A large Italian firm has confirmed it will bid to build and run the first 26km stretch of the Northland Expressway, one of New Zealand’s most expensive road projects. 

Guido Cacciaguerra, the Australia-based head of PPPs for Italian Webuild, a multinational industrial group specialising in construction and civil engineering, confirmed the bid at the Government’s Infrastructure Investment Summit this morning. 

Cacciaguerra said his firm has a long history in New Zealand. 

“The Italians are coming back,” he told media at the summit. 

Codelfa-Cogefar, a predecessor firm to Webuild, helped construct tunnels for the Tongariro hydro scheme in the 1960s. 

The Government was so keen for their expertise that it waived Italian pasta, olive oil, and cheese through the strict import restrictions of the time. 

The firm even brought its own cooks to Tūrangi, where the workers were based. According to the company’s own history, the cooks were the second-best paid workers on the project. 

Webuild is part of a consortium whose bid to build was revealed by Businessdesk this morning. Plenary, an Australian-headquartered infrastructure investor, is another member of the consortium. 

It committed to pursuing at least five public-private partnerships (PPP) opportunities over a five-year timeframe and establishing an office in New Zealand within the next 18 months. 

Plenary managing director Patrick Lauren said Malaysian firm Gamuda was also part of the consortium. He would not disclose local firms. 

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Cacciaguerra said Australia was Webuild’s largest market outside of Europe and it made sense to expand to New Zealand. 

“I’ve been coming to New Zealand for over a year and I think that today was just a confirmation of the consistency… the Government has been very consistent in planning,” he said. 

Perhaps gesturing to the Government’s Fast-track regime, and Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop’s speech to the summit, promising the Government wanted to make consenting easier, Cacciaguerra said one of the main attractions of New Zealand was that things ran to schedule and projects met deadlines. (Fellow conference attendees Hyundai, late of project iRex, and CPB and HEB, of Transmission Gully might beg to differ). 

“Every time there was a new deadline, that was met,” Cacciaguerra said. 

“The Northland Corridor is happening, it’s real… I work with governments around the world and it is very rare to see every time a deadline that is met by the government side,” he said. 

Cacciaguerra said his investment, “in terms of debt” would be “billions” of dollars, and “in terms of equity, hundreds of millions”. 

He said Webuild was used to competition, having won tenders to build several of Australia’s recent PPPs. 

Finance Minister Nicola Willis said there will be money for PPPs announced in the forthcoming Budget and she expected each budget she delivers will have more PPP funding in it. 

Northland Expressway 

She would not say how much money would be allocated. She warned that PPPs did not mean free money - someone, often the taxpayer, still needed to pay. 

“It is often missed [that] a public-private partnership doesn’t mean that a benevolent company will enter New Zealand and build a road for us for free. 

“What it means is that they will lend us their expertise and their capital and we will reach a funding agreement with them,” she said. 

Willis added that some funding would be direct from the Crown in the form of money collected in taxes, while other funding could come in the form of new revenue tools. 

All ministers offered to take suggestions on policy options that would make life more accommodating for business in New Zealand, with Regulations Minister David Seymour, Immigration Minister Erica Stanford, joining Bishop and Willis in their overtures. 

Willis used the example of Rocket Lab, which announced it wanted to launch rockets from Māhia in 2014 and was able to do so by 2017 after a regulatory change from the Government. 

She hinted the Government was open to other changes to encourage the Rocket Labs of the future. 

Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.