Cabinet has approved a scaled-back rebuild of Scott Base, ending years of stalling on a project that was paused when the original design came in over budget. Construction is due to start in October, at the beginning of the short Antarctic building season.
The revised plan is smaller and less ambitious than the one New Zealand signed up to at the start of the decade. Instead of pulling down and replacing the Hillary Field Centre, the science building will be refurbished and kept in service. A new Base Services Building will be constructed for accommodation and day to day living, and the ageing water and power infrastructure will be replaced. The work adds roughly 1,500 square metres to the total footprint of the base.
Antarctica New Zealand board chair Leon Grice told RNZ the savings came from being less precious about demolition and less exotic about construction. “By getting more life out of a building that didn’t need to come down, and by building in a more traditional way, we were able to get it under budget,” he said.
That is a plain admission that the earlier design was the problem, not the site or the weather. The Scott Base Redevelopment has been one of the more quietly embarrassing capital projects on the Government’s books, and it has been embarrassing under two governments now.
The money was first put on the table in Budget 2021, when the then Minister of Foreign Affairs Nanaia Mahuta announced $344 million for the rebuild, made up of $306 million in capital and $38 million in operating costs. The plan at that point was a complete replacement of the base, designed to carry New Zealand’s Antarctic presence for the next 50 years. By 2023 the numbers had stopped working. Antarctica New Zealand paused the project after the cost of delivering the new base exceeded what had been set aside, and the procurement process for a main construction partner ended in August 2023 without a contract being signed.
An independent review followed, and in 2024 the project was formally reset. A project update published in June 2024 confirmed the agency was looking for alternative ways of delivering the base inside a budget that had by then been restated at $498 million. Some parts of the work carried on through the pause, including the relocation of long running science experiments and the upgrade of the Ross Island wind energy system, which supplies power to both Scott Base and the neighbouring American station at McMurdo.
The rebuild started moving again last year. In June 2025 Antarctica New Zealand appointed Wellington firm LT McGuinness as its early contractor engagement partner to help with design and delivery, with the American infrastructure company Parsons brought in for technical support. A new masterplan approach was signed off in May, splitting the work into three stages spread over decades. Stage one is what Cabinet has now funded. Stage two would add an engineering building with vehicle and light engineering workshops. Stage three, still a long way off, would eventually build a dedicated science building and replace the Hillary Field Centre after all.
Building in Antarctica is unforgiving in ways that have no equivalent on the mainland, and the timetable explains a good deal about why the project has been so hard to price. “You can build from October to February,” Grice said. “So you have to have all of the building materials supplied the February before your October start.” Everything has to be shipped a full year ahead of the day a worker picks it up. There is no second delivery, no trip to the supplier, and no extending the season when the weather turns.
Grice framed the decision as protecting something New Zealand has held on to for close to 70 years. “We’ve had continuous presence there since 1957,” he said. “So this project continues that legacy, and continues to support our science programme which is crucial to understanding the planet.” He pointed to a multinational team that drilled a 500 metre ice core last year, pulling out what he described as 20 million years of atmospheric record.
That science argument sits alongside a strategic one that governments tend to make more quietly. A permanent, functioning base is what gives New Zealand standing as a consultative party to the Antarctic Treaty and a say over how the Ross Sea region is managed. Foreign Minister Winston Peters signed a joint statement on Antarctic cooperation with Germany in February, one of a series of agreements that assume New Zealand can keep operating on the ice. A base that is falling apart weakens that position regardless of what any treaty document says.
The politics of this one are unusually mild. Antarctic spending is not the sort of thing that shifts votes, and neither of the two major parties has much interest in a fight over a project both of them have owned at different points. With the general election now roughly 100 days away, the more useful question for voters is what a project like this says about how the parties handle big capital commitments, and whether the discipline being applied to a base in Antarctica will show up in the infrastructure decisions closer to home. If you want to compare where the parties stand across the issues, our voting tool lays out their positions side by side.
For now, the outcome is that New Zealand gets a workable base rather than the showpiece it was originally promised, and it gets one several years later than planned. Stage one is targeted for completion in 2030. Whether the rest of the masterplan ever gets built will be a decision for governments that have not been elected yet.
What do you think, should New Zealand be spending half a billion dollars on a base in Antarctica, or was scaling it back the right call? Leave a comment below and let us know.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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