ACT has laid out a six-point transport policy promising cheaper infrastructure, stronger protection for road maintenance funding, tighter rules around government procurement and changes intended to keep used vehicles affordable.
The policy, published on the ACT Party’s website and promoted by infrastructure spokesperson Simon Court, is built around a simple argument: New Zealanders already pay heavily through fuel taxes, road-user charges, rates and tolls, so more of that money should be directed towards roads, maintenance and transport capacity.
ACT says it would “build more, faster, for less”.
That is a politically powerful message, particularly at a time when congestion, potholes, infrastructure deficits and the cost of major projects remain persistent concerns.
But several parts of the policy are more complicated than the slogans suggest.
Some proposals build on practices already used by NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi. Others involve genuine philosophical choices about procurement, environmental standards and what transport funding should be allowed to pay for.
The key question is not whether ACT has identified real problems.
In several areas, it has.
The harder question is whether its proposed solutions would actually produce the savings and improvements the party is promising.
ACT’s six transport proposals
The policy contains six main reforms.
ACT wants major projects to publish the lowest-cost safe option alongside the preferred design.
It wants transport infrastructure planned earlier in high-growth areas.
It proposes ring-fencing maintenance and renewal funding in the National Land Transport Fund.
It wants ethnicity removed from Crown-funded infrastructure procurement decisions and related spending targets.
It would prevent National Land Transport Fund money being spent on non-functional public art, monuments and decorative features.
And it wants to loosen vehicle-emissions rules that ACT says are making newer used vehicles less affordable.
Court argues the package would increase competition and force infrastructure agencies to focus more closely on core transport outcomes.
Claim one: Major projects need more transparency over cheaper options
One of ACT’s strongest proposals is to require major projects to show the “lowest-cost safe option” alongside the preferred option, including cost, delivery time and benefit-cost ratio.
There is merit in making alternatives easier for the public to compare.
But it is important to understand that New Zealand’s existing transport investment system already requires options to be assessed.
NZTA’s business case process already requires project sponsors to consider alternatives and identify the best-value response. Shortlisted options can be assessed for cost, risk, economics and benefit-cost ratios.
So ACT is not introducing the concept of comparing options from scratch.
Its proposal would instead place greater emphasis on publicly displaying the cheapest safe option and explaining why a more expensive design was chosen.
That could improve transparency.
However, cheapest and best value are not necessarily the same thing.
Value for money can include cost, quality, durability, performance, benefits and risk, not simply the lowest upfront construction cost.
A cheaper bridge, intersection or road design may cost less initially but have higher maintenance costs, lower resilience, reduced capacity or poorer safety performance over its lifetime.
That means ACT’s proposal could be useful as a transparency measure, provided “lowest cost” does not become the overriding test.
Are New Zealand projects really being “over-engineered”?
Court also argues that too much transport spending is being consumed by “over-engineered designs”.
That is more difficult to prove as a general statement.
There are certainly examples where project scope has expanded, costs have escalated or expensive specifications have been questioned.
But there is no single national measure showing how much money is being lost specifically because roads are “over-engineered”.
Project costs can increase because of land acquisition, seismic standards, drainage, safety requirements, utility relocation, environmental mitigation, consenting, inflation and difficult ground conditions.
Calling all of those costs unnecessary would be misleading.
ACT is therefore making a political judgement rather than presenting a demonstrated national figure for waste from over-engineering.
The underlying challenge of infrastructure affordability is real, but the causes are more varied.
Claim two: Roads often arrive after housing growth
ACT’s second proposal argues that transport infrastructure frequently lags behind housing development.
This is one of the more credible parts of the policy.
Rapid-growth areas around Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga, Queenstown, Christchurch and other centres have repeatedly faced pressure on roads and other infrastructure as development occurs faster than transport capacity can be delivered.
ACT wants major growth areas to have funded capacity plans, protect future corridors early and use traffic thresholds to trigger construction.
Early route protection can reduce future land-acquisition complications and provide more certainty for developers and communities.
The problem ACT identifies is already widely recognised.
The difficult part is funding.
Protecting a future route is one thing.
Having billions of dollars available to construct it when a trigger is reached is another.
ACT’s policy is stronger on planning discipline than on explaining where all additional infrastructure capital would come from.
Claim three: Maintenance funding needs protection
ACT wants maintenance and renewal money in the National Land Transport Fund protected so it cannot be redirected towards new capital projects.
There is a strong policy argument behind this.
Deferred road maintenance can be expensive.
Allowing pavements, drainage and bridges to deteriorate can turn manageable maintenance into much larger reconstruction bills.
The current National Land Transport Programme already contains substantial maintenance and renewal spending, and the Government has increased its focus on road maintenance.
ACT’s proposal would go further by placing a stronger barrier around those funds.
That could improve certainty for maintenance programmes.
But ring-fencing also reduces flexibility.
During emergencies or major changes in transport priorities, governments sometimes need the ability to redirect money.
The debate therefore comes down to whether greater long-term maintenance discipline is worth giving future governments less freedom to move funding between categories.
Claim four: Government contracts are being influenced by ethnicity
This is likely to be the most politically contested part of ACT’s policy.
Court says public infrastructure contracts can be “shaped by ancestry rather than merit”.
ACT wants Crown funding conditional on ethnicity not determining who may bid, how bids are scored, who gets preference or who must be subcontracted.
There is a factual basis behind ACT’s reference to ethnicity-based procurement policy, but the language needs context.
New Zealand has operated a Progressive Procurement policy intended to increase Māori business participation in government contracting.
Under earlier settings, mandated agencies were required to report progress towards a target of awarding 8 percent of relevant annual procurement contracts to Māori businesses.
The purpose of that policy was to address barriers Māori businesses faced in accessing government procurement opportunities and broaden the supplier base.
That is different from saying every infrastructure contract was awarded on ethnicity rather than capability.
Government procurement still involves requirements relating to price, capability, delivery and public value.
ACT’s argument is philosophical: it believes ethnicity should play no role in procurement preferences or targets.
Supporters of progressive procurement argue that removing barriers for historically underrepresented suppliers can increase competition rather than reduce it.
Whether ACT’s change would lower project costs is therefore not established simply by removing the target.
That would need to be demonstrated through procurement outcomes.
Would removing Māori procurement targets necessarily save money?
ACT says its policy would create more competition and lower costs.
That is possible in some procurements if rules currently limit the pool of suppliers.
But the opposite argument also exists.
Progressive procurement has been promoted as a way to increase supplier diversity and reduce barriers to government work.
More suppliers competing can itself increase competitive pressure.
So there is not enough evidence to state categorically that removing ethnicity-related procurement settings would automatically make infrastructure cheaper.
ACT is proposing a different procurement philosophy.
Its financial benefit would need to be measured after implementation.
Claim five: Road-user money should not fund decorative features
ACT wants non-functional art, monuments and decorative amenity features excluded from National Land Transport Fund funding.
This is likely to appeal to motorists who believe transport taxes should be tightly focused on roads.
But the policy raises a question over what counts as “non-functional”.
Some landscaping can serve stormwater, erosion-control or safety purposes.
Urban design can improve walking environments and community integration.
Cultural design can form part of consent agreements or engagement with communities affected by major infrastructure.
ACT’s position is that communities would remain free to add extras, but road users should not pay for them through the transport fund.
That is a legitimate spending debate.
But savings would depend on how much is currently spent on genuinely optional decorative elements, a figure ACT’s statement does not provide.
Without that number, it is difficult to know whether this reform would free up a significant amount of money or mainly represent a symbolic tightening of funding rules.
Claim six: Emissions rules are increasing vehicle prices
ACT’s final proposal targets vehicle-emissions standards.
Here, there is stronger evidence behind part of the party’s concern.
The Clean Car Standard applies CO2 targets to vehicle importers. Vehicles above the target can incur charges, while lower-emission vehicles generate credits.
That means emissions rules can influence the price and availability of imported vehicles.
Government regulatory analysis has also acknowledged that tighter standards can create a risk of importers restricting supply or passing compliance costs into vehicle prices, particularly in the used-import market.
So ACT is on firmer ground when it says emissions rules can affect affordability.
But there is another side.
The Clean Car Standard exists to reduce fleet emissions and encourage the importation of cleaner and more fuel-efficient vehicles.
Those vehicles can reduce fuel costs over time and lower emissions.
The question is therefore not whether emissions standards have costs.
They do.
The question is how those costs should be balanced against lower fuel use, reduced emissions and the long-term quality of New Zealand’s vehicle fleet.
ACT is strongest where it demands transparency
The most defensible parts of ACT’s policy are arguably those focused on transparency, maintenance and advance planning.
Publishing clearer alternatives for major projects could allow taxpayers to see what extra money buys.
Protecting maintenance can reduce the temptation to defer basic work.
Planning roads before growth arrives addresses a real weakness in New Zealand’s development model.
Those are practical proposals that can be evaluated relatively easily.
The more ideological parts of the policy, particularly procurement and environmental spending, involve wider questions about what government purchasing and infrastructure should achieve beyond simply minimising construction cost.
“More for less” is easier to promise than prove
ACT’s central promise is that New Zealand can build more infrastructure for less money.
Almost every government would like to achieve that.
The difficulty lies in proving where meaningful savings are actually available.
If unnecessary design features are removed, projects can become cheaper.
If approvals are faster, costs may fall.
If maintenance is done earlier, expensive reconstruction can sometimes be avoided.
But cutting scope can also produce infrastructure with lower capacity, resilience or longevity.
And shifting money away from environmental, cultural or social outcomes does not make those consequences disappear.
It changes which outcomes the transport system is expected to deliver.
The real test is cost per outcome
A useful way to judge ACT’s policy is not whether its language about waste sounds convincing.
It is whether the reforms would produce measurable improvements.
That means asking:
Does the same dollar buy more kilometres of safe road?
Do maintenance backlogs fall?
Are project delivery times shorter?
Do benefit-cost ratios improve?
Does congestion decline?
Are vehicle prices genuinely lower?
And do those savings remain after future maintenance, environmental mitigation and resilience costs are included?
Those are the benchmarks that would show whether the policy works.
Transport is becoming an election battleground
ACT’s announcement also signals how infrastructure is likely to feature in the 2026 election campaign.
Road condition, congestion, housing growth and the cost of major projects affect voters directly.
ACT is positioning itself on the side of simpler engineering, tighter spending discipline, road-focused funding and fewer social or environmental conditions attached to infrastructure investment.
Opponents are likely to argue that transport investment has broader responsibilities and that cheapest is not always best.
Both sides will need to move beyond slogans.
New Zealand does have an infrastructure affordability problem.
It also has a long-term infrastructure quality problem.
Solving one by making the other worse would be no victory.
ACT has put forward a clear direction.
Now the more important debate is whether its six reforms would genuinely deliver better infrastructure, or simply redefine what government is prepared to pay for.
Source note: This article was developed from ACT New Zealand’s “Keep New Zealand Moving” policy statement published on the ACT Party website on 4 September 2026. Webfit News has examined the claims against current transport, procurement and vehicle-emissions settings and added context where the party’s statements require qualification.