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Speaker 1: Last week it was vegis and land use. This week

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Speaker 1: it's engineers. Delays to infrastructure projects are apparently seeing hundreds

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Speaker 1: of skilled workers packing up and leaving the country. It's

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Speaker 1: the pipeline that's dried up, apparently. Engineering New Zealand boss

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Speaker 1: Richard Templar is with us on this. Richard, very good

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Speaker 1: morning to you.

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Speaker 2: Good morning Mike.

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Speaker 1: In a world of clickbait and dramatic headlines, I'm always

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Speaker 1: worried about hyperbole. Is the hyperbole in this or can

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Speaker 1: you actually quantify hundreds of engineers leaving the country.

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Speaker 2: So we don't have the total number of engineers, but

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Speaker 2: in talking with our large, small and medium firms, we

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Speaker 2: know that well into the hundreds of engineers have lost

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Speaker 2: their job jobs and the vast maturity of them are

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Speaker 2: either working on offshore projects or have moved overseas to

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Speaker 2: find work. And in addition to the engineers, there's also

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Speaker 2: the construction workforce. These are the people who build the roads,

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Speaker 2: the hospitals, the schools, everything like that. They can't work virtually,

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Speaker 2: they have to relocate in order to do their jobs.

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Speaker 2: And we know significant numbers of construction firms have been

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Speaker 2: going under and their workers are having to move overseas.

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Speaker 1: This is the artworking of the previous government because pipelines

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Speaker 1: are slow to turn around, given what you've heard from

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Speaker 1: the current government, and they're looking at private partnerships and

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Speaker 1: foreign investment and lots of roads and all of that

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Speaker 1: is their hope.

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Speaker 2: There's certainly is hope, and we really do acknowledge the

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Speaker 2: work of people like Minister of Infrastructure Chris Bishop and

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Speaker 2: their desire to form a bipartisan long term pipeline. You've

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Speaker 2: also got the fast Track Consenting underway and various other initiatives.

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Speaker 2: The problem is is there's been a seventeen month hiatus

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Speaker 2: in which large contracts have been stopped and not relet

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Speaker 2: and that seventeen months has been too long, and that's

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Speaker 2: what's caused engineering firms to make the tough decisions to

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Speaker 2: have to shed their staff. And when there's no work

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Speaker 2: or will head overseas and when.

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Speaker 1: You flick the ghost, which suddenly you can't guess start Monday,

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Speaker 1: gear up by tuesday, can.

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Speaker 2: You Absolutely we'll hit the problem which we've hit in

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Speaker 2: the past when we've tried to build a way out

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Speaker 2: of a recession that will have all these projects come

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Speaker 2: on stream and there'll be no one to do it,

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Speaker 2: and that leads to project delays and cost escalation.

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Speaker 1: Do you hold out any hope? See the problem with

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Speaker 1: bipartisan In theory it's fantastic. In reality it doesn't because

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Speaker 1: one's all about buses and cycle lanes, one's about roads,

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Speaker 1: and never the twain shall meet.

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Speaker 2: I think it's really worthwhile having a look at the

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Speaker 2: Australian model. In Australia, the states get together and degree

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Speaker 2: an infrastructure plan and they lock it in and then

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Speaker 2: when a new government comes in, they say to the

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Speaker 2: new government, you can add whatever you like, but you

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Speaker 2: can't take away from this infrastructure plan. So I think

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Speaker 2: we need to look at the baseline infrastructure the country needs.

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Speaker 2: That's three waters, that's roading, that's power, that's telecommunications. We

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Speaker 2: need to line those projects up. Agree because everyone understands

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Speaker 2: we've got to do something about stormwater and auckland. Everyone

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Speaker 2: understands we've got to boost the power grid so we

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Speaker 2: can deal with the renewable energy projects coming on track.

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Speaker 2: Line those up, and then if a new government comes

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Speaker 2: in and they want lots of cycle ways, that's an

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Speaker 2: on top of not an instead of.

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Speaker 1: Well said Richard appreciate it very much. Richard Templar, Engineering

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Speaker 1: New Zealand Boss.

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