which announcements are saved for the Sunday shows. Their professional instinct is to keep the grid busy and their minister “on the front foot”. When a tricky report like the Infrastructure Plan lands, the first question in that world is not “What does this demand of us?” but “What’s our line and how do we get through the next 24 hours?”
It would be unfair to say that all of these people are cynical or empty. Many are smart, hardworking, and genuinely believe they are helping their bosses survive in a brutal media environment. But the effect of giving comms people such power is that policy is constantly bent around message discipline. If the pollsters and strategists say there needs to be a “crime week” or an “infrastructure reset”, the machinery of government is set to work finding or inventing something that will play well. In that environment, it is almost inevitable that big, eye-catching projects and “announceables” will beat slow, boring maintenance every time.
A Dead-end for democracy
Seen through McLauchlan’s argument, New Zealand’s infrastructure crisis is really a democracy crisis. The crumbling pipes and leaking hospitals aren’t the disease; they’re what you get when a political system prizes announcements over actual problem-solving. When governments, of whatever stripe, keep making promises they cannot keep, based on business cases they haven’t read, to deliver projects they can’t fund, the result is not just wasted money. It is a deep erosion of public trust.
The most striking line in McLauchlan’s column is his conclusion that the Infrastructure Commission’s report chronicles “the carnage wrought by the Beehive’s obsession with announcing mega-projects instead of spending money maintaining existing infrastructure.” That word “carnage” is not hyperbole if you talk to people in health, local government, or transport who have had to live with the consequences. We now have a pipeline stuffed with mega-projects “that are not fully funded – yet all of them have been announced.” At some point, reality has to intrude.
McLauchlan is right that this way of doing politics has reached a dead-end. You can keep feeding the comms grid for a while longer, of course. There will always be another ribbon to cut. But every time a hospital roof leaks or sewage pours into a harbour, the theatre looks more ridiculous. Voters are not policy experts, but they are not fools. They can see when a system has stopped working.
McLauchlan points to Wellington as a possible source of hope. The capital, “with the city’s own mega-projects such as the Town Hall rebuild and the Golden Mile groaning under the weight of cost blowouts, and deferred maintenance leading to wastewater being piped into the Cook Strait,” seems finally to have soured on the “new and shiny.” The convention centre, Tākina, “whose curvaceous brown design rather unfortunately resembles a breaking wave of wastewater, has become a symbol of the city’s misplaced priorities.”
What breaking the grid would actually mean
If we take McLauchlan’s analysis seriously, then the question is not how to manage the grid more cleverly, but how to get out from under it. That would mean, first, treating the Infrastructure Plan as more than a talking point. A government that was serious about “fixing the basics” would publicly accept that not all of the 44 largely unfunded mega-projects in the current pipeline can go ahead. It would let the Commission’s advice on maintenance – that “60 cents of every dollar we spend should go on maintenance and renewals just to keep the lights on” – drive actual Budget decisions, even when that means shelving glamorous projects.
It would also require shifting power inside the Beehive and the political parties. Communications staff would still have an important role – citizens deserve clear, honest explanations of what is being done in their name – but they could no longer be allowed to dictate the pace and shape of policy. Ministers would need to rely less on the grid, and more on long-term investment plans, independent advice and public deliberation. That is a big cultural change, and it runs against everything the modern spin industry teaches.
The Infrastructure Commission has given us a clear, if uncomfortable, picture of where we are. McLauchlan has provided the best account so far of how we got here and why the usual tricks won’t get us out. The choice now is whether we carry on running politics as a communications exercise, or whether we accept that the grid has to give way if anything is actually going to get fixed.
Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project
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