As the country's mayors meet for their big Local Government NZ conference in Christchurch, the quake-stricken city's former mayor warns of a renewed failure to align resilient infrastructure and robust emergency management.
The trouble with being away overseas is you miss those local news releases that let you know what’s going on.
I hadn’t realised until this weekend that the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet had put out a discussion document on enhancing the resilience of Aotearoa New Zealand’s critical infrastructure. It was a chance look at a newspaper article that alerted me to it.
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The headline referred to the ‘global megatrends’ that are putting our critical infrastructure under pressure. These global megatrends are climate change, growing national security risks, a fragmented global economy, and technological change.
That sounds like pretty important stuff and submissions close on 8 August. I was surprised I couldn’t find any other commentary on it. So, I read the discussion document.
It is a follow up to the government’s response to Rautaki Hanganga o Aotearoa, the New Zealand Infrastructure Strategy asking whether the government’s existing regulatory approach to building critical infrastructure resilience is fit-for-purpose.
But the document is very short of actual examples of what they mean by the ‘existing regulatory approach’, what the issues are, and what options might exist to resolve them.
The main issue seems to be what regulatory framework should apply to critical infrastructure to ensure resilience.
This led me to another thing I had missed. The Emergency Management Bill was introduced to Parliament about a month ago to replace the Civil Defence & Emergency Management Act 2002. It uses the phrase ‘critical infrastructure entities’ – the same entities in the discussion document, the likes of RNZ, TVNZ, airports, ports, power and water utilities, telcos, rail and roads, and petrol stations.
These entities must plan and ensure they are able to function to the fullest possible extent during and after an emergency. The new law will introduce emergency levels of service.
The question is, what additional entities or sectors will be included?
As the discussion document highlights, there are many other aspects of government that can be seen as critical infrastructure: defence, intelligence, government data, and of course there are food and grocery providers, financial services and payments, data storage providers, transport providers, and the health system.
The Prime Minister's Department is seeking feedback on what regulatory reforms should apply to those entities, rather than what criteria should be used to designate entities as critical infrastructure.
Its main question is identifying minimum service levels in the event of an emergency. I suspect that is going to depend on the nature of the entity or sector.
I must admit that I don’t really understand why this discussion document has emerged from DPMC, when the Treasury is the oversight body for the Infrastructure Commission. And I don’t understand why it hasn’t been linked to the Emergency Management Bill.
And I also don’t understand why there is no reference to the infrastructure planning that has gone before and occurs in every council, which every three years produces a 30-year infrastructure strategy. Local government barely warrants a mention as usual.
The Treasury’s National Infrastructure Unit actually released a National Infrastructure Plan in 2010 and updated it in 2011. This isn’t even mentioned in this discussion document.
Given that the purpose of those earlier plans was to present a high-level view of the state of New Zealand’s infrastructure, describe the principles and direction of future investment, improve alignment between national and regional planning, establish greater discipline around infrastructure decisions, and increase public awareness about the role that infrastructure plays in supporting and raising the nation’s living standards, we seem to have taken a long time to get to this point.
Could we not have added a resilience requirement to the work that has already been done? And could we have better joined-up engagement on these important issues?
