Why does New Zealand central and local government have such a bad record for building infrastructure? We keep witnessing incredible displays of incompetence on major government projects. The recent immigration database blowout is the latest to astonish anyone who has looked at the details, and it is now the subject of a formal inquiry. But the longest-running and most astonishing government infrastructure project of them all is “Motu Move”, otherwise known as the “National Ticketing Solution”, meant to provide an integrated card payment system for public transport around the country.
An editorial in The Post today concludes: “the saga offers two enduring lessons. Large public projects require far tighter discipline before costs spiral beyond control. And when reliable technology already exists, New Zealand should think very carefully before deciding it needs to invent its own.”
Good lessons. Too polite, though. Motu Move deserves to be read as something bigger: a 17-year exposure of how this country is actually governed. Every part of the political system is implicated: both major parties, the transport bureaucracy, thirteen squabbling local authorities, a financially distressed American defence contractor, and a consultant class billing by the hour. And at the end of it all, nobody accountable for anything.
Seventeen years to build a bus ticket
The National Ticketing Solution was first approved by the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) board in 2009. The original plan was modest: take Auckland’s HOP card system and extend it nationally. In 2014 a consortium of nine councils formed to buy HOP. A year later the deal collapsed because the consortium and Greater Wellington Regional Council couldn’t agree on a purchase price. So, regional squabbling killed the cheap option a decade before anyone dreamed up the expensive one.
In 2018 NZTA regrouped, pulled the public transport authorities together, and decided to build something new. A detailed business case was approved in 2022, and Cubic, a US defence and transport contractor, won a $474 million contract to supply and operate the system. The full programme was budgeted at $1.36 billion: $528m to design and build it, $830m to run it through to 2037.
And where are we now, in the middle of 2026? Some $271 million has been spent. One city, Christchurch, is partially live, and still without the concession fares that matter most to students, seniors and people on low incomes. The actual Motu Move card has been delayed. Wellington and Auckland aren’t due until 2027. Full completion is promised for the end of 2027, a date the project’s own independent reviewers have already described as ambitious.
Thomas Nash, who used to chair Greater Wellington’s transport committee, offered the most honest summary anyone has managed: “It was always going to be ready in two years, no matter which year.”
Even back in 2018, Paul Bruce of Congestion Free Wellington was complaining that “It’s something many other places in the world have had for 10 years. We’ve been talking about it for the last 12 years.” That was eight years ago.
A world-first solution to a solved problem
Contactless public transport ticketing is not frontier technology. London’s Oyster card launched in 2003, built, as it happens, by Cubic. A tourist can tap a bank card on a bus in London or Sydney without a second thought. The technology is boring and proven.
Somewhere around 2018, though, NZTA convinced itself New Zealand’s fare rules were too special for off-the-shelf technology and commissioned its own system instead. The Post’s editorial today puts its finger on why, and on what it means: “Instead of adapting existing technology to New Zealand, the project adapted itself to New Zealand’s bureaucracy.” The councils could not agree on concession rules or providers, so the software would be built around their disagreements.
Nash once suggested New Zealand would end up the first country in the world with a fully integrated nationwide ticketing system. He meant it as a selling point. It reads more like a warning now. NZTA said something similar, without apparent embarrassment, when justifying a $22,691 staff trip to Cubic’s facility in Hyderabad this year: the ticketing solution had to be viewed in India because “it does not exist anywhere else in the world”. According to documents released under the OIA to Nick James of The Post, the travellers came home with a “significant increase in confidence”. Confidence appears to be the project’s principal deliverable to date.
There is a critical question sitting underneath all of this, and almost nobody in officialdom will touch it. Peter L Collins, one of the more obscure but technically literate voices in the debate, states it plainly: “Software does not wear out.” The official case rests on the claim that the existing regional systems are at end of life and that the new system will be cheaper to run than maintaining the old ones. Even taking the Government’s figures at face value, Collins calculates the country is spending $1.4 billion to save roughly $26 million a year. As he puts it, “it can’t be about the money, not if truth be told”.
Governance by veto
Chris Bishop, to his credit, has been blunt about the machinery. The project, he told a select committee last year, did not have a money problem: “There’s plenty of money there.” The problems were technology, delivery and governance, above all a governance arrangement spanning thirteen public transport authorities. “The way it’s structured is you know unless everyone agrees nothing moves forward.”
Thirteen veto players, each defending what Bishop called “really niche, bespoke concessions arrangements”. Concessions exist for good reasons. Student fares, SuperGold discounts and community services card entitlements are equity policies, and regions guard them fiercely. But a structure in which any one authority can stall the whole and none can be overruled is not governance. It is a guarantee of delay.
The regions mutiny
Greater Wellington got sick of waiting and spent $5.3 million bolting contactless payments onto its existing Snapper system. Auckland Transport did its own version for $25.6 million. Set those figures against the $271 million spent so far on the national programme, and the $1.36 billion committed. The clearest verdict on the national project, delivered by its own supposed customers.
Regional council chair Daran Ponter didn’t bother with diplomacy, saying in December: “We have all run out of patience”. Ponter acknowledged NZTA’s complaint that Wellington’s DIY fix undermined the national project, and even conceded the agency had a point. “But do you think Johnny on the number 54 bus gives a s*** about that?”
Auckland’s mayor Wayne Brown has been asking the more fundamental question: “I’ve never understood why it was worth spending $1.3 billion on a national system, given Aucklanders can already pay with contactless methods, and we shouldn’t be boxed into a one-size-fits-all system.” Government IT projects were notorious for blowing time and budget, he added: “This appears to be headed in the same direction.”
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