ANNUAL REPORT 23/24
BRINGING ENGINEERING TO LIFE
Advocating for you and your profession
We continue to advocate on your and the profession’s behalf to drive progress, protect public safety, and address critical challenges facing New Zealand. Our advocacy efforts are guided by feedback from you and emerging national priorities.
Infrastructure certainty needed
New Zealand faces critical infrastructure challenges, and we continue to advocate for improvements in project delivery, long-term planning, and procurement practices. In meetings with Hon. Chris Bishop, Minister for Infrastructure, we’ve raised concerns about uncertainty around the infrastructure pipeline, the need for standardised contracts, and prioritising evidence over politics in planning. We support bipartisan long-term planning and have welcomed consultation on the National Infrastructure Plan.
Addressing the long-term skills shortage
New Zealand needs more engineers to meet our long-term industry demand and support economic growth. There are challenges throughout the pathway for engineers, as illustrated in the Wonder Project. We’re collaborating with ACE New Zealand and Waihanga Ara Rau Construction and Infrastructure Workforce Development Council on ways to address this issue and will release an action plan in early 2025 to highlight workforce challenges and the work underway to address them.
Our submissions on the Government’s recent science and tertiary education reforms emphasised how these systems need to change to help address skill shortages.
Improving engineering standards
We share your concerns regarding outdated or non-existent engineering standards available from Standards New Zealand. The difficult process for updating and developing new standards and the high cost to access them has been the subject of several of our Ministerial letters and discussions. We continue to investigate if collections of standards can be made available to you at a discount and are working to ensure your concerns are represented during the recently launched Government review of the standards funding and development system.
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