ABSTRACT
The material that could be included in this chapter is vast, as infrastructure covers locally focused infrastructure such as water supply, sewage and storm water disposal and roads, generally provided by city/district councils, and large-scale nationally focused infrastructure including state highways, motorways and energy generation. The larger energy and roading projects are dominated by central government, usually driven by funding concerns and wider ideological issues such as the introduction of market models. These projects, which in the past included the now huge hydro-electric power generation system, were developed by central government because the country was too small and the population too scattered to attract private investors to develop them. However, these are often seen as peripheral issues in New Zealand planning, as infrastructure planning is carried out by engineers and often comes to the planner’s attention only in a piecemeal manner as part of a subdivision application. This does lead to a concern that wider issues, such as the impact of discharges from urban waste water systems on rivers and the sea, are being overlooked or ignored. The Resource Management Act (RMA) has had an impact on these issues as these discharges are usually to land or water and thus come under its provision. The tendency to grant local bodies consent to discharge storm water or cleaned sewage into rivers and the sea for extended periods often with few conditions has gradually been replaced by consents for shorter periods with strict conditions on the quality of the discharge and constant encouragement to look at other solutions such as land-based sewage disposal systems. For Māori the need to stop the disposal of human waste into waterways is of significant importance as such discharges are culturally and
physically repugnant, given the mauri1 of the water. It would, however, be pertinent to observe that such improvements have taken almost two decades, partly because there is always reluctance for the regional council to be seen to be adding to the financial problems of city/district councils. These financial problems can be traced to the ongoing issues with local body finance and what Bush (1995: 255) calls ‘the serious search for a lucrative alternative to rates’. Essentially rates are, with borrowing and limited user charges, the only sources of local body finance. Although better and more strategic management had emerged from local government reform from 1989 onwards, local government at the same time faced competition in the loans market from central government looking to reduce its debt, so local authorities plunged into overseas borrowing with some unfortunate consequences from currency fluctuations.
